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February 7, 2010 · category blog · by km
For the sake of nostalgia, I bought a pack of Marie biscuits from a HongKong supermarket today in Shanghai. When I was a boy growing up in Singapore, Marie biscuits were the standard fare to stave off hunger in between meals. In our home, we would have them usually around three o’clock in the afternoon, accompanied by a glass of Milo (hot chocolate milk beverage) or thick black Sumatran coffee. This would be the balmy ex-British colony’s equivalent of English tea. The Marie biscuit, we are told by Wikipedia, “was created by an English bakery Peek Freans in London in 1874 to commemorate the marriage of the Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna of Russia to the Duke of Edinburgh. It became popular throughout Europe, particularly in Spain where, following the Spanish Civil War, the biscuit became a symbol of Spain’s economic recovery after bakers produced mass quantities to consume a surplus of wheat.”
The Marie biscuits in Singapore in the seventies were made by a famous local biscuit factory called Khong Guan, founded 1947, right after the Pacific war. The biscuits I had today were produced by Galletas Gullon in Palencia, Spain; a factory which was founded in 1892. They were imported into China by a Shanghai/Beijing company called Shanghai Kwei Chun, founded in 1996. Economic globalisation, cross-cultural influences, the rise and fall of nations; some things don’t change. After all these years, the biscuit still has its distinctive (Russian?) pattern around its edge; a medallion or a dharmachakra with its 12 dimples like the face of time; and 4 other dimples surrounding the name “MARIE” (or “MARIA” in Spanish), stamped with a flourish.
January 24, 2010 · category blog · by km
minus k house under construction; a labyrinth of thises and thats.
January 20, 2010 · category blog · by km
Packages “are no longer the temporary accessory of the object to be transported, but itself becomes an object; the envelope, in itself, is consecrated as a precious though gratuitous thing; the package is a thought; … Yet by its very perfection, this envelope, often repeated (you can be unwrapping a package forever), postpones the discovery of the object it contains–one which is often insignificant, for it is precisely a specialty of the Japanese package that the triviality of the thing be disproportionate to the luxury of the envelope: a sweet, a bit of sugared bean paste, a vulgar “souvenir” … are wrapped with as much sumptuousness as a jewel. It is as if the box were the object of the gift, not what it contains … the very thing it encloses and signifies is for a very long time put off until later, as if the package’s function were not to protect in space but to postpone in time. … The richness of the thing and the profundity of meaning are discharged only at the price of a triple quality imposed on all fabricated objects: that they be precise, mobile, and empty.”
Roland Barthes, “Packages”, in Empire of Signs, 1982 (translated by Richard Howard)
January 19, 2010 · category blog · by km
in western architectural thinking (or thinking derived from the greek), the new is always an opposition of the old. when they want something new, they willfully make something that is diametrically opposite the old, or the existing. thus the memphis group spearheaded by ettore sottsass in the 80s met and consciously invented a new style of design that was completely the opposite of the sober black bauhaus-internationalstyle so prevalent at that period. instead of a rational “form follows function”, they made objects bewilderingly colourful, ’superfluous’, flat, and wonderfully distraught with subjectivism. to oppose right-angled ‘euclidian’ space and the cartesian binary thinking that it represented , western thinkers and architects advocated non-euclidian geometry. to counter the modernist fixation with the singularity of the signifier attached to the signified, they proposed the pluralism of post-modernism. to go against the modernist tenet “god is in the details”, they said “fuck details!” to get away from the subjectivity coupled with the hero-architect, they went ‘parametric’. however they try, they keep getting caught in the web of hegelian thesis antithesis synthesis. droog is dada meets memphis. the new is a reaffirming of the old; it remains a closed loop informed by western thinking.
いわゆる”西洋建築的”な思考においては、新しいことは常に古いことの反対にある。何か新しい物が必要な時、彼らは古い物もしくは既存の物の対角線上にある物を作ろうとする。このようにしてエトーレ・ソトッサス引き入るメンフィスは80年代に、当時支配的であったバウハウスやインターナショナルスタイルの反対に位置するような新しいスタイルを意図的に作り出した。”形態は機能に従う”の代わりに、カラフルで奇抜で常識を逸脱するような作品を主観主義に基づいて作り出す。”ユークリディアン”的な空間やデカルト的二項対立的な考え方に対抗するために、”西洋の”学者や建築家はノンユークリッド的な幾何学を提唱した。また”神は細部に宿る”に抵抗し”ファック、ディテール”と叫び、また大物建築家によって唱えられる主観性を排除するために、”パラメトリック”へと進む。しかしやればやるほど、テーゼの提唱、それに対するアンチテーゼ、そして総括といったヘーゲ的流れに陥るだけである。ドローグはダダにメンフィスが混ざったようなものである。新しいこととは古いことを解釈しなおすことである。そしてそれ自体が西洋的思考によって作られた閉じたループになってしまっている。
the problem with the west’s new, is that it relies too much on form or the presence of form. to be new, you have to exhibit a new form, manifest an unprecedented new presence. the new is always an idea or an ideal intelligible and promoted in form. without new form there is no new new. according to francois julien (The Great Image Has No Form, or On the Nonobject through Painting), this has to do with ontological and theological foundations of western (greek) thinking. as the west’s foundational story goes, since the fall of man from ‘paradise’, “the logic of christianity … has been to make god present again among men.” western thinking asks “what is it?” “to be or not to be?”
