Lecture Response 2

Christoph Ingenhoven, Presented by a+u                                                            29 Sep 2015

This is the second (and only other) talk I attended during which I asked a question.

Ingenhoven really talks about his entire oeuvre the whole time, which I feel may not be that beneficial to discourse. However, there were still many things to learn from him.

Ingenhoven proposed the concept of ‘supergreen’, green architecture that doesn’t merely meet environmental standards, but also encompasses people and their daily activities. As the brief says it all, his architecture is about combining ecologic architecture with aesthetics and technology.

He has his own studio, Ingenhoven architects which is one of the world’s leading practices in sustainable design.

In Singapore, he is doing the Marina One project.

He first mentions his design philosophy with relation to the future of the world.

In 2050, 70% of the world’s population will live in urban areas. Right now, Shenzhen, Guangzhou: largest city contains 120 million people, and Tokyo, 37 million people. They are examples of hypercities, metropolises containing more than 20 million lives. 40 of the world’s largest cities represent 18% of the world’s population but represent 66% of the economy. Cities take up 3% of the surface; but 80% of the carbon emissions.

With all these being said, it is only right to focus on urban cities, which (in my general knowledge) have the potential to be efficient consumers of energy. We passed the point where over half the world’s population is living in an urban rather than suburban area already. Cities are what we need to develop architecture in relation to.

He talks about his works as follows:

RWE tower – one of the first skyscrapers to be naturally ventilated. 1996. Skin facade.

Toranomon Project, Tokyo, is a residential tower and office tower as well. Every balcony has both horizontal and vertical landscaping.

Breeze, Osaka. It has a double-skinned façade with natural ventilation. 50%. A 7-story podium is tucked under the building, with concert halls and shopping etc. Building has relationship to the others around it.

Kobogen 2 Dusseldorf. Positioned between a public park and something else. Ingenhoven’s practice looked for the types of trees with golden-brown leaves during autumn, kept during winter snows, and slightly more green during spring. Type of species is important. This creates a varying landscape through the course of the year as the seasons change.

Lufthansa HQ Frankfurt. Very surrounded by noise, yet the most approachable building around. Beside high-speed train tracks and the airport’s runway. The idea of a concrete shell with steel and glass. Each office is oriented to gardens. Not heated nor cooled. (gardens in between buildings. Kinda like a greenhouse. Louvres that allow for air circulation in the roof. Also opening windows ventilates the office.) There is heating in winter and cooling water through the floor slabs during summer. Vents in the ceiling ventilate as well as let smoke out (??? Thought smoke goes down)

European Investment Bank, Luxembourg, has a timber facade! This doesn’t radiate coldness and people can seat nearer to it. Very interesting idea, that his architecture is indeed climate responsive. It is a curved, v-shaped building (a series connected together like a W) and this helps reduce sound. Triangular glass panels for facade also.However, the Venturi effect throws a wrench into the ventilation. The shape of the building helps to counteract this effect.

Lanserhof Lake Tegern. A rural and nice getaway area. Designed similar to a monastery. All rooms oriented to the outside. Material: wood. Ingenhoven likes simple reduced elegant design. Luxury comes from the space and the landscape that the architecture supports.

Main Station Stuttgart. Ingenhoven saved most of the existing station and built downwards. 28 light-eyes allow light into the excavated interior. Heating and Cooling are done by the trains coming and leaving. So zero energy needed. The Light-eyes are above the train platforms. In winter, the minimum is 14 degrees Celsius and in Summer max of 28 degrees when it’s 34 degrees outside. Also facilitated by the shading of trees outside. The light-eye: 30cm thick at the extreme ends/thinnest. Great engineering to make things appear very light. Thickest part is 1.5m. Also have vents in them. There was also a need to build a temporary railway station (imagine a waterfall and making it flow earlier first while treating the original.) So does the architect need to design the interim structure well too? 7-8 years...

International Criminal Court, The Hague. This INTERNATIONAL court tries to cater to all nationalities, appearing first and foremost as a place of law. So dispense with the old stone building, the Greek pediments etc. Instead thin colonnades rising to hold up a light ceiling. Very transparent and light (both meanings.) IT’S HARD to get the energy balance even with a great climate, not too hot nor cold.

Alexanderplatz Berlin: A residential tower in the middle of Berlin. The volumes jut out to random extents. 3D shape. The first few floors provide a safe feeling for the pedestrians. Welcome. Facade played a big role.

University Dusseldorf. Surrounded by trees, nature, a body of water. Using the environment to cool, for aesthetic, etc... Ingehoven is very sensitive to the exact environment his buildings stand in. Harmoniusly blending in. The sun shines directly on the rows of steps leading to the building and letting the building and students interact with the lake and nature.

