Ramblings on air

At night, On this day…

I suppose you don’t get many poems here on tumblr.

I like writing poems every now and then. I like the feeling of completeness. Couldn’t be simpler.

I thought I share the latest ones with you. Poems for Friday - hey, why not?

The two poems I present here are not really related to one another but I wrote them on the same day. I also think that poems about day and night kind of belong to each other.

Enjoy!

This is a rambling on what it means to have style.

The world is divided into two halves: those who have style and those who haven’t. It’s black and white for me. There is no fuzzy bit in the middle. The division goes across class, religion, gender, nationality and age. In another word, you can be filthy rich and have no style, or you can be poor but have style. You can be male and have style or be female and have no style. You can also be Japanese and still have no style!

It’s also important to remember that no one is born with style. You must acquire it. This is the critical difference with other types of divisions, such as class, religion, nationality, which unfortunately are all given at birth. Moreover, style is not inherited. So even if your parents had style, you yourself may not necessarily possess it. Not yet, I should say, because you may, one day. It is more a matter of choice.

Children naturally do not have style. They can’t. They are too young. Teenagers, very rarely, indeed. Style comes with a certain maturity, it requires both emotional and intellectual integrity. You can’t just copy someone else’ style. It’s about knowing yourself, knowing what suits you, what tickles you most, and making a statement about that. That knowing takes time.

In fact, it is not dissimilar to fine wine. It needs ripening, a rupture of some kind, a struggle even. A designer with style spends a long time thinking about what he/she designs. A fashion student with style spends a long time thinking about what he/she wears. Having financial security does help because that means you can free up some head space to think about such things, but time is more important. Neither a commercial success nor celebrity status will bring style, in fact, they may actually hinder it. Whether or not you are a famous architect or a senior designer, if you do not have the kind of maturity that goes with fine wine, you may still very much lack style.

Having style is not at all about having a large ego. That is the interesting thing about people with style. You cannot be self-obsessed and have style, because you have to think about others. You need audience. What kind of statement are you making? You must be able to de-clutter the junk in your head before you can have a clarity of vision that goes with style.

See the picture above, for example. That bag with a zip at the bottom of it was what got me started thinking about what it means to have style…Why would a person design such a bag? And why would a person buy such a bag? What annoys me is the mindlessness that went into the production & the possession of it…I felt strongly that I needed to write about this.

Am i being harsh? I tell you, the world would be a much better place if we had more people with style…

I made a contribution to a new online magazine called Architecture in Development. This website is “a new architecture platform and a community to share information, knowledge and creativity about architecture and sustainable development.” I tweaked my original text on Takasugi-an by Terunobu Fujimori for this website and put some images up. I hope to add a bit more to this page (about the city itself, for example). Check it out…

Air as Architecture Lecture - Discussion

This is a new section I have created in the hope of sparking off a pubic discourse about Japanese architecture. I am starting here with what Robert Torday has to say about the question he raised after my lecture regarding the contradiction or the “inconsistency” found in Japanese architecture. He raises an important point. Read on:

So - I think my point was this - your fascinating talk touched on the theme of an essentially ‘porous’ architectural ethos intended to be transformative and inherent in traditional Japanese society, stretching back over the centuries. Physical boundaries were deliberately blurred, or absent, perhaps to imbue in the traveller a sense of life as essentially transient, ethereal - the empty rooms at the long temple/shrine you used an illustration being a case in point. While I admire and am intrigued by this notion of absent architecture, I find the idea somewhat at odds with my perhaps misinformed perception of traditional Japanese society/culture, which to the outsider, despite the ad hoc espousal of Western values, seems intrinsically hierarchical and formal. Have you read de Waal’s ‘Hare with the Amber Eyes’? The essence of the book being a collection of netsuke, patiently fashioned over years by craftsmen with exquisite skill and taste, emblematic objects that although small and fragile are also strong, assuming a beauty through their considered detail and practical application. Emblematic in that they seem to capture a more general ethos of private, immutable study and contemplation that runs through all Japanese thought and society, with its compartmentalised perspectives, where a journey - physical or spiritual - is fraught with protocol and ritual, overlaid and constrained by social standing. This is the inconsistency I was trying to indicate, rather clumsily perhaps, on the night of your talk.

In other words, is the ethereal / airy nature of traditional Japanese architecture a conspiracy - a piece of subtle trickery to lull the pilgrim or explorer into a false sense of fluid movement or progress, when in fact real life was specifically designed to impede mobility through an impenetrable maze of social proprieties - from the Imperial family downward?

In a few days, I would like to put my response up. But please feel free to post your comments here…

Photo credit: Ayako Iseki

Lecture: Air as Architecture

Considering that my lecture clashed with Rem Koolhaas’ book launch taking place at the same building in the same evening (sorry, Rem, for not making your do!), as well as that my lecture room was tucked away on the 4th floor, where only two of the four main lifts could get up to (why?), we had a fantastic turnout of people last Monday.

For those of you who came to my lecture, thank you for coming. For others, I will give your a taster here. This is one of the photos I showed that evening - it’s a view out of Okoshikake or “Waiting Bench,” one of several garden huts found in the famous garden of Katsura Imperial Villa. Notice how the stepping stones that lead up to it do not stop at its threshold but continue on right through it and out. …These stones, in other words, whip us into motion.

This is just one example amongst many in which architecture is used to keep us moving in Japan, by circulating air through it, and ultimately transforming us, the users, in the process. One question was raised after my lecture, however, asking whether or not there was an inherent contradiction in Japanese architecture, as there was a move to keep it open and porous, whilst, at the same time, all the more efforts were made to try contain it and keep it locked away. I don’t think I managed to sufficiently explain then, but what I can say is this: the transformation that is expected to take place through the traditional Japanese spatial rendition - the journey through space as well as time - is still very much a prescribed one and I don’t see them as being necessarily contradictory; both are ways to exert and maintain some kind of control on our bodies and minds. In the modern era, we see all together different trends emerging but we should still consider what kind of control is being exerted and maintained.

…I think I could do a whole course on this - anyone interested in developing it with me?

Photo credit: Yoshiharu Matsumura

In less than a month’s time, I will be giving a lecture at the Barbican on history of Japanese architecture from the perspective of…well, air. I’m hoping that it would be an entertaining evening, nothing too academic, as I flip the Japanese architect Junya Ishigami’s idea of “Architecture as Air,” which is currently on show at the Curve, and explore, instead, “Air as Architecture.”

My article on Tadao Ando’s House in Sri Lanka is published on Dezeen. The text has been replenished with lots of unpublished anecdotes that you might enjoy reading about. I was fortunate enough to actually visit it. (BTW you have to scroll down quite a bit to get to the beginning of my text.)