Nascent Propositions

Thoughts on space, art, culture, interaction.

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What if design is all about perversion? What if modern design is kind of kinky? Why not. Why believe some professor that says design is about solving problems. Maybe it is a very kinky thing. All these sort of shiny surfaces and slippery things. Maybe it’s sort of a sexy thing.

Mark Wigley in AA DUE, 2017 

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A Case for Building As Architecture

超級全能住宅改造王 / Before After

In what I can only describe as building as its best, the programme crudely named “Before After” is an emotionally-driven renovation programme each 30 minutes long that delves into the most humane aspects of building.

At the start of each programme, a home riddled with problems is presented to the viewer. In one episode, the two halves of a house is situated on top of an open rainwater drain that the family traverses across everyday. In another, we are presented with a house with super steep stairs posing daily hazards for its occupants, a 90 year-old couple. Through interviews with occupants and footage of their lives, we understand the day to day struggles faced by these families and their 

Then, the architect is presented, briskly walking towards and examining the problematic house as they survey the issues they face each day. We see the interaction between the client and the architect, discussing the wishes of the client, taking note of the situation and lending their expertise on the integrity and origins of the house’s structure, features, and minute details of their lifestyle in order to define the design problem.

We then turn to the beginning of construction and renovation, workers hammering on wooden columns and beams as the house is, little by little, taken apart and put back in alternate formations. At times during this segment we will see the manufacturing of specific objects or workers employing curious techniques, and the presenters of the show will take turns making light-hearted remarks about the potential purpose of this object, only to be revealed later on as the result of the architect’s well thought-out design intentions.

As the house is unveiled to the its occupants and the programme’s viewers, the building is transcended. It becomes architecture - in that it becomes something that suddenly exceeds our perception as an ordinary domestic space into a space that interacts with, and is a result of its subject - its occupants. It becomes a transcendent narrative of resistance. We observe as each design feature made specifically for the occupants are revealed - carpeted sections of the wall that allow the parents pin up the kids’ drawings, or a sliding piece of floor panel at the kitchen counter that accommodates for the height difference between the mum and her daughter. The outcome is considered, a direct result of the interaction between architect and client, and above all humane.

The core of the programme rests on a conception of architecture that is focused on the function of bettering lives, one that considers its foremost subject matter - the human needs particular to each of us. It is a simple kind of architecture. It is architecture that talks to its occupants - without which, there wouldn’t be much point.

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This has Killed That, Thomas Weaver.

It was through stone, not paper, that thoughts, ideas and memories were connected.

If it is true that the concepts contained within buildings are obsolete and begin to age as buildings go into its production, then this equates that the book has killed architecture. It is telling that Weaver finds discussions with architects as the most interesting form of interaction. This is the same reason why the book is more valuable.

Going through his efforts of killing architecture book by book, the kind of architecture that is presented in the lecture (of the kind concerned with the field at large) have always had this fate.

The key word here is critical.

If the architectural idea is a scientific hypothesis, it follows that building is its proof. The documents of a building is a manifesto of a specific kind - it is suggestive of a certain experience. The material proof is elusive, subject to other controls such as bodies, worksmanship, weather, budget, economies, international peace, legality, neighbours, institutions, and individual subjective bias in experience. This proof is difficult to quantify and to assess for the validity of its hypothesis, where universality is impossible.

It must be noted that the architectural proofs described in this lecture is different to the material proof - it is a frame with which to review the trajectory and projection of the field of architecture. It is concerned with ideas of architecture. The essay’s proof is provided by the strength of its arguments and evidence. Evidence is found in other forms or already exists. Hans Hollein uses images and words to prove that Alle Ist Architecture. Koolhaas and Venturi uses post-rational thought to prove their after-thesis for existing evidence.

These architectural hypothesis are those that inscribes a trajectory of the buildings of the future.

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A good concept is no use without a good design.

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Hong Kong: A Manual for Efficient Architecture

Space is oriented around efficiency. All spaces are flexible programs. Efficiency is focused on the use of space (program) and the representation of inner space. Yet these are separate in their pursuit of their capitalist potential, their relations merely scraping each other’s shoulder in the overall design of the building. The external and internal are isolated matters in everyday architecture.

1) Spaces, using as little volume as possible, aim to achieve the most multitudes of variety in the smallest possible modulation. This configuration is believed to be the most efficient and profit-generating as possible.

2) Profitability comes first. Human comfort and natural necessities of the haptic senses (light, space) are secondary.

3) As a result of [2], façade and programme become separate entities as they no longer have to be functionally related to provide for human comfort. Without programmatic concerns, façade and interior is liberated from each other.

4) Façade as architecture, other than the requirements of code, functions purely as iconoclasm. Façade is efficient capital. Interiors replace daylight and climate with tubes of artificial lighting, staged sets, and synthetic atmospheres consisted of potted plants and glued-on wallpaper of 

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The Metropolis of the Future: Architecture as Tangential Universes and Background Image

In Trevor Patt’s essay in Architecture on the Edge of Everything Else, he criticises the previous developmental models for the City / the Metropolis of the Future - the kind that attempts to categorically organize the strata of the city into a coherent structural beings of organized components - as models that have fallen “on the side of prediction, explanation, and organization”1. These models fall short of the imaginative minds of its makers, relying on a pragmatic means to its existence, thus eradicating the totality and intensification of actual, real, living cities.

