Architecture in Seconds

Malaysian Institute of Architects 2020 Countdown Urban Design Winner

A quick submission to a brief architecture competition that tells the story of how quick time lapse towards '2020' - a mythical vision of a struggling ruling regime promising development that is somehow faintly theorized. Almost as vain and unidentifiable as the human figure put in front of the rendered structure.

It reminds me of the character of Tak (Takuya Kimura) who travel by train to (or from) a distant time call '2046' in Wong Kar Wai's film of the same name.

The Double Life of Utopia

It is a party of fossil fuel consumption. The victims of this cosmopolitan life seeking emotional shelter, driving in his/her mystified symbol of freedom and esteem leaving the daily jail of modern enslavement.

It is the Utopian vision of the occidental industrialist, mistakenly borrowed by the civilization-hungry oriental as a tool of masking its native humility...generating a kind of life that somehow contradict and betray its former promises.

The ever expanding sprawl have mutated into an irreversible collective fantasy of the masses. That it would be suicidal to try to solve this problem. The duty is to make this problem forever insurmountable by extrapolating on the existing fiasco. Its blatant 2-dimensionality and the brilliant purity of its surface are hypothetically said to be able to ease the thirst for true freedom. Its extreme utility and (therefore) its problems are distorted to become pure a poetry of a better tomorrow.

The conspiracy continues, supplying this double life of utopia with more and more fresh new mystified symbol of cosmopolitan freedom...in the blind love affair between the Slave and the City!

[LIVING]

Malaysian Institute of Architects Design 2011 2nd Prize
Malaysian Institute of Architects Design 2011 Honourable Mention
ADJapan 2011 Gold Award

Linked Hybrid Housing - Sem 2 2010/11

Linking Lunacy

He is, above all, the pride of a matematicalised world. An unity of uniformity that defies speculation, and severe discipline that suggest differentiation. The vernacular house has given way to his new system of value...the value of 2-dimensional totalitarian.

They are the replicants of the One...the One architectural idea. The large amount replicants are the product of one computerized ritual. One single powerful option. The replication is a strong control, preventing any form of suburbanistic architectural Ego. One territory, one generating plan, one ideology, an anarchy of ultimate totalitarian. The architect refuses any form of humour. The mathematicians reject any form of marverickism. Together they form the civil fight of a mute architectural play.

Each of his inhabitat could only perform silent rebel within the confinement of the Great Firewall and the Plot. Since, he cannot grow in any unconventional manner. Neither vertically nor horizontally, neither sectionally nor planimetrically.

The Plot has become a soap opera of hundreds episodes. Continuity of story is blocked by the Ego of the Plot. He prohibit any form of sinfull pornography with the nature. He links independence entities of unlinkable selfishness[s], through the medium of Plot.

He is made up of many oxymoron of extremes. His super-linkability is linking isolation[s]. His centralization of domains promote segregation. His discipline is raising internal violence. His pre-conceived visual promise is promising a spectre social catastrophy.

Year after year the nexus reproduce itself, forming a colossal diaspora of identical Ego[s], and yet, the inhabitants are unconsciously paralysed by the powerful regime of the smart mathematicians...The smart mathematicians are reaching the moon while the inhabitants are suffering the mute porn of indecisible blues. It is an accumulation of all sensible disaster...an accumulation of all possible theatrical climax that never happen...we call him the 'malaysian superlink.'
In a world where the only constant is change, he is the Special One, the only architecture that survive the test of time.

Blade Runner and Our Brave New World

Blade Runner. Consumerist prison of Los Angeles in the year 2019. City dwellers are occupied with constant psychological detergent of commercial promise and surveillance. Human and non-human replicant are programmed as the spending machines who sustain the dominance of giant corporations, the Masters.

Blade Runner (1982), one of my personal favorite film (a fully non-emotional credit), has always been an useful source of analytical reference, every time doubts loom over my over-extrospective cognitive thirst. The tag 'inspirational' could only deserved by a fantastic film like the one directed by Ridley Scott, for its investigative and precise accounts on human post-industrialist future.

How far could a 80's film provide an insight about a typical capitalist city, 40 year projected ahead? Its vision of a disjunctive passive consumerist society of Los Angeles, has been materialised way ahead. Los Angeles and other para-colonial Asian metro cities have been a major target of human migration, dislocation and marginalization. The fantasy depiction of a near future city was coupled with characteristics of severe decadence, ephemerality and inequality, brought to life by the roles like the human replicants, the rule of imperialistic corporations, and the subsequent dehumanization of the city's inhabitants. All of these pessimistic assumptions, have their highest degree of threat on some post-colonial asian cities, Kuala Lumpur, an easily conquerable colonial urban squalor, could not escape the implied implications of the whole system.Kowloon walled city, HK. Over-population, slum and urban squalor typify the dystopian cyberpunk cities.

Utopian visions, inspiring political slogans, gigantic advertisement screens and other 'feel good' ecstasies, march along the gradual deconstruction of these societies towards a much anticipated 'brave new world', of full-fledged consumerism, pluralism, diaspora and of course, the cunning dystopia.
Architecture and its semiotics lost its pace with the artificial signs that rule the colonial asian cities.

