Sung-Ching Lo

From Wafer to Grub

The Conversion of Hsinchu Science Park  
 

This graduation project reimagines Taiwan’s Hsinchu Science Park, once the heart of global semiconductor production, in a speculative future where climate collapse and geopolitical upheaval have rendered its fabs obsolete. As the ‘Silicon Shield’ falls, the project explores how abandoned cleanroom infrastructures could be transformed into a new survival architecture: the GRUB Campus, a corporate-driven food production hub.  

Drawing from worldbuilding methods inspired by film and game design, the project situates architecture within a larger narrative of the 2050s–2060s. It envisions a corporate-led era where resource scarcity, food insecurity and environmental extremes redefine urban systems. Within this framework, Hsinchu’s high-tech ruins become laboratories for adaptive reuse – their precision-engineered shells retrofitted into protein farms, greenhouse roofscape and distribution towers.   

The proposal introduces three guiding principles: Circular Production Systems linking insect farming and greenhouse cultivation in closed ecological loops; Material Extraction through chitin recovery, feeding new cycles of bio-based construction; and Farm to Table 2.0, a vertically integrated food pipeline enabled by drone logistics. Together, these strategies demonstrate how architecture can operate as resilience infrastructure in the Anthropocene.  

From Wafer to Grub positions architecture not only as a technical solution, but as a speculative narrative of transformation. It reflects on how the collapse of Taiwan’s high-tech industry could open unexpected paths toward survival – where the infrastructures of silicon are reimagined as infrastructures of food and the legacy of fabrication becomes the foundation of nourishment. 

Part of the speculative series The Broken Silicon Shield. 


Graduation date: 25 August 2025  
Graduation committee: Gilbert Koskamp (mentor), Dafne Wiegers, Shibo Ren  
Additional members for the exam: Txell Blanco Diaz, Sofia Koutsenko