Swarovski Lake Zurich. U-shaped building. View of lake is emphasised. The interior U-shape is conceived as a public plaza to give back to the people of the village. (the two pointed ends face outwards to the water). Again as with the university previously, usage of lake water to cool the building. Very green.

1 Bligh Sydney: People sit on the steps (lots of steps) and eat lunch, there is interaction with the public. Talking through the curtain (facade) of the building. The building has no ‘back’ to it!  Apart from the openings for bicycle and carpark, it is meant to be viewed 360-degrees “in the round” like a sculpture. The atrial space, first few floors are given back to the public. The atrium is a space for looking across, up and down floors, into the transparent space, facilitating interaction, fostering community.

Google HQ, Palo Alto: Designing for climate change. California, LA, turning into a desert because of the drought. So how does one design something so big, make people feel as if they’re nerdy students when working, and yet cater to such a climate?

Other small projects that were skimmed past: House 61; Strandkai Hamburg; UCD University College Dublin.

Marina One Singapore: The tropical city is the city of the future. The countries likely to experience population growth tend to have this climate. Tropical areas need wind for people to feel good. Building designed to facilitate wind movement and ventilation. So, the design is such that wind speed and turbulence is enhanced. Air flows from the bottom to the top because hot air rises and is blown away. Everyone gets a little wind.

The plot of land given is right in the centre of the Marina Bay reclaimed area, and will not be affected by future land reclamation. Ingenhoven designed Marina One to be insular first until the developments for the next decade or two are completed and there is harmony between buildings in the district. Pedestrianisation and public space take place on the ground level – public space and the atrium. Rule to bring back about 25% of the greenery taken away. Eventually, 3000 will live and 30k people work here.

Questions:

Did your education in any way influence your future career path towards greening/sustainability?

Green party created an entire political agenda focused on “green politics”. The shift in German culture in the 70s caused the end of modern architecture being taught in German universities. Swing from modernism to postmodernism based on white, rose-striped buildings, turned the attention onto an artistic, intellectual, diverse form of architecture, whereas modernism was more rational.

Out of studying heritage and preserved buildings come many of the solutions for contemporary architecture. Brazil has a strong tradition of good architecture under difficult economic, political, climatic conditions. Singapore is on the edge of whether or not to develop an identity. Identity comes from dedication and being keenly attuned to local issues, while finding local solutions.

Certification is important, but boring. This is not the holistic approach to green and sustainable buildings. There may be things which do not contribute to any award rubric, but is still important to the building. You are not forced by the system to give back more land than you use, but you can do it anyway. That is the supergreen mentality.

For countries which do not enforce green and sustainability standards, is it the responsibility of the architect to create it in your design?

Is there anyone who would reject green design? So far in my personal experience there has been no one “forcing” me to create a green building or “forcing” a non-green building. Everyone usually agrees to do the right thing. Hence, if it is a realistic idea, do not be afraid to put such ideas on the table for discussion.

Firstly, I have learnt more about green architecture and the way the world is going from Ingenhoven. Granted, some statistics I already knew, but through his repeated examples of his own work, I gradually understood the key tenets of his philosophy. Architecture has to cater to high-density, high-rise living, such as that already found in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo for example. We need to cut down our energy usage and instead utilise the natural environment. (Perhaps some lessons could be taken from vernacular architecture and the shophouses of Singapore and adapted to a new concept of Tropical Architecture.) Architecture has to co-exist with the environment around it. Existing buildings should be conserved and made use of as far as possible, as cultural icons and to reduce wastage. Climate and micro-climates and ecosystems can be made use of and factored in to design. Perhaps, the issue of greenery and sustainability can be woven into the very process of design, present in the parti, and fulfilling part of the function. Architects need to proactively factor the concept of ‘supergreen’ into their designs, and not simply do it for the sake of the accreditation. It needs to be part of how we look at the world.

But then again, on a less ‘architectural’ note, what I didn’t like was the fact that he only talked about his own work. I’m not sure how many principal architects do this, but I know that I prefer to work for someone who is more collaborative and perhaps not as egoistic as to only bring across his own work while talking about his philosophy of ‘supergreen’. Perhaps a more nuanced discourse could be achieved by discussing other firms’ approach to this ongoing movement in architecture and then trying to lay some ground for the future and perhaps inspire others. I believe that two and a half hours on an oeuvre may indeed be too long and doesn’t serve to hold the audience’s attention. With that said, Ingenhoven has sadly lost a little bit of credibility with me. That, and that I expected more breaking of new ground. Since the future of architectural growth is likely to be in tropical cities, how can architecture adapt itself to the climate more? What kind of changes might sustainability take on in the near future? I think that these are questions that I will have to ask myself.