The replicants in Blade Runner, who act as slave of its creator, the Tyrell Corporation to exploit the resources of other planets, could be a silent mockery of the role of us today, living in a distorted vision of the past. How could the 'replicant' of today, escape the unhealthy reality of high-tech and low-life? Plus the fate of being the slave of the system of our own creation? Cultural pluralism, confusion, hybridity, are they celebrated achievements or a dark clandestine tools of our deceptive and feudalistic corporation and ruler? What they clearly bring to this postmodernist pastiche is the paralysed political and cultural sensitivity, of false futuristic noir that benumb its citizen's analytic thinking through endless hyperreal promises.

What if all the reasons of our existence are merely the subject of their strategic manipulation?

Blade Runner and its architecture projected everything communicable of its zeitgeist. From the monolithic headquarters of gigantic corporations, to the chaotic damped streetscape overcrowded with wandering immigrants, neon light billboards and eroticism. Everything from signature corporate glass box to dome-topped mansions of the little napoleons. From jumbled artificial mechanical ducting to the territorial battle of signage. Maybe only a Voight-Kampff machine could distinguish a true modernized first world and an enslaved savage garden of false civility, and thus, are we the replicant of our own system?Profile of a replicant Nexus 6 as examined by blade runner dectective Deckard (reference to Rene 'Descartes' with his theory of human and non-human soul).

Dalínian Legitimacy of Modernization

Replies to comments on The End Of Architecture History And The Representation of the Void.

Salvador Dali (1904-1989): The Persistence of Memory. A surrealist reexamination of the Eurocentric cosmic order and concept of time.

On western history
The legitimacy of western model of history on our society are proven to be too important, only by looking at how the past eurocentric modernity is embraced throughout this non-western region currently. The disorienting confusion between the original historically-specific eurocentric 'modernity' and the meaning of 'modernization' itself has fueled our adoption of the wrong duo in our eastern soil. If the non-western world's modernization is based on its colonialist, exploitative and mass-industrialist model of 'euromodernity', and is built upon the western model of historical bedrock, then I think we have no other option other than using the western package to analyse and plan for our own future. That is what build our present identity.

The root of this situation lies in the false universalistic assumption that tend to equal eurocentric modernity with modernization. The eurocentric model with its geographically specific history of past innovations like human enslavement, science and mass-industrialization, are a solely an european invention and assertion. This benchmark for human civilization has never been challenged by any of their conceived 'weak' non-western 'sub-human'. But on the other hand, the value of 'modernization' itself lies in every non-western civilization, each is different to another, distinct, unique and non-imitative, has yet to fully developed before we succumb to the european model that itself in the past, has records of devastative manipulation on non-western society. So is there any other historical model that we can use to describe our crooked modernization? - pessimistically other than the western model, No.

Just like how the word 'enlightenment' is perceived, the signifier of the 16-th century renaissance immediately overwhelm and took over any other model of 'enlightenment', for example, of the Buddhist and Taoist tradition, and many other. With this his level of misconception, it does suggest that the need to critically reevaluate and redefine our own edition of modernity is calling.

The mass-information age now has help our effort to question our past blunders. More and more people has enough information to develop the attitude of questioning. Helped by the capitalist mass cultural shuffling, the pluralistic and the chaotic contemporariness of the world culture now has slowly brewing a new wave of fundamentalism who seek to recast the monopoly of the eurocentric modernity. In architecture, the defiant and internal struggle with the universalizing european modernity can be seen in the development of many sub-regionalist architecture that look away and remediate from the already porous european architectural utopianism. Their introverted, meditative and defensive architecture gesture suggest their newly found awareness of their past cultural flop. In philosophy, some postmodern fundamentalism movement like the al-Attas's 'Islamization of knowledge' are good example of this conviction of false cultural selection.

Thus I think, the Malaysian 'centre' could be the culture of the time before these postmodernist chaos and counter-culture struggle begun.

On feudalism
I think indeed, a 'true' democracy has never happened throughout the human civilization. The concept of 'democracy', freedom and right, are merely psychological invention. They are 'named' while any name can be 'named'. Feudalism and inequality are like oxygen, are everywhere, and only the polished names of 'democracy' and 'equality' could temporarily hide what is apparent. The modern psychological manipulation by the ruling class and the vulnerability of the peasant are the backbone of 'democracy' - the new feudalism. The Chinese socialist government is the only one who understand this reality. Their model of a 'harmonious socialist society' and selective modernization took precedence upon the failure of the extensive european model of modernity towards a sustainable cultural ideal.

On the sudden technological flux
Identical to the consequence of globalization plus the concentration of advance technologies and wealth, the sudden flux of technology in architecture in this country will further polarize the big scale architectural consortiums who own the technical knowledge on jointing these industrial parts, and the survival of those individual self-made architects who rely largely on conventional materials. This concentration of wealth, knowledge and power proven to be an undeniable characteristic of a feudalist order.
Salvador Dali - Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man (1943). Perhaps the notion of total redefinition of our own standard of modernization and its effort required, could stem from the idea of Dalinian surrealist reborn of a man out of the eurocentric entrenchment.
Salvador Dali.