Phenomenology in Design

My design studio project is to make a proposal of a pavilion, to house a selection of sculptures from the Bangkok Sculpture Centre. I chose a sculpture called "Meditation" as my centre piece and my concept, the direction of my design process is developed from the essence and the meaning of the sculpture, which then leads me to designing an "experience" of "Meditation" that I want to convey to visitors of the pavilion. Because the sculpture is a study of a sequential progression of the body and mind during an act of meditation, the pavilion design will create space that will allow visitors to see the sculptures in a continuous sequence and has a form that tends to compel visitors to walk or progress forward.

The site for this project is at Parc Paragon but I specifically chose where there are steps to emphasize progression, not only making the visitors experience conceptually but physically as well, because "Meditation" is not achieved easily. In Buddhism, meditation is the train to nothingness, which is the ultimate achievement, where there is no suffering, therefore later on the pavilion will offer a phenomenon of nothingness. The emptiness is created the threshold and boundary of the form of the pavilion. The project offers this phenomenon of an experience to convey to visitors of Buddhism and that it is not something impossible and anyone can achieve, you just need the effort.

Walking through walls

The reading of "Walking through Walls" by Eyal Weizman has lead me to question the existing conventional features around me. A door is a door, a window is a window, a door is no window, and the same goes for a window otherwise. These are the rules of architecture that we were taught since we were young. However, these rules are merely rules created by our perception. In reality there are no such rules. Who is to say you "cannot" exit through a window, it is just we are taught that we "should not", after all they are both just holes created in the walls. For ghosts, these conventional boundaries mean nothing. They move through walls, floors, or doors if they "want" to, because they have a different perception of space.

The soldiers that lead the attack of the city of Nablus in April 2002 used this same idea and took advantage of it. The literally "walked through walls", knocking and breaking their way through palestinian homes, "smoothing out" space to carve out their pathways. It was unexpected of anyone because it was against the existing tradition. Nobody knows on which wall or at which moment will the soldiers pop out, and anyone on the streets (conventional grounds) were shot dead. This methodology is called "inverse geometry", meaning an reorganization of the urban syntax (the way things are ordered). Likewise, there are also applicants of this method of inverse geometry, such as parkour which uses walls, stairs and railings quite differently from normal pedestrians. There's also a resemblance in the architecture field. You can replace the word in the text clients for enemies, and it can still be well-understood. The book stated, "the enemy interprets space in a traditional, classical manner, and I do not want to obey this interpretation and fall intro his traps. Not only do I not want to fall intro his traps, I want to surprise him!" Similarly architects want to exceed the clients' expectations and their interpretation of what space looks like. Therefore we seek for a wider perception. The meaning of space is contingent, individual, never the same, and always changing - the client, or anyone or anything in the world is seeing the world differently.

Actually if you observe and take a look around again you will see that a lot of things follow this concept of inverse geometry and defying the basic rules of perception. As you can see through movies, a media a representation of human perception, burglars or boyfriends entering/exiting in/out of windows is a common sight. In the series, Prison Break, about a man and his friends in jail trying to break out of prison, also use the same idea knocking through grounds and walls. Nowadays, everyone wants to be new, innovative, do things nobody has every done or seen before.

We are in an era of "no walls". Shift the convention, think outside the walls.

BILDUNG BLOG

on Contemporary Theory

19th CENTURY

Along with the alteration of social structure, the replacement of royal patrons by public authorities, new typologies of buildings such as government offices, banks, hospitals, museums have emerged. Though it was a revolutionary period, not all was new. 19^th century is the century of eclecticism and revival. Therefore, many of the architecture in the previous historic scene would reappear, beyond their original borders or otherwise brought together.

While there’s a positive progression in the advancement of machinery and new energy, continuing from the Industrial Revolution of the 18^th century, I would say that there’s a negative progression in architectural innovation. Instead of simulating new architecture it revives the old, existing structures. However it wasn’t a direct imitation, it was an application of the new into the old. I view it almost like a trial run, for them to test their qualities, so they start from the ancient, the very basic, aiming to challenge and overcome what were architectural achievements and successes of the preceding periods. Consequently, the architecture of the century was an experiment used to explore the integration of newly invented materials of steel and glass, firstly into the existing architecture of the past. Therefore, it is a period of time that eventually becomes a mark of the transition of architecture into the modern world, before the big leap in the face of architecture.

BAROQUE: EROTIC OR NOT?

Baroque is a period of expression. In contrary to the previous Renaissance era, which is all about perfection.

