After fire destroyed the Governor-General's offices in 1905, the colonial administration held what is generally counted as Japan's first open architectural competition, in two rounds between 1906 and 1910. Uheiji Nagano's entry was selected; the drawings were then sent to Tokyo, where the scheme was revised and the executed design completed by Matsunosuke Moriyama, who raised the central tower from six storeys to eleven and reworked the corner turrets. Construction ran from June 1912 to March 1919. The result is a European historicist vocabulary — Renaissance, Baroque and neoclassical elements, Ionic and Corinthian columns at the porch — carried out in the red brick and white banding that Meiji-trained architects used across the empire, and turned to face east. The 60-metre tower was the tallest structure in the Taipei basin during Japanese rule. Allied bombing on 31 May 1945 struck the front left side, the main lobby and the northern sections; restoration financed by donation was completed at the end of 1948.
The building was commissioned and built as the seat of the Office of the Governor-General of Taiwan, the administrative apparatus of Japanese colonial rule over Taiwan and the Pescadores from 1895 to 1945. It housed that administration from 1919 until Japan's surrender. Bombed by Allied aircraft during the raid on Taihoku on 31 May 1945, it was left unrepaired until the Taiwan Provincial Government began a donation-funded restoration in 1947, completed at the end of 1948 and named Chieh Shou Hall — "long live Chiang Kai-shek" — to mark the president's sixtieth birthday. It became the Office of the President of the Republic of China in 1950, was designated a national monument by the Ministry of the Interior in 1998, and the Chieh Shou Hall name was formally dropped in 2006.
Wikidata Q55601 · Commons: File:Taipei_Taiwan_Presidential-Office-Building-01.jpg · Photo: CEphoto, Uwe Aranas · Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0