Interstate

2024-05-01

The section of I-30 that runs through the state of Arkansas is no more than a layer of tar seared into the dusty earth of the great plains. No terrain to plot against, no need for detour. A straight black line rolled out for miles, save for the outcrop of perpetual maintenance and upgrades as makeshift lanes painted with solid white chalk, bright orange temporary barriers, and red blinking LED caution signs.

The traveller, in her rental Kia, is going from one potential project site in Bentonville, Arkansas to another potential project site in Dallas, Texas. She is greeted by the rotation of fast-food joints and chain restaurants: McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Arby’s, Wendy’s, McDonald’s, Hardee’s, Waffle House, Arby’s, Wendy’s, McDonald’s Taco Bell… the dull repetition would put her to sleep if not for the heavy-load trucks, ten times the size of her sedan, wedged on both sides. These kings of the interstate move at ninety miles per hour, exerting strong gravitational forces and pulling the light aluminium shell of the Kia toward their massive steel bodies. The traveller grabs the shaking steering wheel tightly, attempting to steady it, while sound from the audio system fills the sedan with a melange of melodies from the pre-globalisation eastern continent, left-field hip hop, and contemporary Asian pop sounds.

She rubs her sweaty fingers on the taut new leather wrapped around the steering wheel; the tautness that stretches between the ungraspable origins and destinations, between nostalgia and longing; the tautness pulled by giant forces on a highway without exits, and who knows of its own fatigue. All the while, the sound waves dissipate into the ether inside her sedan, and the goods inside the steel bodies of the kings deteriorate before they reach the shelves. She digs her nails in.

I don’t recall when and how the idea of architecture came to me, but it came with a discreteness. Finite, yet imbued with endless possibilities. It came to me that life begins and ends in architecture. When a baby is born, she spends her first nights in the neonatal intensive care unit of a hospital or at home with her mother. She might not be able to see yet, but she smells the place, feels its warmth and light, and hears its sounds. She senses space. At age ninety-nine, my grandmother couldn’t move nor speak anymore and had lost most of her taste, vision, and hearing. She couldn’t recognise me, her favourite child, but she still knew where she was and gestured at the window for us to open the curtain and let light in.

It came to me gently. Architecture shapes our becoming, and with its patient ways, it lets time pass through its interior. When I close my eyes and imagine such a place, I see dappled light rubbing on the wooden window sill thickened by layers upon layers of paint, whose edges are no longer sharp but rounded and smooth; the light slips and glides until it gently falls on the tiled floor, whose cracks and wrinkles are its charm. Afloat in the air are the dampened laughter of women next door, bicycle bells ringing outside, sparrows on the electrical lines, and a sweet hint of sesame oil and rice vinegar.

Then, it came to me that both fragility and violence are a part of architecture. When all of a sudden, development steamrolled into my sleepy hometown, the feathery charms stood little chance against the mighty neoliberal engine. Overnight, thousands of old oak and plane trees were cut down to make oversized asphalt streets all over the city, which were then decorated with the confetti of KFCs and McDonalds. Wooden houses and stone courtyards were replaced with marching orders of concrete housing blocks, which in turn, were quickly torn down to make way for shiny highrises. Crusts and dust drowned the streets and pushed an entire generation of youth indoors.

Where does this violence come from? Why does it seek to destroy and erase if its purpose is to contain life? Does it invariably propagate some desires and inhibit others? Can it be sustained without continued vows of value? Or does it eventually succumb?

Once unleashed, like a kite’s string snapping in the wind, I started to wander, searching for a new place to dwell in. Some architects build castles on constructed grounds. Others are travellers like me, collecting fragments from many continents, hoping to piece together a new island. For this series, I choose to write six fables from the journey — narrative objects of some sort. Some are short and fleeting, and others are unending mazes that trap us in. Inside each is a smouldering hearth that had been burning for a long time.

Bruges

2024-05-15

Bruges has many cobbled streets, polished by centuries of caressing feet. It has quaint canals, predating those of Amsterdam and Venice, and a brick bell tower that survived — not once, but twice — German occupation.

Bruges has a beguinage with a pretty name – Princely Beguinage Ten Wijngaerde.

Like many other beguinages in the Low Countries, Princely Beguinage Ten Wijngaerde has a court in the middle. In early spring, it is filled with blooming daffodils, and it is the dawn that is most beautiful. As the light creeps over the tall Carolina poplars, their outlines are dyed a faint red and wisps of purplish cloud trail over them.

