TOWRDS THE NEW BEGINNING

At an attempt to apply my point of view in architecture ( My manifesto ) to my own work I'll tell you how the knowledge I developed through out the class has been applied to inform my decision making and design process for the final studio design project – The Shophouse for Film critics. Although the time scale is only about 4 week longs but to me every assignments prior to the design phrase is an equivalent to the Grand Tour where you learn and develop architectural vocabulary through your hard work and most importantly your curiosity. At the opening of the semester we chose one master architect and one of their domestic project to be closely examined for me I chose Rem Koolhaas and his house design – Villa Bordeaux. This phrase is called “ Learning from the Master” which I think it's similar to the learning of history that most of the famous architects did before they create their own manifesto and ultimately their own architecture.

Nonetheless, the Villa Bordeaux represents a kind of Apostate itself to the modernism by Koolhaas's use of iconoclastic which focuses on the destruction of modernist values and icons. The example of this would be the overturning of the modernists aspiration for truth and transparency where in the case of Koolhaas he attempted to play with people perception and have people guess what is the main primary structure of the house – people often guess that it was the big rounded column cladded in reflective material but in fact it's the opposite – the smallest structure turns to be the most important of all – thetensile steel rod anchoring the weight of the house down to the ground. The breaking of symmetry through the displacement the structural members seem to be going against the modernist strict adherence to order and symmetry. Because this apostate break way from the orthodox modern architecture of static – meant to be forever – attributes and introduce more dynamics into the architecture. I also in favor for Koolhaas's treatment of the three totally different facade which correspond to the programatic requirement of the interior – where the ground floor being semi private space so the facade makes use of semi translucent glass and in the 2^ndfloor where it's programed to be use mostly for living room the facade open up totally and the 3^rd floor where the programa is the most intimate such as bedroom the facade change its materiality from glass to concrete with small portholes. I praise him for the customization and not blindly strict with the rules that did not allow for flexibility and specificity.

We have seen a tremendous influence of art on architecture since from the cubism to de stilj to deconstructionism. All these art movements were presented something radically interesting for many architects and it had been translated into architecture as well as furniture design. Art as the means of expression. But architecture of the present and particularly at my age where we are surrounded by mass media culture we tend to favor Film rather than Art. The film medium become much more relatable to the majority of the population as opposed to art where it's required certain knowledge in order to appreciate it. Therefore, as film medium is as much closely associate with architecture as to art we have studied the filmic medium and try to deconstruct it to find our own vocabulary and conceptual framework to design the shophouse for the client who is also the film lover. At the beginning of the discussion I talked about how I stand for the power of an institution it's because of this reason where you are being pushed to think out of the box and find your inspiration from the source that unfamiliar to you. This will not only provokes new thoughts and ideas but it will open you up to the unknown territory where the process of how to derive the concept is equally important as the final product itself. The analysis of my film – Wong Karwai – In the mood for love – is based methodology of unified organizational clarity of which I want to observe the relationship of the two married people and their immediate settings, therefore I divided my scenario into different settings and monitor the changing in behavior and intimacy and also how the camera work changes. This unified organizational clarify of what I want to archive through the breaking down of the film sequence into list of setting in combination with the emergence of visual complexity of each interaction within the different settings as the film narrative developed provided me with an interesting conceptual framework of how and what determine the change in people behavior in relation to the underlying narrative of the story.

Moving on to the next phrase where we conduct a site analysis of the house's immediate surrounding by using filmic techniques in documenting these site specific informations such as recording and film making. I started to discussed my take on the site analysis as similarly to what Zaha hadid did with her architecture. I want to document the urban forces interm of circulation between different users and how they chose their appropriate route to get into or around the neighborhood. I perceived the site as having based on the grid line type of planning where there are these small alleys cutting in between the houses. Hence, I want to use the filmic medium or video recording to document each of the alleys for 10 minutes each and then after that decomstruct the film as I did earlier during the fim analysis phrase and come to the conclusion by quantify the frequency of users and the direction which they look – most turn left or right – then I went on to continue documenting the next part of the journey. For example, If the first alley I decided to video recording has 10 people walk pass by and 7 of them turn right at the end of the alley then I can develop a kind of if.. then scenario that if 10 people walk pass by and 7 of them turn right then the majority of the people who walk pass this alley will turn right. Another thing I notice from my site analysis is the basic organisation of the house in relation to the alley way and how different orientation weather you in front of the house or in the alley between the walls of the two adjacent houses or the back of house will give different experience of space and it also dictate different kind program because you basically enter from the public realm which is the front of the house to the transitional space which is semi private and finally you enter the most intimate surrounding which is the back of house. I think it would be totally different kind of approach and different result if this assignment did not required you to look at the site from the filmic aspect perhaps all of us would use the same old traditional way of google earth map and large scale exploration of the site rather than human scale based experience. Therefore, this experience taught me of how to be inclusive by combining many sources of knowledge to arrive at something radically new that you never thing of doing before because of the feeling that breaking the norm would equal to failure. Therefore, I praise for the juxtaposition and exploration of uncertainties that have leave some rooms for creativity and invention.

