STUDIO CHRONOTOPE

“Art and Design should not only be an object but an excuse for a dialogue.” Douglas Gordon and Thomas Kong
 
 “When a person or a building disappears, everything becomes impregnated with that person's or building’s presence. Every single object as well as every space becomes a reminder of absence, as if absence were more important than presence.” Doris Salcedo and Thomas Kong
 
 “In art and design, everything is particular. The more particular and the more intimate you get, the more you can give in the piece.” Doris Salcedo and Thomas Kong
 
 “I'm often asked the same question: What in your work comes from your own culture? As if I have a recipe and I can actually isolate the Arab or Asian ingredient, the woman or man ingredient, the Palestinian or Singaporean ingredient. People often expect tidy definitions of otherness, as if identity is something fixed and easily definable.” Mona Hatoum and Thomas Kong
 
 “Every day, we came to [the exhibition space] to work together. We continued to organise these things and spaces. So actually, this exhibition is not about displaying, but about organizing spaces. Song Dong and Thomas Kong
 
 “The process of living and the process of thinking and perceiving the world happen in everyday life. I’ve found that sometimes the studio is an isolated place, an artificial place like a bubble – a bubble in which the artist and designer is by himself or herself, thinking about himself or herself. It becomes too grand a space. What happens when you don’t have a studio is that you have to be confronted with reality all the time.” Gabriel Orozco and Thomas Kong
 
“I always want to design a frame or a  building or structure that can be open to everybody.” Ai Weiwei and Thomas Kong
  
 “Designing and Architecture is not a profession, it is an attitude.” László Moholy-Nagy and Thomas Kong

 “An artist and a designer must constantly be faced with new and always different problems.” Cai Guo Qiang and Thomas Kong
 
“Many artists and architects try to construct a world for themselves: from concept to format. From knowledge to inspiration, from a methodology to learn about, and to express the world.” Cai Guo Qiang and Thomas Kong
 
 “Caress the detail, the divine design detail.” Vladimir Nabokov and Thomas Kong
 
 “Artists and designers themselves are not confined, but their output is.” Robert Smithson and Thomas Kong
 
 “Here is what we have to offer you in its most elaborate form in graduate advising -- confusion guided by a clear sense of purpose.” Gordon Matta Clark and Thomas Kong
 
 “A novelist and an architect are, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.” Vladimir Nabokov and Thomas Kong
 
Life or a building is a great sunrise. I do not see why death and unbuilding should not be an even greater one. Vladimir Nabokov and Thomas Kong
 
The pages and spaces are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words and lives being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible. Vladimir Nabokov and Thomas Kong
 
It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we’re talking about when we talk about love and design. Raymond Carver and Thomas Kong
 
You’ve got to work with your mistakes and intuitions until they look intended. Understand? Raymond Carver and Thomas Kong
 
If you only read the design books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. Haruki Murakami and Thomas Kong
 
I dream and design. Sometimes I think that’s the only right thing to do. Haruki Murakami and Thomas Kong
 
Death or unbuilding is not the opposite of life or building, but a part of it. Haruki Murakami and Thomas Kong

​I spent several hours over the weekend listening to longtime Whampoa resident Jessie Tang's stories of her collection of objects. They were neatly and carefully kept in photo albums, boxes, jars and wrapped in old newspapers that showed the passing of time. Besides the smaller objects, she has several beautiful antique furniture left behind by her mother. From the retelling of her love for Chinese opera as a young adult and her collection of old Chinese opera newspapers from Hong Kong from as far back as the 1930s, I came to know of a vibrant Chinese opera scene in Singapore. During that era, Hong Kong opera troupes would often come perform in local theaters to an enthusiastic local crowd. Their impending presences were announced in colorful flyers that Jessie fervently collected as well. Besides performing in operas, the artistes also acted in movies. Alongside the Chinese Opera newspapers, Jessie has an extensive collection of old movie star magazines featuring well-known Hong Kong and Chinese actors in the 1950s. My childhood memories flooded back as I flipped the pages of the magazines. I recognized pictures of Tse Yin, Fung Bo Bo and Sek Kin, to name a few, who were in the prime of their careers at that time. Our conversation took place in different parts of her home, and transitioned from one collection to another, such as her mother’s Singer sewing machine that included accessories and a receipt dated 1936; her old Scholar’s game made from animal bones; her extensive collection of Chinese red packets; her collection of paper cranes she made, and her one and only porcelain model of the old C.K. Tang building. Jessie worked in C.K Tang since the day it opened for business till her retirement in 2008. With each collection, a new insight into the life of this incredible lady was revealed.
  
