Chapter 42: Notes for an architecture thesis: social

Showing posts with label social. Show all posts

"From the Machine Age to the Life Age"

Kisho Kurokawa

An earlier memory... Up till the age of ten I had lived in a house like this in Malaysia... "Zinc-roof house" they call it. The road that led up to it was covered with flattened frogs, because it was really a village. The path that led to the house was unpaved dirt, on rainy days it was just mud. There were two really shaggy looking dogs, one about to die. Flies abundant. Wasps and other insects. Mosquitoes for sure. In the monsoon season huge swarms of black flying ants. Sometimes snakes hide in the gutter and killing it was always a loud affair involving all the neighbors (mostly spectators.) One or two heavy sticks were kept in the house... for snakes and robbers.

The living room was so high we played badminton in it. There was an alter at one end, a typical Chinese altar, all red, with smoking incense standing in ash urns. Sometimes the shuttlecock gets lost among all the paraphernalia of the altar. We preferred the shuttlecocks that had real feathers, not the plastic ones - those are heavy and don't sail as well. I buried hand scrawled notes in the ash urns, I can't remember what I drew or wrote, possibly stick figures saying hello.

My dad's family (him, my mom, my brother, me) lived in one room on the right of the main entrance to the house. To the left (if I remember correctly) the great grandmother's room. Standing right inside the door to that room is an old full-size grandfather's clock, the real kind that worked with a real pendulum. My dad had to adjust it from time to time - though I never figured out what he did. My great grandmother used to eat rats as a tonic food, they said. She had real bound feet, the last generation. When my great grandmother died, the garden with all the flowers in the world was burned. The flowers were as tall as I was. Past the altar on the other side of the living room was the kitchen, and on one side of the kitchen was my aunt's family's room. I don't remember my cousins at all - except that they were older girls. What was the kitchen like? I think there were old fashioned stoves, or maybe gas cylinders. Big burnt woks of course. The bathroom is at the other side of the kitchen - a real wet place, with a big earthen jar filled with water and a couple of plastic scoops.

Have you ever heard rain fall on a zinc roof? It is the most soothing sound in the world. The roof may leak, we place buckets all around the house; but the sound is worth the rainy day.

Stuck lifts and rubbish from upstairs

When I was a child, one of my favorite activities was flying paper planes out of my 4th floor kitchen window down to the parking lot below. My mom turned a blind eye to that most of the time. She did not turn a blind eye to water dripping from our neighbor's laundry hanging outside the window upstairs onto ours. The remedy was to use a bamboo pole to hit the ceiling of our kitchen a few times as a warning to the neighbor upstairs.

My mom also kept an eye out for the "egg man". He would come in his truck, selling eggs to all the housewives in the area. I kept my eye out for the ice-cream man. Thinking about it, we were on the last or second last storey to be able to spot them on the street below. The egg man and the ice-cream man didn't worry about that. They shouted and honked their presence- and you would not miss them from the twelve storey.

Gangsters, mischievous children, bad neighbors, dirt, police

(Homes for the People: Study of Tenant's Views on Public Housing in Singapore, Stephen H.K. Yeh, 1969)

Where children play

(Homes for the People: Study of Tenant's Views on Public Housing in Singapore, Stephen H.K. Yeh, 1969)

Worrisome singles

(The Singapore Experience in Public Housing, Augustine H.H. Tan and Phanf Sock-Yong, 1991)

On walls and space

(Semper)

Art and Need

(Four Elements of Architecture, Gottfried Semper)
(pencil emphasis not by me)

"Art knows only one master - the need. It degenerates when it follows the whim of artists, even more so when it obeys the powerful patrons of art. Its proud determination can indeed raise a Babylon, a Persepolis, or a Palmyra from the desert sands, whose regular streets, mile-wide squares, stately halls and palaces impatiently wait in their sad emptiness the population that the despotic ruler was unable to conjure. The organic life of Greek art is not its work; it flourished only on the soil of need and under the sun of freedom."

On cultural imposition

Adolf Loos: "It would be nonsense to impose on people a cultural form that went against their inner feeling."

Resonances; affect

"It has no intention to decorate, and there is in it no hidden meaning. At the best of times, ornament becomes an "empty sign" capable of generating an unlimited number of resonances."

"vertical affect", "weighted affect", "quilted affect"... - yet none of these are of the social relationships and imaginations of people in a city, they are like sculpture affects, not architecture

Symbolism

"meaning in the eyes of the public" - yet I think it is no longer about symbolic meaning but meaning in imagination

As such, these buildings are devoid of imagination

Is loneliness a constant?

We can agree that if there is no loneliness, Blade Runner could not be made. (Is there any great movie that can be made in the absence of loneliness..?)

Yet, are there people who feel nothing for Blade Runner? Perhaps they would not notice if loneliness is not present? Perhaps they do not sense loneliness? Is it necessary?

What is architecture, what can it do if the canvas is loneliness?

Is there loneliness in a small town? Is there loneliness in a warm family?

Loneliness in a city full of people? Warmth in a city full of emptiness?

Why is a red balloon most red against a solid blue sky? "There is nothing redder in this world" - who said this..?

Loneliness co-efficient

Is the loneliness of the high-rise the loneliness of the city?

We might think here of Paolo Virno’s distinction between the “multitude” and
“people.” The latter positions individuals in relationship to larger shared identities in which individuals recognize themselves and with which they see shared experience, while multitude (which Virno characterizes as the dominant tendency of the present) describes subjects incapable of recognizing themselves in social groupings or of imagining shared experiences. The individuals of the multitude are bound together as multitude by the recognition in one another of the shared experiences of alienation.