The question that I asked him was about whether he, in his architecture, was looking for a new typology. The high-rise, so ubiquitous and necessary in the urban city, and providing offices, private and public housing for people to live, work and play in: has he, or are there, new attempts to redefine a new typology, or is the concept of “supergreen” itself a new typology that is catering to the new requirements for energy efficiency and greenery and so on?

I honestly didn’t get a very satisfactory answer, but I felt that his reply was a sort of closure at any rate. Ingenhoven told me (more or less) that a new typology is not looked for; it is found, in the process of trying to adapt to the problems faced with every new building: site constraints, the client, the cultural and world context. While I have no way of verifying his words as of yet, if I take them as true, I suppose that it is so. Sustainable architecture, while being the next big thing, and even required by BCA for buildings to fulfil certain criteria, seems to have produced new elements: the green wall, the green rooftop, new types of skyscrapers with a void in the middle with a terrace garden and bringing a hint of nature into the building. Is that not a new typology when compared with the concrete office towers of the past? I gather that architecture evolves with the times, is a reflection of the current movement in the world, as quotes from the few Ideas lectures that I have attended (for the sake of curiosity) put it.

However – and this in retrospect, since this response is written more than a month after the lecture – perhaps new typologies really can be defined after all. At WOHA’s talk on their BTO at Dawson, Richard Hassel also questioned, why make skyscrapers the way it is done now? The trees should be on the ground and the rooftops of different buildings blended into a homogeneous whole at a specified height – that way, they don’t cast shadows on each other and minimise the efficiency of solar panels. He also proposed that the stepped terrace (a la Chan Soo Kian’s Dawson) be turned inside out and the terraces climb outwards instead from the inside; protected and creating a central green atrium. If this is not the creation of a new typology (were it put into actual practice), then what is it?

I feel that Ingenhoven has broken new ground for sure, but other architectural firms would do good to follow his example and build upon it and continue to challenge the notion of sustainability and green architecture even more. 