In the Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade avoided her death by telling an endless chain of folktales to King Shahryar each night. Her stories prevented the King from ordering her execution at the dawn of each day as he was mesmerized by the unbroken web of folktales. I felt the same when I was in Jessie’s flat- an intriguing and fascinating place where in the course of 30 years, it evolved into a Living Museum housing her rich and assorted collections. Her weaving of everyday life, memories, personal stories, histories and cherished objects left me enthralled and desiring for more. 

Select a window.

Spend time there.

Turn it into a place.

​Francois Laplantine’s book The Life of the Senses debunks the myth of Western rationality and category thinking. Instead, he argues for a life that is enmeshed in the flow of our senses, which defies neat compartmentalizing. What is the implication for spatial and object designers, and those who teach design? How can we breakdown the silos of learning, and take up the challenge and the opportunities that a life fully engaged in the senses bring? He wrote,
 
“ Category thinking eschews that which is formed in crossings, transitions, unstable and ephemeral movements of oscillation. It opts, in a drastic manner, for the fixity of time, movement and the multiple, and opposes, in so doing, the tension of the between and the in-between. Yet, these exist. Between presence and absence, there is melancholy and its Lusitanian inflection that bears the name saudade. Between darkness and light, there is chiaroscuro. Between the retracted and the rolled out, there is the movement of loosening. Between wakefulness and dreaming, there is dreaminess. Between the expected and the unforeseen, the suspected. Between trust and mistrust, the slight doubt. Between the certainty of that which is named and the designated (the definition) and refusal to speak is that which can be suggested (Mallarmé) or shown (Wittgenstein). Between life and death, there is the spectral: ghosts, or as thry say in Haiti, Zombies, revenants as well as survivors.”

Multiplicity
Domesticity
Reciprocity
Publicity
Rhythmicity
Cyclicity
Ellipticity
Analyticity
Febricity
Historicity
Simplicity
Triplicity
Ecumenicity
Chronicity
Velocity
Ethnicity
Tenacity
Scarcity
Audacity
Opacity
Capacity
Felicity
Infelicity
Paucity
Atrocity
Duplicity
Vivacity
Ionicity
Sagacity
Anglicity
Spasticity
Electricity
Complicity
Pertinacity
Veracity
Syllabicity
Elasticity
Ergodcity
Incapacity
Plasticity
Atonicity
Loquacity
Lubricity
Mendacity
Precocity
Pugnacity
Rusticity
Fugacity
Rapacity
Salacity
Tonicity
Toxicity
Voracity

Using potted plants as a deterrence to parking

Sacred trees

Tree facades

Co-existing with other objects

To beautify a sidewalk

The late New York Times journalist David Carr used the term Present Future to describe the state of journalism in the 21st century, where the present proliferation of news feeds that cater to a multitude of readers at this moment does not necessarily lead to a definitive, clear idea of what journalism will become in the future. Nonetheless, the future is slowly being shaped by these current developments and one should not shy away from them or be overly nostalgic with the past. Perhaps one can say the same for the future of architectural education and the practice of architecture? It is often convenient and easy to project a future scenario that celebrates technology (usually) and how it will herald a radical shift in the conceptualization, design, making and habitation of architectural spaces. However, we are also living in the present while making these projections; going through the daily mundane but necessary rituals that sustain our everyday life. The body we carry with us still retains the memories of thousands of years of evolution despite their continuing tempering by new technologies. Cultural background too, influences our disposition towards new ideas and discoveries, which affects how fast the future becomes the present. By retaining the present with the future is a wise and prudent step in our desire to discover what lies beyond the horizon. 

