Kengo Kuma interview

There was a Kengo Kuma interview on CNN. I like the subtle treatment of materials in his buildings. And of course, he started the talk with Japanese tradition and materials.

He feels that reconstructing cities in Japan with concrete after WWII destroyed the Japanese tradition. I sort of agree. But I am not sure if you can simply blame the loss of tradition on the change of building material. There are so many other dimensions to it. Reclaiming tradition can't be just restoring the use of traditional materials. Concrete is not a traditional material in Japan (you may say it's hardly traditional in any country...), but there were certain reasons in a particular period of history that determined its popularity. He said, "20th century architecture is concrete, iron, and glass. People didn't pay attention to materials." I would argue concrete, iron, and glass are materials as well. It was the attention to these new materials that nurtured the innovations in structure, hence the revolution of modern architecture. Why is architecture only nice when built in wood and paper? To me, Japan is probably the most successful country in remaining a national architectural identity in the flashy modern world. Many of its architects are using concrete, iron, and glass.

Fortunately his approach is not that literal. What he aims at in his career is actually the quality of tradition - in the case of Japan, softness, delicacy, and warmth. "Our approach is to capture the atmosphere of the place... by communicating with the people there," he explained. "Therefore it's important to go to this place several times or to live with these people - to eat, and drink with them." He also sees the importance of checking on details and touching the materials in person. As a result, he travels a lot - meeting people, visiting construction sites and trying to control the quality. Working on 55+ projects at the same time, he only rests about one or two days in a year! But for him, it's a lot of fun. What's more exciting than doing something that you love and care about? "I will keep working until I collapse."

Kuma compares architecture to sushi making. "There are two important things to make sushi. One is the material and the other is the skill..." After listening to him, I would add another one - care.

One year anniversary

It's been a year since I launched the Scribbles! In this year, I posted 82 entries - one per 4.5 days in average. I think this sounds quite OK given the fact that I worked 56.3 hours in average per week all year...

Out of the 82 posts, 48 are related to architecture or design. (That's inevitable and I am glad that I am still interested in the profession.) After that, art and science seem to have a good balance. (They say architecture is both art and science, right?) Poor books only earned 3 entries. (I still read. It's just hard to write about them. Partly because I only have time to read bit by bit - excitement from reading becomes more stretched and less intense.)

I love stats. Here's an attempt to find out the relationship between posting and work load. Strange enough, work schedule doesn't seem to affect the pattern of posting that much, except for two occasions when big competition deadline hits. The other extreme is posting also stopped during vacation. January is a hard-to-find example that fits my assumption, where low work load resulted in a more steady and frequent posting pattern...

The science of sleep

We tend to be more interested in the things that we don't have. In my case, I have found sleep increasingly intriguing and mysterious. (Of course it has to do with the several insomnia patients around me as well.) I just wanna share some of the things I found:

- We sleep every day. (Well, maybe not...) But scientist are still debating about the true purpose/function of sleep. Here are some arguments that support "sleep is essential." 1) There's no convincing case of a species of animal that does not sleep. 2) There's no indication that one can forgo sleep without a compensatory rebound. 3) There's no indication that one can forgo sleep without negative consequences.

- Although the entire body benefits from sleep, the brain suffers the most from lack of sleep. The most immediate, unavoidable effect of sleep deprivation is cognitive impairment.

- You think you will lose weight if you don't sleep much? Several studies, on the contrary, suggest that sleep deprivation is one of the causes of obesity. This may be happening because sleep deprivation could be disrupting hormones that regulate glucose metabolism and appetite.

- Sleep deprivation also makes you grumpy. Researchers at Harvard Medical School and UC Berkeley showed emotional-provocative images to volunteers after keeping them awake for 35 hours. They found out blood flow to the amygdala (an emotion-processing part of the brain) increased by over 60% in sleep-deprived brains. Some other studies linked this to the production of cortisol ("stress hormone").

- Feeling sleepy is different from being tired. Pure sleepiness can be conceptualized as the effect of central sleep-promoting mechanisms telling the brain it is time to sleep, whether or not brain cells need to do so. Examples are jet lag, food coma, or simply being in a boring environment. Pure tiredness can be conceptualized as the inability of brain cells to continue functioning in their normal waking mode, despite the central wake-promoting mechanisms telling the brain it should be fully alert. Do you really need examples for this?