The court’s perimeter is lined with a continuous low wall that is just my height — the practice of discretion, not separation. This datum is interrupted rhythmically to contain a doorway to a chapel, a storehouse, or a gate to the smaller courts behind. The smaller courts are usually enclosed by row houses of two to three stories. The walls and the houses are all white-painted brick, crowned with deeply pitched roofs of clay tiles. In summer nights — not only when the moon shines, but on dark nights too — the whiteness shimmers, as the fireflies flit to and from. And how beautiful it is when it rains!

The only structure in the beguinage that is not painted white is the tall church, which protrudes from the wall. Its unfinished brick walls are weathered, and its weathered tile roof mossed. The church looks over the houses like a mother over her children. In autumn, the evenings, when the glittering sun sinks below the edge of the roof, the crows fly back to their nests in threes and fours and twos. More charming still are the white swans on the yellowing grass, like tales from distant times. When the sun has set, one’s heart is moved by the sound of the wind and the hum of the insects.

In winter, the early mornings are beautiful indeed when the snow has fallen during the night, but splendid too when the ground is white with frost, or even when there is no snow or frost, but it is simply very cold: the beguines stir up fires, and smoke rises from the chimneys. How well this fits the season’s mood! But as noon approaches, the cold wears off, the women busying themselves with spinning and twisting and sewing, and soon nothing remains but piles of white ashes.

In the Princely Beguinage Ten Wijngaerde, the traveler encounters her kindred. Clack, clack, clack. Within its brick walls, bobbins crossed each other on the pillows laid on women’s knees. From behind the reedgrass screens of the Heian Palace, court lady Shonagon offered her scribbled pillow, of undaunted praisings of the tiny beauties of the everyday. The traveler lit a lamp and ventured into these dim rooms where lives passed without words to describe them, remembrance endured without chronicles, and love permeated without tales. Lowering her eyelids, she saw that on each pillow passed down, a glistening new world.

Swoosh, swoosh, swoosh. Her Vega 3.1305 glides back and forth swiftly, knitting surfaces with threads spun from plastics drifted in oceans — the recalled waifs of our Anthropocene. xfer fNL bNL xfer bNL fNR tuck - fNL Y knit + fNR Y… her new hiragana. Tiny threads become expansive surfaces, and expansive surfaces become manifold spaces that wrap infinite worlds within.

Come on inside. In spring, when the daffodils bloom again, in the cloister of the Friars Minor Capuchins, where the refugees from Ukraine live now. “What you are now we used to be; what we are now you will be.” No need to pretend to know what’s wrong and what’s right. No need to mend the dress for the zombie’s bride. Spin your wheels and tell your tales. Come inside now, and turn down the light.

Seoul

2024-06-05

It was already late afternoon, the ailing day high on adrenaline. Just a moment before the traveller was roused, she was in her bed in Brooklyn. Two large windows at her feet, looking at a red brick church across the street. Tree canopies laden with chirping birds. But this bed felt different. The sheet was crisper, colder, and the blanket flatter. There were too many pillows around. She opened her eyes and found herself in a large room lined with excessive wood panellings, varnished with a glossy finish that repelled every touch. Then, she remembered where she was: the Somerset Hotel in Seoul.

Walking to the construction site requires passing by the royal palace, the principal buildings of which are held at such vast distances from each other that it takes a solid twenty minutes to walk the length. For eight hundred years, its expansive metes and bounds, impressive ornaments and craftsmanship, have affected a celestial posture which the Japanese invasions destroyed twice, and which twice, the Korean people dutifully restored. This frail body, held together by an elusive collective identity, hardened as more materials, labour, and tears poured into its pores and joineries.