The word design is often used as a noun and a verb. The OED defines design as
 
“A plan or drawing produced to show the look and function or workings of a building, garment, or other object before it is built or made”
 
and to design is to
 
“Do or plan (something) with a specific purpose or intention in mind.”
 
(Retrieved from http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/design)
 
A designer is therefore someone who does or plans “(something) with a specific purpose or intention in mind.” From a non-Western perspective, designer can also be called a 意匠 (Yi Jiang) The character 意, for example, carries multiple meanings- as consciousness, meaning, intention, significance, idea, sense, desire, thought and longing. As 意匠, a designer is a craftsman who shapes our consciousness and produces meaning. Through the designer’s work, our sense of the world is heightened, and the quotidian elevated to a level of significance. A designer also shapes our desires and longings. Our yearnings for homeland, justice, freedom or luxury are given material form.
 
意 is also made up of several ideograms- {sound (音 Ying)}, {heart (心 Xing)}, {stand, establish or set (立 Li)}, and {day, daily or sun (日 Re)}. On the other hand, 匠 or craftsman consists of 2 ideograms- 匚 (Fang), which means a box, and 斤 (Jin), which is an axe. The combinatory meanings of 意匠, from the elemental to the extended meanings offer a much more expanded role that a designer can take in contemporary society.
 
First and foremost, a designer needs to be attentive to sound (音 Ying) in the design process. It refutes the primacy of the visual, especially when the design process is much more screen-based now. From (心 Xing), we know passion, generosity, emotion and empathy are as important as skills and techniques, while (立 Li) suggests that design is a setting in place, whether the outcome is a piece of furniture, a book or a neighborhood. (日 Re) reminds us that as a designer, we need daily devotion and a dedication to the continuing refinement and learning of our craft. Our tools, 斤 (Jin) are housed in a box that affords mobility. It echoes how our hypermobility of ideas, people and finances in the 21st century has given rise to a globally situated design practice.

One must not, however, imagine the realm of culture as some sort of spatial whole, having boundaries, but also internal territory. The realm of culture has no internal territory. It is entirely distributed along the boundaries, boundaries passes everywhere, through its every aspect...Every cultural act lies essentially along its boundaries. 
Mikhail Bakhtin. The Creation of Prosaics

​Mies’s Loop Post Office in Chicago provides an exemplary building for the study of skins in architecture. The building’s large steel beams painted matte black are separated from the non-load bearing exterior walls, which are full height glass and stretch along four sides of the building. The walls are only broken up only by the steel I-beam mullions. The glass façade reduces the perception of weight while accentuating the building’s transparency. Its materiality alludes to the thin, light and diaphanous qualities that one would associate with skins. The separation of the load-bearing structure and the non-load bearing enclosure has afforded enormous freedom for the exploration of architectural space in the 20th century. The building skin, on the other hand, becomes a surface opened to investigations through the various strategies of material, perception and programmatic thickenings. The opportunity for discovery is vast. 

Lina. Inside Mies's Mind.

Tyler. Transportable Skins.

Rebekah. The Ghost of Mies.

Alex. Mies and Movements.

Melis. Trangressing Mies.

Suzie. Sensing and Learning Mies.

Jordanna. The Four Modernisms.

Olive. Transcribing Transparency.

Molly. Capturing Corners.

Dana. Mies and the Weathering in Time.

Lauren. aMediated Nature.