- Multiple studies indicate that sleep may be a good time for consolidating and integrating newly acquired information in memory without interference from ongoing activities. The observation that neural circuits activated during learning are “reactivated” during sleep is consistent with this possibility.

- Researchers at UCSF found abnormal copies of DEC2 gene in those who need far less sleep than average. The gene is known to affect circadian rhythms and oxygen regulation in mammals. When the scientists bred mice to have the same mutation, the mice slept less and were more active than their regular rodent peers. I would be great to be a mutant!

Blind men and an elephant

Buddha tells the story of eight blind men touching an elephant and trying to learn what it is like. The blind man who feels the elephant's tusk shouts out, "the elephant looks like a daikon radish!" The others disagree and assert that it is either like a dustpan (the one who touches its ear), stone (head), a pestle (trunk), a wooden mortar (leg), a bed (back), an urn (abdomen), or a rope (tail). Buddha continues and explains, these men see only one side of a thing. In their ignorance they are by nature disputatious, each holding a fractional view on reality as thus and thus.

As Spock would say, reaching a broad conclusion from limited evidence is not logical. It's called hasty generalization. Think about sustainability which everybody is obsessed with. One general belief is that paper is degradable but plastic is not, so it seems "natural" to conclude that paper bags are more environmental-friendly and we should all use paper bags instead of plastic ones. But this is just one side of the story. What about the trees we cut to make all that paper? In the manufacturing process, plastic bags only consume about 18% as much energy, and less than 3% of the fresh water necessary to make paper bags. According to an analysis by Franklin Associates, Ltd, during the life cycle of both types of bags per 10,000 equivalent uses, plastic creates 9.1 cubic pounds of solid waste vs. 45.8 cubic pounds for paper; plastic creates 17.9 pounds of atmospheric emissions vs. 64.2 pounds for paper; plastic creates 1.8 pounds of waterborne waste vs. 31.2 pounds for paper. When you see the big picture, the saint-like aura around paper bags disappears.

The same trend happens in the field of architecture. Architects are obsessed with green jargon. But how many really understand what it means? Geothermal for a small house? PV panels on the north facade? Yeah, I bet it sounds a lot fancier to say "solar energy harvesting from all around the building."

Another trend in contemporary architecture is the dominance of flashy images. Everything comes down to how it looks rather than how it works. Critics base their judgments just on images, and architects design only the images. We see beautiful renderings that intentionally avoid certain aspects of reality (Zaha's monolithic shapes or Greg's super-blobs?), beautiful photos with fantastic lighting that conceals the detailing flaws (can't forget this), and beautiful moments captured by tasteful photographers that glorify the entire building no matter how lame it is as a whole. Yes, we all love eye-candies, and we would like to believe that's reality. But unfortunately, we are all blind...

The consequences are severe. Everybody is lazified (Salute, J and J!). On the consumption side, the iconic official image has superseded the actual experience and use of architecture in our society of spectacles. People are sufficiently happy with what they see (mostly indirectly). Nobody would take the effort to verify the facts before believing, nor would anyone care to ask about the other side of the story behind the scene. On the production side, representation has replaced the building as the ultimate goal or final product of architecture. How to get it done? Does it actually work? Nobody cares. If people would buy the beautiful lies so easily, why bother trying to really figure it out? Competition? Well... "plans, sections, and renderings don't need to correspond - they just need to look all good." Construction? "I don't care when it really opens. Just hire a good photographer and we call it done." Here we hear a collapse of truth and responsibility.

We are blinded and we are blind. All this reminds me of horse blinders. It would actually be good if it keeps us moving forward. But piecemeal perceptions will only hold us back, or lead us to laughable ignorance...