Across the street, Hanok homes cluster in a close-knit fabric. Their perimeter stone walls, barely a rickshaw-width apart from each other. The site is nested snuggly among them. It is impossible to see from a distance. For much longer than eight hundred years, smoke and aroma rose from the chimneys of the Hanok houses, warming the walls, the floors, and the bodies of the stubborn people who made the harsh peninsula their home. The traveller hears whispers. Whispers of matters ceaselessly pressing themselves into time, making meaning possible in the eternal present. Stones. Walls. Bulges. Cracks. Curves. Bones. Rounded. Corner. Glass. Passage. Shiny. Reflection. Salt. Flat. Straight. Door. Curved. Tiles. Ripples. Roofs. Shadows. Long. Soft. Mesh. Surface. Climb. Cantilever. Steel. Stair. Whistle. Wind. Elevator. Stump. Ground. Concrete. Rattling. Air-con. Enclosure. Hanging. Rings. Falling. Curving. Stretching. Between. Zenith. Nadir. Pliable. Mutable. Cloaks. Springs. Parapet. Light. Skylight… when the traveller finally comes to, it is already fully alive. Like the elephant “seen” by the blind men. Oddly banal and strangely familiar; from one angle, the building looks like a rectangle parasitically reworked by an alien species. From another angle, it’s a creature that has swallowed but is yet to metabolise a peculiar object twice its size. The metamorphosis of an earthly mammoth. A cocooned transient state. Rising, not from affectation, but the roused soul of our deepest dreams.

Back at the Somerset Hotel, the screensaver of the Samsung TV cycles through the “Architecture of the Future”. Dongdaemun Design Plaza, Harbin Opera House, Oculus, Burj Khalifa, Disney Concert Hall… All these new celestial postures, laden with labour and all-too-human detail, distract us from seeing the true nature of an emergent form. That which must be strangely familiar and oddly banal at once. That which is up-close and imminent. Wrapped in the cold, crispy sheet, the traveller swaddles herself again. This time, with the mammoth next to her.

At Home

2024-06-19

A dining room faces a garden crowded with three young birch trees, a tall bald mulberry usually laden with purple fruits in early summers, a lopsided sour cherry, an elegant weeping willow, a peach tree so old it resembles a withered bonsai and the stump of a tree of heaven recently felled to curb a lanternfly epidemic.

In their shade cluster thorny roses, berry bushes and climbing hydrangeas, a Japanese flaming maple bush, yellowing English ivies and dried perennials. The garden backs onto a construction material storage yard piled with blue insulation foam in stacks as high as fifteen feet, like giant icebergs floating in an asphalt sea. Beyond that, red and blue cranes along the harbour. And beyond that, the Manhattan skyline.

Back inside, a genteel dinner is about to be served. The guests are a former client, who used to be an investment banker and his wife, who was once a school teacher.

“The ESG index is not doing great right now. The building industry needs to step up. What are architects doing about that?” The past client asks, opening a bottle of grenache from a biodynamic winery in southern France. Dark red berries and purple fruit. “By the way, this winery is the first B-Corp certified in Europe. A Brit doing British wine in France. Apparently the soil was so chemically saturated that it took the owner five years to remediate.”

“Let’s decant a bit longer,” says the former teacher, filling water glasses instead. “America epitomises extractive carbon culture. This whole continent is founded on the genocide of indigenous practices and people, repopulating the land with slaves, and depleting it of its last fruits and nutrients. Now, the only way to retain the amassed value on this impoverished land is to keep pumping carbon, cheaply extracted elsewhere, into it. Architecture is just a tool in this mechanism.”

The traveller sprinkles thinly-sliced Ponderosa lemon rounds with sea-salt flakes, placing a spoonful of fagioli e tonno — made with line-caught tuna and organic cannellini — on top. Economically and historically speaking, she thinks to herself, architecture is dead. The only mode left, which can never be smothered completely, is expression. It needs to express a different relationship with carbon, which is to say, one of life. But whose lives? In what state?...

“Oh! The extra virgin oil from our place in Tuscany, as promised. Just arrived last week. Here, drizzle them with it,” the past client passes the bottle to the traveller, grinning, “But that’s what we need good designers for, right? You can make sustainability sexy.”

“Depopulation and degrowth are necessary for decarbonisation,” she responds.

Two small medallions of Wagyu filet mignon from a Vermont ranch are seared on a ridged cast-iron griddle, with hand-harvested Maras salt and fresh pepper. “You know, I can’t eat meat at home anymore. My family has all turned against it,” the past client sighs, then shoots back. “The degrowth economy can’t pay for your retirement.”