For the last phrase we have to come up with a strong conceptual framework by drawing connections from the previous studies including learning from the master, film analysis and site analysis and conclude the unified conceptual framework to approach the design of the shophouse. I begin my conclusion of conceptual framework by asking myself what I want to archive and then I define my own intention toward the design of the house. My intention is to create a kind of crossover between users such that of guests, owners, and servants. This interwoven of interactions between multiple users will be the conceptual framework of my shophouse design. After I stated clearly my intention of how I would go about designing the house, I will use it as an underlying guidance and try to find means that would answer my intention. After stated clearly the big idea, I shifted my attention toward drawing connections between the previous studies. What I got from The learning from the master project is that the way Koolhaas's customized each space to suit with appropriate programatic requirement. I like his approach that the overal project look unified but when examined closely into each components the house was actually tailored down to each program and also circulation where there are three separate circulation element for each of the users. As for the film analysis, I want to extract the most interesting concept out of this phrase because it will determine how your house will be conceptually different than the others people who's doing the same movie as you. I chose to work with the essence of the film where its main characters involved in the secrete relationship and they often have secrete interaction that is very implicit such as walking pass each other in a tight space which also respond to my intention of generating a cross over which then can be related to the concept of multiple users having crossover of interactions. As for the Site Analysis, I extract the organisation of the shophouse where it's situated in an orientation of front of house – public, side alley – semi private and back of house – private. This organisation will help me determine to allocate each program in a correct hierarchy so that it will be correspond to the way people move from public to semi private and private and vise versa. This pragmatic organisation will only be applied to the first floor of the shophouse only since it had intimate relationship to the ground and the surrounding.

From The above conclusion of conceptual framework, I then designed my house based on the basic principles of parametric design started by creating the desire scenarios ( to generate cross over between the multiple users) . I accomplish this desire by drawing from two connections, one from film and another one from the specificity of how the client, guests and servant will use the program. The first approach aim at the crossover interactions through the acts of watching. I decided to came up with the modular units because one of the challenge of this house is to design within a restricted amount of space there fore I think modular units can be assembled in many different way and it can be efficient interm of how it takes up the space because eventually every units will fit perfectly together without leaving useless negative space. From this thinking in term of modular units and I developed three scenarios which related to the film. The first scenarior is the view from the actors point of view, so basically this module will be dedicated to the house owners programs such as bedroom, bathroom and screening room where the space required certain amount of privacy. The second scenarior is the view from the camera : this view you are the camera looking into the actors which is basically the owners so this view is equivalent to the view of the gusts or the servants. The third scenarior is the view from the audience watching te film : so this view depict the view of the guests watching over everyone in the house. As to archive the same level of customization and specificity as in Koolhaas's Villa Bordeaux and other architects I mentioned, each of the three types of module accommodates the three different types of scenarior and different programs will be customized to make suitable adjustment to emphasis more strongly the concept of the three scenariors. Hence, The first scenarior where you view from the owner point of view this space require privacy so it will employs the use of framing within framing where the wall of the module will be solid and also with a door. For the second scenarior where you view the space from the servants or guest point of view where the space require not much privacy the glass panel will be use for all the 4 sides of the module and the solid door will be use so that the guest and the servant would respect the boundary created by this door. The last scenarior, where you view from the guest point of view all 4 sides of the module will be totally open with no panel and no door so it will tricker the comtinulity of space for the public realm. Also the form of the module comes in 3 shapes. The first one is for the first scenarior ( where you view from the owner point of view : more private ) the two walls of this module therefore leaning inwards to create a space that is more introverted. The second module for the second scenarior would be a normal rectangular since its pragmatic requirement is for semi private therefore the straight edge give the sense of neutral where the space is both private and public at the same time. The last module panels will be leaning outward creating that sense of welcoming and it wil triggers people to come closer to his slanted surface to watch over another space.

The overal design process of this house was trying to mimic the idea of parametric design where you consider many variables that can become influential to the decision making and the transformation of the existing typology such as the regular modular unit. You have seen how the starting module become manipulated and transformed by the consideration of different variables concerning the film, the site and the programatic requirement. The emphasis here is on the inclusive approach and the engagement in large scale subject matters from site to each of the requirement of each program. With this engagement in various scales it gives one design many values that can have multivalent meanings and not ended up read as flat and boring to that of deductive conclusion where many good opportunities have lost along the road of naive.

Bibliography

History and Theory of Architecture II course taught by Ajarn Taylor Lowe

Venturi, Robert. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977. Print.

Le, Corbusier, and Frederick Etchells. Towards a New Architecture,. London: Architectural,

1946. Print.

Wolfe, Tom. From Bauhaus to Our House. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1981. Print.

Koolhaas, Rem, and Bruce Mau. S M L XL: OMA. S.l.: S.n., 1993. Print.

Sakamoto, Tomoko, and Albert Ferré. From Control to Design: Parametric/algorithmic Architecture. Barcelona: Actar-D, 2008. Print.

Balmond, Cecil, Jannuzzi Smith, and Christian Brensing. Informal. Munich: Prestel, 2002. Print.

Spuybroek, Lars. Research & Design: the Architecture of Variation. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2009. Print.