Instead, when we take a look at examples of the Metropolis of the Future in its filmic, fictional, or speculative realizations, like the vertically sprawling cities in Fifth Element (1997):

I still remember being mesmerized by the image of this city as a kid, and also with the guy with the amazing hair and ‘tache (played by the talented Gary Oldman). 

Or the Metropolis of the substitute city in Evangelion. 

Within the very fabrics of these cities we see echoes of what the models of modernist projections of future metropolises have attempted to achieve - of a coherent network of systems based on a principle of organization that which investigates alternative modes of living beyond our current configurations.

If anything, these speculative models containing the full richness of the Metropolis spur new models of engagement with the city in much more effective ways than the critically-engaged and causally-defined projects that stifles the autonomous and self-organizing principles of the subject. The city as background image is a playground for instigating further action. Each fictional city is a fictional tangential operation of the social, economic, and political consequences of certain actions - actions that may define our realities - and are able to offer a surface of reflection.

This may mean that architects must forgo the creation of authored meanings in exchange for the promotion of othered possibilities.

We move beyond architecture and future as absolutes and into an architecture of a possible realm, the background to the protagonist of culture, living, social roles and so on, as it should be and as it is in our lives, a dominant but dormant systematization that appears if you look close enough. Ahead of us we can see these imaginations taken as eventual realizations, but that’s not really the point either - the point is to create new architectures, new potentialities and tangential universes that are embarks beyond that-which-is-all-wrong with the present epoch, and resist.

But it’s not sufficient for a city to become a realization of its very apparent predictions, which may eventually reach only the apex of each of its own defects, magnified. Finding an appropriate problem for which to solve is crucial, otherwise there is a risk of producing dystopian fiction rather than speculative design.

1 Trevor Patt in Architecture At the Edge of Everything Else.

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Architects are only ever called into a situation when it’s impossible. If it’s possible, you invite somebody with a toolbox who can give answers. You call the architect in when it’s not clear what the question even is.

Mark Wigley, Surface Interview

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Dialogue in Design, Kenya Hara + Masayo Ave

In pursuing design in one’s practice, it is a necessary path to question the role of design, a ‘designer’ and the various values and belief systems associated with the term.

Back in 2006, Kenya Hara and Masayo Ave, visited each other’s homes in Japan and Berlin and recorded the respective conversations that occurred between them. Hara and Ave, both Japanese designers  with one based in Japan and one in Europe, pores over matters of design over the length of the book from the design of kitchen products to accommodate the differences between cultural cuisine to gushing over bespoke Italian furniture and design. What I found central to the theme of the book is 1) the subject of “the role of design” and 2) the East-West paradigm.

In their examinations of everyday designed objects to the role of design in society, their views aptly reflects Japanese (and broadly speaking, Eastern) intonations, even if Ave has practised and taught in Europe for many years. References to haptic senses, a body-centric perspective, and harmony through design - though many of these remarks are made by Hara. Behind these ideas there is a certain sense that Japanese mode of thought is above all a socially driven tool, in contrast to the Western tendency of rethinking traditionalism as the mode of operation. I find myself shifting to these ideas in theory - yet, even as I embark upon my own projects during the course of reading this book, I still feel a stringent urge to rebel on the assumptions and human wisdom accumulated over history. 

Culture, history and society form a great part of the discussion as factors in design as intrinsically linked and as a reflection to the cultural formation of the time. For one, depending on one’s cultural origins, the products in one’s kitchen including the types of pots, cutlery and containers carry great varieties (and as explained by Hara, is also why kitchen products don’t achieve great sales in foreign lands). But the more interesting parts are Hara’s observations on how history, economy and society has shaped the attitudes of its people into their particular epochs, and which sparked a desire in me to buy a book into a short history of the world. These musings are short but speaks volumes about what design is informed by and what informs design.

What I did find most insightful and lingering in my mind are the analysis pertaining specifically to the role of design itself. Communication, in Hara’s words, are an exchange and not a transfer of an idea. It delivers an idea from one to the other, and from that point on continues to evoke and stir up new thoughts.

1 Cover of Dialogue in Design by Wang Zhi-Hong

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Flash Games of 2000s: Escape Rooms

Before the advent of smart phone gaming as the current fast-food equivalent for entertainment, flash games dominated the paradigm of my adolescent past times.

A type of game that I was especially enamoured with were escape rooms games - simple digital 3D models of rooms that challenged the user to a series of object-finding (involving a lot of spam-clicking) and puzzle-solving tasks. A type of game that often communicates no plot, no character, no protagonist, but simply an unspoken desire to reach the other side of the door.

In these minimalist interiors, the implied objective was the result of the staticity and tunnelling of player interaction. Within its confines the actions that you can partake includes turning your head/view (most likely only around the 4 walls of the room), finding an object before an obscure surface and examining it, and getting to keep it in your inventory. Paced to the player’s progress, the game is advanced only when the player has managed to solve a certain puzzle. The player is finally the self-perpetrator of their own narrative.

An architecture of limited possibilities and interactions instead creates one of giant potential. 

Above: Sagrario’s Room Escape