He's right, the traveller affirms to herself quietly, decarbonisation is a moral paradox. When the world was marching to the drum beat of neoliberalism, the wombs that brought the human engines — five billion by estimate and more than half of them in Asia — to life, breasts that fed them, and hands that cared for them were not allowed to retire. Her grandmother, for instance, who survived the Nanjing massacre and single-handedly raised three children through the Mao era, also raised the traveller and her cousins in her old age — while the parents worked away from home, propelling the carbon century. But her mother, who went through three abortions and divorced, lost her job in her thirties. And most of her cousins, despite being lucky to have work, don't and won’t have children — because they can't afford it. Have we really imagined what a decarbonising century looks like? The bodies of Asian women, having propelled the carbon century, are being retired. Economy and history shy away from paradoxes and death, that which can upon us prematurely but nevertheless an essential part of life. Architecture however, could wrap around life and all of its mysteries and paradoxes, like in Man Ray's riddle, where a sewing machine and an umbrella find themselves wrapped together in a blanket on a table.

On her own dining table, the traveller puts out an unglazed white ceramic plate with white flowers embossed on it “Would you please take the mason jar of rainbow carrots and fennel out of the fridge? They are lightly pickled with home-made Shiso vinegar.” The gentle green-and-mauve of the fennel bulbs counters the vibrancy of carrots on the white plate.

The former teacher sniffs the grenache and pours a glass for each of the party. The past client flips the filet, while the traveller trails a few stalks of broccoli rabe through boiling water, before placing them on the griddle next to meat. Water drops fall on the griddle; the steam envelops the meat for a fleeting moment, whispering tenderness. Broccoli rabe is one of the few vegetables still in season at this time of the year; its deep, strong greenness seduces the traveller whenever she passes the farmer's market. Finally, they are anointed with Tuscan olive oil.

“We can eat now,” says the traveller.

On Campus

2024-07-10

The whole thing feels like it’s rigged sometimes.

“Administration has gone to the other side,” someone says. White paper rolls covered with words written in thick black markers spread on the lawn: Justice, Resources, Voices, Freedom, Liberation. Representation. Racism…

“If capitalism is our enemy, then there is no scenario of winning,” someone else says.

On one end of the quad, a monumental stair leads up to a neoclassical building clad in beige Indiana limestone. A makeshift accessible ramp is grafted onto its side; the galvanized steel pipes and perforated decks emit a dulled shine against the muteness of the limestone. On the middle landing, where the ramp catches up to meet a stone border at bench height, gathers a group of skaters. One of them, in a bright, multi-colored nylon jacket, drops her board and steps on. Her left leg dangles off the board and with ease, pushes forward. The board glides in a stillness underscored by movement. Like celestial bodies bond in one constellation, the skater, her board, and its wheels embark on their journey together.

With measures, the skater lowers herself into the board. At the nadir of the compression, her body springs up, pulling the board upward with her. In the space opened up between the skater and the ground, the board takes a glorious flight. It flips upside down and up again before landing back on its wheels. The skater follows almost simultaneously, reuniting with her board after their shared flight.

“Not quite so,” the traveler says to the students spread out on the lawn. “Capitalism will not persist. It will give eventually, for the simple reason that change is the only constant. The stock market will give; the indexes will give; and the betting and hedging will give. So take good care of yourself. Dream of habitation without extractions in the age of interplanetary travel.”

A pigeon takes its flight from the neoclassical building's apex, effortlessly drawing a wide double curve in midair before softly and precisely landing on the stone border, where some pizza crust is left unattended.

“Interplanetary travel?” Someone asks.

“Yes, Interplanetary travel.” The traveler starts to sketch on the white paper: Mars, the moon, Jupiter… “Interplanetary expansion will bring about the biggest material and energy transformation we've known. The journey there will impel us to raise a host of humans and march them great distances. It will impede them in their life and further drain the resources of this planet. The arms race has already begun. Interplanetary expansion in the age of artificial intelligence and quantum physics will call on angels to descend from heaven and Prometheus to rise from hell.”

“What does that have to do with architecture?” They ask.

“What is architecture if not the art of cohabitation with what’s alien to and outside of ourselves?” The traveler explains. “Architectural imaginaries presuppose subjects and their cohabitants, their rituals, their hopes and communality. They are not merely forms, but underscored by material realities organizing and reorganizing energy, labor, territories, and potentialities. So, can you build a home for Shelley’s Creature at the edge of the known world? Can you bring love and care to abandonment, instead of upsetting ecologies? Can you show up, create together, and leave behind, taking nothing with you?”