I personally find Baroque art and architecture erotic. It contains the elements of expressiveness and exuberance. It is its “pleasure if excess” that correlates with the idea of eroticism, which is a stimulation of feelings and emotions; never fixed, uncontrollable and most of the time overwhelms our logical thought. So Baroque architecture is erotic, evidently in Bernini’s left transept of Santa Maria della Vittoria, where the painting of clouds spills over the corner onto the sculptures expressing the uncontrollable nature of clouds. Moreover, the blending of the two is also erotic in a way that it demonstrate a certain ambiguity because it cannot be defined as solely a painting or purely a sculpture, it is where painting becomes sculpture and the sculpture becomes part of the painting. One other element that is both Baroque and erotic is the layering of things, which occurs mainly on the pediments, its repetitiveness shows an emphasis and an excess of an components which makes the architecture much more dramatic and unconfined. Another ingredient of illicitness is the use of oval plan, as it exceeds the boundaries of perfection defined in the Renaissance period by using a deformed circle that has a directional quality to it. Likewise, the curvature that is nature to Baroque architecture also contributes to bringing out an erotic effect as a breakout from the norm of straight and confined outlines to a morphing and free form that is again expressive and affective. Especially in Sant Andrea al Quirinale where there is a use of layering and curving in the pediment, and a curving cut that breaks the convention of a triangular pediment completely, so it explored curvature, illicitness, repetition, excessive, all in which corresponds with the ideal of eroticism.

Painting in the left transept of Santa Maria della Vittoria - Bernini

Sant Andrea al Quirinale - Bernini

Early Renaissance

The Renaissance is the rebirth of the Classical, the Roman and the Greek elements and the derivation of Gothic style, a period of faith and strong belief in God. Concurrently is the emergence of many intellectuals, along with the establishment of the first university. Interestingly, I think it can be said that it is a period where people begin to gain more confidence in themselves even though it follows the style which express a lot of reliance on God, since the arrival of ancient texts from the east and the successful trades result from the Crusades, and influence of the bourgeoisie of strong secular thoughts in art and architecture. Hence, the belief of “humanism” initiated. This is the belief in the potentials and capabilities of humans, thus the gain of confidence of one’s individuality. Consequently, this confidence is expressed in their ideologies; the idea of “anthropomorphism”, referring to humans as perfect and thus derived from the human figure is a perfect geometry, shown in the drawing of the Vitruvius man. Which then creates the sacred cut – the overlapping of two squares, one rotated to 45 degrees that is applied to many architecture like the Renaissance City Plan.

The Vitruvius Man - Leonardo Da Vinci

The Renaissance City Plan

“Perfect” was the adjective of the period. Even though there is a lot of reference from Roman ruins, they use the theory of perfect proportions to conduct the design of the building. For example, the Pazzi Chapel at Santa Croce with its façade inspired by the Roman Triumphal Arch, perfected to geometrical proportions of squares and circles, squares within circles and circles with squares – balanced and symmetrical.

The Renaissance could mark the transition from European medieval era to the early modern age. This is evident in the approach to anthropomorphism of Le Corbusier’s modular man and the ideas of pure geometry and forms of order, balance, and symmetry. On the other hand, there are elements which appeal to Post modernists like Robert Venturi, for example the application of classical Greek orders on the façade as ornamentation rather than columns, which can be interpret as an idea of a decorated shed.

Post-Fordism

Is modernism as truthful as it claims to be? Is it accurate to say that an object has only one meaning? Meaning is unstable, because there is no ‘one’ truth; everyone sees things differently, and that realization sparks the era of specialization, uniqueness and differentiation. Post-fordism opened up new ways of interpreting mass production and consumption. The prominent ideologies of standardization and regulations were replaced by increasing individualists systems. No two person are exactly the same, even twins, everyone is engraved with different DNAs, we look different, we act differently, and we obviously think differently. Therefore everyone has his or her own individual characteristic, and even though we are bind with rules and restraints there’s always the need to express that distinction, which is much of what is seen in today’s society. For example, even students contained within the same regulations, under the same school uniforms are able to articulate their own individual personality by customization. The idea of differentiation is evidently seen in parametric designs of fluid forms. Those animated forms represents a ‘process’, captured in time, the ‘in between’ of two (beginning and end), emphasizing the idea of multiple truths. Hence, the form changes and morphs every step of the way, calculated by computer, the adaptation in reaction to different stimuli. So even though it is seemingly spontaneous and flexible, simultaneously it is very controlled, as seen in Zaha Hadid’s urban carpet that merges the wall and sidewalk floor into one surface, so it looks like the city flows into the building, using the environment to design.

Zaha Hadid's Urban Carpet

Not only that, the idea of structuring of ‘process’ is relevant to contemporary society more than the past. For instance, grading systems in schools are mainly evaluated from the ‘process’ rather than the final, complete work.