Feast of curves

I can't say I am a big fan of "organic shapes," but the Ron Arad show at MoMA had the power to engulf me in amazement. It's much more than just a fancy furniture showroom - the space itself is a masterpiece. A giant display structure (Cage sans Frontières) twists and unfolds the beautiful objects as it loops around the gallery. The morphing grid is made of Cor-ten steel, lined with polished stainless steel inside the squares and backed with stretched fabric. The installation functions not only as shelves that hold most of the exhibits, but a powerful unifying device that sets the general tone of the show. As it warps through the gallery, it divides the space into sections and at the same time creates connections and flips it inside out.

It's hard to describe Ron Arad's career. Industrial design? Architecture? Art? Maybe as the exhibition is titled, "No Discipline" can define his work. Of course, most people know him from his chairs, like Big Easy and Ripple Chair. His design has a certain 50s/60s sensibility that resembles Frederick Kiesler or Verner Panton, but the originality is undeniable. He dares to explore new forms, and more importantly, new materiality and manufacture techniques. I was most fascinated by this set of two chairs called "Even the Odd Balls?" (2008), a variation in the Big Easy family. Making the exact inversions out of stainless steel is both conceptually intriguing and technically challenging.


Some other objects picked from the show:

Chair By Its Cover, 1989

Uncut, 1997 (vacuum-formed aluminum)

Thumbprint, 2007 (made of stainless steel rods)

Paved with Good Intentions (series), 2005

Bodyguard n°5, 2007 (blown superplastic aluminum)

I.P.C.O (Inverted Pinhole Camera Obscura), 2001 (by modifying the bulb's filament)

Lo-Rez-Dolores-Tabula-Rasa, 2004 (fiber optics projection from inside a Corian table)

I love this one: Ballpark (2001), a prototype developed for Ingo Maurer’s lighting company. A group of small rubber balls, each with a small mirror on it, catch the light and spell out words or images. The angle of each ball is individually manipulated so that the text reflected on the wall can be different from - even the opposite of - what is shown on the tray. Isn't it fun and ingenious?

Principles, not just the look

Do you have to use natural materials to represent nature? Is choosing recycled material the only possible way to say you are environmentally conscious? The superficiality of the current understanding of environment really bothers me. Luckily, I found the freshness in Tara Donovan's work. It's all everyday synthetic materials - Styrofoam cups, plastic straws, Scotch tapes... with a single action repeated over and over. But this action is always specific to the property of the material itself. Tara Donovan's artistic sensibility turns the ordinary, even the condemned, into magnificence. It evokes not only the morphology of nature, but its systematic principles.

The recent installation at Lever House is made of 2,500 pounds of translucent plastic sheeting, loosely folded into a glassed cutout of a freestanding white wall in the lobby. When you approach from the side, you just see the plastic snaking in the box. Then you look at it frontally. Light comes from behind, squeezes and flushes between the sheets, bounced and reflected in different angles from the shiny curvilinear from. The kaleidoscopic optical effect is awe-inspiring. Then you study closely the accumulation layers. Density of the folds changes vertically. Our mother nature is interfering with her law of gravity.


I still remember the installation she had at the Met last year. The entire room was covered with webs of Mylar tape loops. The pins determined the general configuration, but the final shape of each cell actually evolved from the balance between the material's tendency to unfold and the forces of the neighboring cells. In Donovan's own words, “it is not like I’m trying to simulate nature. It’s more of a mimicking of the way of nature, the way things actually grow.” Again, the play of light and reflection kicks in and creates a unique phenomenological experience for the viewer.

Problems of inspiration

An exhibition on sustainability designed by J Mayer H Architects recently opened in the Autostadt in Wolfsburg, Germany.


I don't mind the form at all - it looks dynamic and fun. But when I tried to find out how they got to the form, I saw this diagram. I was literally laughing out loud for several minutes. People in the office thought I had gone crazy because of stress...
Here's a paragraph from the news: "As one of the first prominent signs of the growing consciousness for environmentally friendly consumption, the well known PET-sign was taken as a starting point from which the metaphor of the extensively branched web was developed. This originally 2-dimensional sign was extended into the third dimension and through a series of step by step manipulations a complex structure was created, which allows for an abstract property of the topic to be experienced on a spatial level."

