The BIARCH site posted two interesting lectures, one by Yoshiharu Tsukamoto (of Atelier Bow Wow) and the other by Chilean architect Smiljan Radic.
The inward Smiljan Radic, presented a video that poetically focuses and frames his sense of himself, his edited biography, his poetic vision, his influences, rather than of his works directly. From this, as well as the way he tells his stories, we get a very good sense of what he is about, his keenly refined self-identity. We can thus begin to read his works as emanating from these self-defined consistent sensibilities, and of himself as creative fount. From this fount, Radic’s output is complicated, and interesting because on the one hand, being a South American with East European roots, he sees himself and his architecture quite apart from Spanish (western/European, permanent, precise, proper, master culture) architectural trajectories, on the other hand, unknowingly, he tries to understand his world within the confines of the same western discourses, projecting himself as the so-called ‘other’.
His works are deeply personal and political consequently: a preference for forms, processes and details that celebrate the temporary, the transitory, and the imperfect. The lecture was about articulating himself as a knowing subject apprehending the world as object out there.
In contrast, Tsukamoto through their studies and projects, talks about their interest in the active play between how people use and experience space, and how space can shape use. This, he names “Behaviorology” or the study of “behaviour”. In one project, the Hanamidori Cultural Center park extension, where park activities are added both inside (below the great roof) and outside (on the great roof), he wondered aloud to the audience that although he can’t SAY or doesn’t KNOW exactly how, this bigger project is certainly related to the way they think about “behaviour” in their smaller projects and their urban studies. What is tentative, what is not said, he speculated instead with photos of how people were using the green roof as an extension of the park and an image of Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Le Grande Jatte. His use of the Seurat image is like his attempt to use the name “Behaviorlogy”: a deliberate and conscious effort to communicate with an idealised western audience in a vocabulary that they are familiar with. Throughout his presentation, we sense what is constantly at play: Atelier Bow Wow’s particular and lively responses to the environments they find themselves in, and their active responses to changing situations in the design process (… we could not convince the client…. so we transformed our idea to this…). We can sense who they are, their sensibilities interacting with the world out there. We get a tentative, softer, diffused image of what is subject and what is object, what is in here and what is out there.
On the topic of self and world, Zhuangzi has this say, “When you no longer occupy in your self, forms and things appear by themselves.”
Francois Julien explains: “The Zhuangzi teaches us to de-occupy ourselves, but not because the ’self’ is detestable and we must flee it or ascetically deny it, but because we need to recover from the consistency of the subject, to rid ourselves of it and ‘forget’ it, … in such a way that we no longer have to posit the world as an object opposite us, to be known and manipulated. Or … by undoing the possibility of nature (as object), it thrusts us back into the natural (as process).”