During the past two decades, most of the scholars who studied traditional houses in Taiwan focused their attention on the explanation of the cultural significance of traditional houses. In other words, they tried to examine the external characteristics of environmental features, the internal arrangement of spatial elements and the setting of indoor functions according to the concept of gods and ghosts in folk religion, the living breath concept in Feg-shui, and the ethic order concepts within the traditional thought. Such research, despite contributive to the her-meneutics of the cultural style of traditional houses, touch little on the material basis upon which the existence of traditional houses depends. Therefore, it seems not yet complete in the com-prehension of the integral meaning of traditional houses. To complement the above-mentioned inadequacy, this paper intends to adopt an human ecological approach to decipher the ecological meaning of traditional houses in Taiwan. First of all, the major views of architects on the cultural meaning of house space are briefly retrospected. Then the process of intensity traditional rice cultivation is analysed as a basis to explain: (1) How did the farmers turn their farm-house complex into a energy-renewable and self-sustainable ecosystem step by step? (2) under the operation of such ecosystem, how did the houses con-tinually adjust their internal function structure and delicate their spatial forms together with the development of the whole ecosystem? (3) How did the traditional houses gradually disintegrate together with the breakup of the ecosystem?