It does make architects seem like a bunch of pathetic morons. Anything can be the "starting point" of architecture, right? They extended a 2D graphic into 3D - wow that's space! Isn't that what architecture is all about? "A series of step by step manipulations" sounds very intellectually sophisticated as well. Blah blah blah blah... I suddenly remember our old friend Robert, who told us, "The sign is more important than the architecture."

Apollo virtues

Exactly 40 years ago (10:56pm EDT, July 20, 1969), Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon's surface. It was certainly one of the greatest moments of human history. The mission was carried out in a not only technically brilliant but morally inspiring way that seems almost inconceivable in the risk-averse world of today. Once again, I am amazed by the good old 60s - an age when dreams turned into visions, and visions led to accomplishments.

Curiosity. Men had seen the Moon shining in the sky for thousands of years. But only some wondered, "What is it made of?" "What's up there?" "What does it look like up close?" All these questions were brought together into one ambition: "What if we go there?"

Courage. Adventures suggest risks. For some people, those men were almost flying out into the vast darkness to kill themselves. There's nothing scary about the darkness itself. It's the unknown that we fear when we look upon it. But curiosity had conquered the territory of fear and courage turned the unknown into, as Buzz Aldrin described, "magnificent desolation."

Determination. RETRO? Go! FIDO? Go! Guidance? Go! Control? Go! TelCom? Go! GNC? Go! EECOM? Go! Surgeon? Go! CapCom, we're go for landing! It's exciting to hear them calling it out with firm determination. "Yes, let's do it!" Low fuel warnings? Radar data overload? That's all right - we can still do it! As JFK rightly put, "We must be bold."

Confidence. The operation was not completely smooth or flawless. At the moment of landing, Neil Armstrong realized the computer's landing target was in a boulder-strewn area just north and east of a 400 meter diameter crater. He decisively took semi-auto control and drifted forward to another spot. With full confidence, human decision overrode what technology was telling him to do.

Gratitude. No great work can be done by one man. In a TV broadcast before splashdown, Mike Collins said, "All you see is the three of us, but beneath the surface are thousands and thousands of others, and to all of those, I would like to say, 'Thank you very much.'" Unfortunately, it doesn't seem necessary any more for the public face(s) to acknowledge the effort of those who stood behind them...

Clearly enough, all this kind of missions have political intentions (prestige in the Cold War, distraction from Vietnam, etc.). But I would just embrace it as the greatest adventure of all men and women on earth. As Neil Armstrong said himself, "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." The event united people of all nations, who were all gazing upon the moon with tremendous excitement. Today, 40 years later, we shall unite once again, not only to celebrate this historic moment, but to revive the endangered virtues exemplified by the epic journey.

F@@k! 40 seconds!

Psychologists at Britain's Keele University recruited 64 college students and asked them to put their hands in a tub of ice water for as long as possible while repeating a curse word of their choice. Compared to when they were not allow to swear, they were able to keep their hands submerged in the water for an average of 40 seconds longer. When questioned about their perceived pain they also rated it as being lower.

Dr Richard Stephens, lead conductor of the study, said, "[Swearing] taps into emotional brain centers and appears to arise the right brain, whereas most languages production occurs in the left hemisphere. Our research shows one potential reason why swearing developed and why it persists."

It's almost common sense that curse words are effective pain-killers. (Don't OD though...) But I guess it's interesting to see some numbers.

Sausage and stuffed animal

   
There are two approaches of designing from outside in. I call them sausage and stuffed animal.

Premise
Sausage: We can certainly make the casing first. Any kind of meat can fit in this simple shape, even veggies! Who says a pig cannot be in a tube?
Stuffed animal: Cotton is great - it doesn't feel odd to be in any kind of shape. You have all the freedom to be creative about the form.

Making
Sausage: The art of filling in an a priori generic shell.
Stuffed animal: The art of sculpting for generic contents.

Flexibility
Sausage: Too much meat? Just squeeze, or make it longer - but it has to be round in section and shouldn't look too fat.
Stuffed animal: The ears have to be that exact shape and size otherwise it's out of proportion. Just get some more cotton.

Unfortunately, the content of architecture is not ground meat nor cotton. Very often it requires a certain size or implies an optimal proportion...