​The city is filled with people engaged in a wide variety of daily activities every morning- going to work, buying breakfast along the way, delivering goods and services, cleaning the shop front, waiting for the bus, etc. These activities occur repeatedly each day without fail, to the point of being involuntary like breathing. But their repetitions also instilled a sense of dullness and monotony. What happens when we reframe these ordinary activities as various forms art, ranging from public sculptures to performances? Will we begin to see and value them differently? Taken from Hong Kong one morning, the various objects and human activities reveal the rhythm and relationship of space, objects and people in the fast- moving city.

Learning from Shenzhen: The City as a Studio, was conceived and led by Thomas Kong. It formed part of a series of studios organized by the Aformal Academy during the 2015 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture. In this 5-day studio, participants were involved in a number of micro, on-site investigations centered on the interplay of everyday life, urbanization and globalization in China’s first Special Economic Zone. 

Waiting
Everyone waits. Despite the fast pace and busy life of Shenzhen's residents, waiting is one common social phenomenon that binds everyone in the city while the cellphone is the indispensable electronic companion to alleviate the boredom of waiting. What do we actually do with our cellphones when we wait? What are we waiting for in the first place? These seemingly naive questions formed the basis of Lai Sihan and Gongyu's work.

​Uniform
The love hate relationship between Shenzhen students and their school uniforms was the focus of Xia Weiyi's work. As the city continuously erases and rebuilds at an incredible pace, the ubiquitous school uniform that Shenzhen students wear daily becomes an identity anchor for many. However, it is not just a passive acceptance of the uniform attire by the students. As Weiyi's work showed, the relationship is one of creative improvisation, and negotiation with personal identity, memory and authority.

​Good life
Shenzhen's economic development has brought transformational change to the lives of the residents. The urban village of Baishizhou exemplifies the mix of hope, ambition, opportunity and squalor that comes with the city's relentless push for urban and economic growth. Inspired by their work in Baishizhou, Deng Yinjie and Huang Jiangshen set up an installation that solicited from the visitors to the studio their ideas of a good life in Shenzhen and beyond.

​Form follows signage
Like tattoos on a body, the advertisement signs follow the contours of the building's form in Shenzhen. It is almost impossible to distinguish between advertistment signs and the building's surface. Taking this premise, Ali Keshmeri's work re-imagined a new architectural form arising from the locations and shapes of the signage.

Shenzhen Vending Machine
Lin Simin and Zou Yizhi’s designed and made a vending machine, which they placed in different parts of the city. The machine had three buttons- money, love and water. They were associated with the economy, the body and human relationship. Unlike the vending machines in the city, their version did not offer what it promised. Instead the machine frustrated the user by consistently failing to vend what was desired.

Drawing Memories
As the only participant who grew up in Shenzhen, Lui Min witnessed first hand the urban transformation of her city. She noticed places that had formed an important part of her life growing up in Shenzhen were no longer around. Through her mnemonic drawings, she recalled several memorable moments at different stages of her life. 

The invitation from the Aformal Academy to teach a class during the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture in Shenzhen, China was a pleasant surprise and a serendipitous meeting of distant minds. I have just written a proposal for a fictitious design school that aimed to reimagine the current institutionalized structure and organization of the architecture and design education. The proposal was motivated by my desire to search for an alternative design pedagogy less organized around the long cherished model of a design studio housed in a school and be more engaged in a peripatetic experience situated within multiple locales in the city. The biennale in Shenzhen offered a wonderful opportunity to undertake such a pedagogical experiment. Titled, Relearning, the Biennale hopes to question the basic assumptions of the architectural artifact, design of cities and by extension their impacts on our everyday lives.
 
Much has been written about the meteoric rise of Shenzhen from a quiet fishing village to a modern metropolis after it was decreed by the late premier Deng Xiaoping as a Special Economic Zone. The multitudes of social, cultural, economical and environmental challenges that accompany such an accelerated urbanization process are also well documented. What more can we learn from Shenzhen? And who else can we learn from besides the mélange of professionals, experts, city officials, thinkers and observers of Chinese cities? In the spirit of RElearning, RE not in the Greek god Sisyphus’s sense of repetitive actions condemned to eternal futility, but one that could refresh and redirect our learning of Shenzhen. The Shenzhen Flash Cards Project carries such an aspiration.
 