問題なのは、形や形の存在に固執しすぎていることである。新しくなるためには、新しい形を視覚化し、前代未聞の新しい存在を提案しなければならない。新しいということはいつも形として表されるアイデアであり、理想的な明確さである。新しい形なくして、新しい新しさは存在しない。フランシス・ジュリアンによれば、これは存在論的で神学的なギリシャ的思考の基礎と関係している。
non-greek based thinking, such as the chinese on the other hand, never had this obsession with presence. to be or not to be, is not the question. absence is presented on the same plane as presence. according to julien, for the chinese, there is a “nondisjunctive weaving of the course of things; they indiscriminately mingle presence and absence, vague and diffuse.”
ギリシャ的でない思考、例えば中国思想等においては、存在については全く固執しない。そうであるのか、ないのか、は問うべきものではない。不在は現存と同じレベルで存在している。ジュリアンによれば、中国人にとっては、”物事とは分離されずに繋がっており、現存と不在を混在させ、曖昧になり拡散する。”
kazuyo sejima makes radical ‘new’ things from old things. but she doesn’t talk about the new because that’s not what she has in mind. she has a much simpler way to talk about her architecture: “I always think that it can be used in a more fun way or that people might feel that they want to use it or find it an easier way of using things.”
妹島和世は古いものから斬新な”新しさ”を作り出す。しかしそれは彼女の意図しているものではないので、その新しさについては語らない。その代わり、もっと簡単な言い方で自分の建築について語る。”変わったことをやろうという気持ちは全然ありません。こっちのほうが、うまく楽しく使えるだろう、あるいは使いたくなるだろう――。（朝日新聞グローブより）”
atelier bow wow makes subtle new things that may look old. they are interested not in the presence of new form, but of new ways of using, by a careful looking at old ways.
アトリエワンは古く見えるかもしれない”新しいもの”を作る。新しい形作りに興味があるわけではなく、古いものの新しい使い方を発見することに興味があるのである。（概訳：佐伯）
January 5, 2010 · category blog · by km
Found an interesting article by Erik Spiekermann, creative director and managing partner of a design and communications firm. He was mildly lamenting why people might be afraid of the new in general: new ways of doing things, in political systems, world order, design. He asks, if the old system is “obviously broke”, why are people afraid of designing a new one?
But he sees the other side of the argument:
“… it is our job as designers to invent new stuff every day, or at least make much new ado about old ideas. Our clients, however, are not really interested in the unnecessary risks usually associated with anything new and unprecedented; and neither are we, if we’re honest about it. So we end up keeping what’s tried and tested, and repackaging it. I’ve yet to meet a client who would be willing to risk their job for a revolutionary but untried concept…. ”
Thought I might add some random notes about our experiences here:
- unprecedented newness is difficult
- newness requires new thinking, new trying, above all deeply personal views
- it is even harder to get newness built
- most designers are afraid of the too new because they want others to like what they do
- most importantly they want their clients to like what they do
- like pop music, most designers simply re-style the same few chords, it’s much easier, many people would be able to hum along
- it’s hard to go indie
- it is hardly true that in China “all things are possible”, including new ideas
- it is true that most clients will say in the first meeting that they want something that “no one else has”
- by the third meeting, they will reveal that they want something new “but not too new”
- clients invariably want you to show “reference” images, i.e. existing built examples of what you want to propose
- one client only cared for “innovation that works”; will your new design guarantee more sales?
- clients would always want you to show realistic renderings of what they will get; this reduces things to the visual and makes new thinking about the experiential difficult to show
- most people don’t care for new experiences; it’s beyond their “comfort zone”
- people who truly are comfortable with new design do not need designers
- it’s not that bad a situation here; you can still get some newness in because some clients want to be nice when they see your eyes glazed like a football fan
- every football match obeys the same old rules, but each match is always new
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