I know nothing about architecture
I know practically nothing about architecture. I live in a suburb—everywhere in Los Angeles, excluding maybe few suburban centers, is a suburb—and drive my ‘89 BMW 325i on 12-lane Freeways to commute. There is not a day that goes by without seeing a “boring” house built with the two-by-four studs method, but I rarely see a house worthy of color spreads in architecture magazines. I have been to France, more than once, but each time, I gave into the temptation and spent all of the leisure time smacking my lips on the French gourmet, missing the chance to see Villa Savoye. I did see the Pompidou Center, although I must admit; I did not go inside.
In 2006, I lived in the new business center of Beijing, only 5 minutes (on foot!) from the famous “pants” building designed by Rem Koolhaas. Everyday, I would look up, from the back seat of a shabby Beijing taxi (taxi fare in Beijing was very reasonable so I took one every morning to work, only about 2 miles down ChangAn Avenue), and watched it go up slowly, until I realized that this was no ordinary skyscraper. In truth, I had no idea that it was designed by Rem until later (I was working at an advertising firm back then and it didn’t seem too important to find out who the architect was). Nonetheless, I enjoyed watching it from almost directly under the enormous cantilever, which always gave me an impression that it could topple over me at any moment. The image of the “pants” building is still fresh in my memory as if my last commute on ChanAn Avenue was only yesterday. After leaving Beijing, I have done almost nothing to feed my architectural wisdom, other than the wishy-washy chit-chat, the pecha-kucha, or the bara-bara (deconstruction) exercises in the architecture school.
But I know a little about train design. I was,and still am, a trainspotter. When I was younger (much younger; too young to know the meaning of the word “architecture,” which admittedly I still don’t know), my parents took me to a nearby viewing spot for a local train in Tokyo. Everyday, I would cling to the fence along the train track, and watch the trains go by. Luckily for my parents, trains came every three or four minutes, so the little-me would contentedly urge them to take him home after spending just half an hour or so on the precast fence. I watched one particular train go by so many times that I could catch the slightest design changes adopted in the new models. Of course this was a thing of the past, but it occurred to me that maybe this relentless love for the trains was what shaped my aesthetic preferences, or “taste.” I like things that are linear and directional. I like them even more if they are composed of repeated units. I do not like random curves “akin to nature,” but I relish the fillet corners. Basically, I am prone to favor the “mechanical” look. What I saw through the fence during my childhood seemed to have programmed something fundamental into my (in Katherine Hayles’ term) nonconscious.
What then is “seeing?” I often find myself being unable to answer this question because of the very fact that “I can see.” Colin Ware in Information Visualization says that seeing is a means of pattern recognition. We extract outlines (distinction lines) and apply our knowledge. But, how do we make such distinctions, and how do we know what lines to draw on which objects? Peter Wyeth in The Matter of Vision explains that our nonconscious (“automatic” in his book) makes distinctions based on the likelihood of survival. We “nonconsciously” choose to see what would help us to survive. Of course, we rarely encounter a life-or-death situation, but on the flip side, we often find ourselves needing to create self-images to prove our worth in our society. What makes a person choose Apple over Dell computer is often the “aesthetic preference,” programmed in our nonconscious for the purpose of self-esteem. For me, it would most likely comes down to the train, and maybe the CCTV tower (the “pants”).
So, then, what is the real significance of architecture? Everyone has his, or her way of seeing the world. No two persons will view my design and “see” exactly the same thing. All architectural projects—the thought, the lines, the words, and the colors—are sincere, but there is nothing (I’m sorry) intrinsically valuable about the forms or the shapes. In thinking about this, I turned to Kant’s “Thing in themselves” and Graham Harman’s Object Oriented Ontology in a desperate attempt to find the values in the forms themselves, but this route came to a dead-end. The dilemma is that the more you believe in them, the more the object (architecture) slips away. To this end, I must conclude that I still don’t know anything about architecture. But there is an architecture I know. This one exists in the wishy-washy chit-chat, the pecha-kucha, or the bara-bara exercises. It is purely a human enterprise.
My wife should not be the only person who believes in the esoteric nature of the discipline; that architects are oblivious to banality, but this belief is based on the shallowest of understandings. The truth is that we know it all too well. We are very aware of the precarious nature of the discipline. All of the ‘isms, the fashionable codes we have created, were designed with precisely our proneness to banality in mind. They were meant to block the discipline from falling into decadence. Otherwise, we would forever give into the temptations of French gourmet, and continue building the stud-wall houses as guided by the “force of the economy.” Arguably, the “parametric” method made its way onto the list of banality because it gave into the popularity of seemingly neutral “data.” Architects cannot escape this Karma. We are destined to continuously invent something different so we won’t fall into the banality. This is the game of architecture, an image creation game.
I have heard of an iOS game where the objective is to assume the role of a dull middle-aged man and transform him into a smartphone expert. We are sometimes oblivious to this fact but smartphones are turning into a platform to learn about the smartphones. I play video games about sports games, so do 100 Million other eSports fans. Will there be a video game about playing video games? I certainly think so, just as the series of video games I have developed is simulating the game of architecture. Such simulations, I would like to believe, should not be considered as an act of imitation, but rather one of discovery.
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