“We Keep Us Safe”, “Resist”. Chants break out from the center of the quad, echoing and amplifying within the confines of the surrounding buildings. The pigeon has gone, taken flight elsewhere. The skater in the colorful jacket has picked up her board and is now watching her friend taking his flight. These students camped out on the quad too, will one day walk out of this campus, this city, and this time. They too, will take glorious flights and be reunited with this place anew.

Back On Earth

2024-07-23

I always knew that I would be back. Back among the ghosts of the dying heart, treading lightly on this poisoned land. Casting no shadows, travelling unnoticed.

Feeling the lightness, pulled along by a plastic bag, the bustle dancing on my skin. My heart quickening, chasing the confetti of the automobiles — and quieting, bathing in the fragrance of oil heating in skillets. I remember living inside this place once. In some way, I remain connected to it; I feel the urge to pluck its chords, but I don’t. Innocent dreams burned here. Lonely souls washed up from one sleepless shore to another. Before the music finally stopped.

I’m back here to excavate the divergence between life and death. It means I have to be embodied, flesh and all, on Earth. So when my boat passed the submerged inlet and I saw the structure perched on the disintegrating shore that had long been overgrown, I was not unscathed. In the years since it was abandoned, water had risen up to its base. Climbing vines and wild bushes had taken root in the cracks of the vertical concrete surfaces of the walls. Spiderwebs had shrouded them over; the house, barely distinguishable from its surroundings, was veiled in a translucent gauze-like membrane.

Few details I knew of it were discernible. In fact, most of the shoreline was laden with so many layers upon layers of dead, dying and barely born weeds and all kinds of parasitic lives that the translucency seemed final. Green gauze guarded the house inside the thicket; inside, emptiness seemed to be imbued with meaning and breathed life into matters. I was sure that dreams too, lived there.

My companion was in a hurry to get to the other side of the island, where long beaches stretched out. He was eager to get there before the sun became too unbearable. But I couldn't take my eyes off the house for a very long time. It frustrated him, so when I finally let go, he cranked the motor boat up to its top speed. The beach was already teeming with locals seeking repose from the heat when we arrived. The sand had been broiled too hot to walk on it barefoot. Every time a foot stomped on the sand and shook loose the huddled grains, the air trapped inside escaped, shooting thousands of heat rockets into the sole. People wore sandals woven from plastic straws and stripes torn from plastic bags, the thin plastics softened with the heat and moulded around the soles. Colourful soles protected hopping feet from the burning beach as people made their way from the shore towards the water.

We took a long swim in the slimy, brackish water. The warm water, combined with the abundance of decomposing bodies floating from the shores, allowed plankton and algae to flourish. They drifted all around us voraciously, looking for every opportunity to propel upward, to the surface of the water, to devour the precious sunlight piercing through. Sunlight, merciless on land, is gold to the lives down here in the ocean. A tiny flicker would inspire hope. A golden drop would nurture a dream. A pool would cause desire to burst into bloom. Most of them — these primitive lives — would sink, in a slow and despondent descent into the darkness of the ocean bed.

When our muscles became strained from the repetitive propelling, and our skin wrinkled and tender from the sun and the water, it was time for a nap. We found a shady spot behind a large rock, a lone and ancient juniper tree growing from it. As we dosed in the protection of its shade, I travelled back to the time when I still lived in the house. The smell of freshly grounded coffee, the chatter of hard-working people, the rustle of papers being moved around. The willow tree in the backyard just reaching the second floor windows. A child swung in a swing, in and out of branches that danced elegantly in the breeze. I sat by the window. My long silky hair lay still on my shoulders. Through a pair of maroon rimmed glasses, I examined the last page of a book in front of me.

When we awoke, the tide had receded, exposing the soggied surface of the beach. The island broke away from the continent a long time ago, and was left rotting in the rugged and foamy water, where the sound meets the sea. In the distance, the ocean swallowed and spat out the small boats of bright yellow, chained to makeshift anchors of odd structures that once stood on land but now barely poke above the water. It did so at whim. Powerful currents harmonised with the howling wind in a never-ending crescendo that drowned out the horror and glory of all surrounding life and its incessant metamorphoses. Then, from the fathomless hollow inside of me, wonder swells and an incorruptible aliveness rises like a hissing sun, born from a thousand shooting stars.

Earth is where we left our story. Our fingers still linger on the last page. Only now, our journey begins.