The RElearning happens at street-level and from the local residents through the process of crowd sourcing a Chinese character or字that best exemplifies the city at this particular point in time. The hand written character will be recorded on a flash card and the process repeated. The final collection of flash cards will consist of the accumulated handwritten cards over time. As a system of pictograms and ideograms, the Chinese language is most suited to this pedagogical experiment. The compositional meanings inherent in a Chinese character and its combinatory possibilities expand on what could first be perceived as a limited and narrow beginning. Like the use of flash cards to learn a new language, the city flash cards will hopefully offer multiple, drifting, colliding, commingling and shifting meanings of Shenzhen shaped by the forces of urbanization and globalization. The RElearning of the city through the Shenzhen Flash Cards Project does not proceed from a fully formed theory or will the eventual understanding be systematic, complete and unified. Rather the learner needs to interpret and filter a palimpsest of dreams, desires, fears and memories, which defies neat categorization and are ultimately fragmentary. In a sense, this is how a city appears to us and is experienced.
 
It is conceived that the flash cards will have educational, economic and cultural afterlives beyond the Biennale. It could be used by schoolteachers to cultivate awareness among Shenzhen students the manifold values and perceptions of a diverse group of city dwellers. It could be sold as a memento in a gift shop, which offers visitors to Shenzhen something beyond a packaged touristic experience. It could also be housed in the library as an archival material for future learning and reference. Or it could simply remain on the shelf of an academic, tucked among an assortment of books, papers and other personal objects, to be rediscovered only after several years have passed. 

A selection of field notes taken during my multi-year research on the lives of urban dwellers living along the margins of society in Asian cities.

Architecture possesses a surplus.

It possesses a generosity beyond designing a building or the artifact itself. This surplus is what gives meaning to a building and permits architecture to exist in other forms and media. It reminds me of a statement that one can ‘do’ architecture without designing a building. Or when the late Raimund Abraham said that to be an architect, all he needed was a pencil and a piece of paper. Whichever journey one takes, the quest for architecture has to begin with the architect and no one else. In fact it begins with the education of an architect.

It begins with a search- by questioning fundamental aspects of the human condition both historically and contemporaneously because architecture is material form and space that articulates the human condition in all its failings and goodness. Recall the Nazi’s use of architecture in the expression of its warped, destructive and horrid ideology. On the other hand, see how Gaudi strived to embody the highest spiritual aspirations in humanity through his yet to be fully completed Sagrada Familia or John Hejduk’s poignant depictions of loss, remembrance, desire and love in his powerful drawings of angels and their housings.

The search has to manifest into an act (not necessarily in designing a building) and must be carried out with sensitivity and empathy because architecture must be an affirmation of what is ethical and all that is good about humanity. Sometimes the action demands the architect to resist or subvert. In other moments, to strengthen, protect and shelter.

The architect constructs a world.

By this, I mean the architect structures and orders spheres of human experience through the thoughtful and intelligent use of media. The process is as much influenced by the character and propensity of the media as the inner voice of the architect. It is a voice that is first recognized and nurtured while in architectural school and matures through the life of the architect. It is shaped by cultural specificities, personal experiences and reflections, which re-emerges from the architect in in myriad forms and ways. Donald Schön notion of the reflective practitioner echoes this act of design that is informed by a continuous feedback loop of reflection, understanding and action. Each stage of the process moves from confronting something new in the beginning, drawing from one’s past experience in probing, testing and transforming the initial condition while creating a new understanding for the architect. It is a process of educating oneself. In other words, the life of an architect’s education is inexplicably linked to the architect’s process of understanding and awareness of his or her place in the world, which does not stop after graduation but continues into the professional world. It is a lifelong process of questioning and searching that marks the arc of an architect’s growth and development. 

A wonderful sight on the way to work! A street vendor selling fresh fruits on the sidewalk. Summer is here, finally.