Lecture Response 1

THE ONLY WAY IS UP [SHELTERED: DOCUMENTS FOR HOME]Panel discussion.                                                                                 6 Nov 2015 NLB LVL 1Firstly, an excerpt (mixing in some views of mine).-          Prof Jane M. Jacobs, Head of Urban Studies and Director of the Division of Social Sciences at YNC. Expertise: urban studies, postcolonial studies and qualitative urban methods.
Book! Buildings must die: a perverse view of architecture (MIT Press, 2014)-          Debbie Loo. Studying doctoral at NUS. Project, Passages Home.
-          The Saturday Projects (Felicia Lin, Jolene Lee, Wong Zihao). Familiar landscapes with unstable, unfinished or unwritten expositions.-          Moderator: Dr Lilian Chee. UCL doctorate; A.P. at Arch. NUS. She conceptualized the architectural essay film 03-FLATS (2014) which formed the initial impetus for Sheltered.The only way, it seems, is up, sometimes... The verticality of HDB, while being a success story, has also generated a whole complex of unanticipated movements.Prof Jane:She talks about home as something banal. While the HDB has achieved all these fantastic accolades, and Singapore has achieved what nobody has done with public housing, but there’s still another definition of home beyond that. Home links to identity. A person’s identity, our nation’s identity. Home is about the intangibles as well. It can be mobile and fluid, a concept rather than a concrete physicality.She quotes Liu Thai Ker. (Side track: He’s the director of RSP Architects Planners and Engineers! His father is Liu Kang, a local pioneer painter. He was head of HDB and URA. Chairman of National Arts Council. STPI Chair. Etc etc etc.) – HDB, as big as residents can afford.
Can the HDB be more than pragmatism? Or is it already?An example of a magazine – Our Home. In Oct 1983: with a HDB as the background; in the foreground, a NDP kind of party with people dressed in red and white, holding up the HDB flag (red on white). If we look at it in terms of rhetoric, we see a message of the heartland starting to emerge. HDB built these; HDB employs the common man, proud to serve and live in these flats; HDB as an icon and backdrop to Singaporean life. We can see it not only as propaganda, but also as an instrument of national building (on the flip side).But at the same time, are there correlations between high-rise living and suicides? She cites a paper, a thesis written in the 1980s. Applying sociology to architecture; high-density living and its negative aspects. As a new way of life, new typology of buildings they led to new forms of social conflict, such as washing clothes and with dirty water from a mop dripping down. The paper shows that a high ‘worry index’ is linked to living on higher floors. Is there a correlation?**********************Firstly, her talk about the stresses of high-rise living brings to mind some booklet I took from NLB before the panel discussion. About how Chinese coolies smoked opium, partly as a means to forget about their cramped conditions… So now that Singapore doesn’t have all these vices, how do people relax?Also, is high-density living really a new typology? When we know that HDBs were built to replace the slums, shanty towns, coolie houses, as a social good. Perhaps it may be more accurate to frame the social conflicts as what happened when people are inconsiderate and forget that others live above and below. How has the situation changed now? The study tried to imply that people are more stressed on the higher floors. But it seems that nowadays we like living on higher floors to catch the breeze. New HDBs – think BTOs like Skyterrace@Dawson – are up to 40 stories high. How has our ‘happiness index’ changed with time?I feel that there are more questions than answers to be had for Jane’s short talk. But I guess that her main point is that home is more than just four brick walls. It’s also a concept. Home – Singapore on a macro scale. Propaganda-like images help to influence that for sure. But more often than not, we live in Singapore. Born and bred here. I think it’s no surprise that people get attached. It’s more than just HDB living, but also about the lives we lead around it that wrap around the architecture, give it greater meaning. No matter how big or small the flats eventually turn out to be, there has to be a degree of sentimentality, especially if (since) a good enough job has been done of making a way of life.Perhaps, as our definition of ‘home’ changes, the architecture has to adapt to the needs of the people. How does the architect find that expression in the façade of a building for instance? Especially as in Singapore, the buildings seem to get torn down every so often. Perhaps the look of our public housing will have changed with the times in a generation.Debbie Loo:She started off with a poem like thing which I cannot remember.What she did recently is to go to pearls centre, located at 100 Eu Tong Sen Street, upon the invitation of her friend who lived there, and it became an obsession to her to document the lives of people unseen. She showed pictures of the intangibles of a home, and of people making homes where there wasn’t supposed to be one: umbrellas hooked and hidden behind doors, a fridge in a smoke stop lobby, signs of habitation, graffiti on the walls in Chinese that ask for the return of Imperialism and the emperor – an explicit denial of capitalism.It is clear that the residents have taken over the building and that whatever intent the architect originally had for it is now subsumed over the years by the various tenants of the building. We have to bring in Yangtze Cinema, which started off showing wuxia films, but changed to softcore porn (R rated flicks) upon its re-opening in 1995. Along with that came a reputation for seediness and sleaze.Debbie’s photographs remind me of my Intangible City assignment where we were supposed to go about Singapore and take 12 photographs and write a poem. There it already was, a building full of character and characters with words in it that existed to be taken, and she captured it perfectly through her lens, showing the exact same subjects I wanted to show – the ageing of architecture, the lines and blackened dirt marks telling volumes of the stories untold that we could all see, if only we looked a little harder. Debbie talks of Paul Auster, who makes scribbles of a detective who traces someone through a building and eventually comes up with fantastical routes that seem to trace out letters that perhaps are the echoes of the building itself. Debbie does rubbing on the floors and parts of Pearls Centre and leaves some of her marks behind, as her own contribution to the place. What has been left there – torn-off posters, scribbles of I-love-yous, all speak of the history of the place just as her marks do. And she says, someone will come along and interpret them and add his or her own mark too, and so it continues, until the building is torn down and demolished (which it was in August).*******************************************This was honestly the talk that made the most impression on me, because it resonated with me. In reading up more on Pearls Centre, I discovered just how sleazy it was. On Coconuts Singapore, Robin Hicks talks about old men who go to the cinema to masturbate and satisfy their desire for intimacy. But more than that, it reflects an undercurrent for “Singapore’s biggest social ill – loneliness” and the Yangtze cinema is a market for a specific audience on coping with this. I really began to see the dark underbelly of Singapore. This draws parallels with stories I’ve heard of aunties and uncles going to floating casinos over the weekends to gamble, and with the current work we’ve been doing – looking at the busy metropolitan lives of the people in the city and what consequences they may have – Debbie’s work came across as apt.Many questions were raised (in my head) that may not have answers to them: what happens when the architect is gone? When the architecture is no longer needed, slated for destruction and for a new building to takes its place – in paraphrasing Hicks’ words, to make way for yet another shopping mall even more soulless than an airport? When people start forgetting and the building doesn’t really exist anymore because it is being treated as though it isn’t there anyways, and both it and its residents wait for death like old people in a geriatric home. It’s just so sad. And I wondered, who will remember? Who will come by to pick all these memories up? Who will document and make sure we remember? So what, even if that happens? What will change, or is anything meant to change? And what can the architect do about it, if he can even do anything about it?I asked Debbie the question of whether she thinks that buildings can be designed to prevent this from happening – that hopefully we can design ourselves out of this problem of old, forgotten buildings and people. With the preamble during the open-floor discussion – that architects are increasingly involved also in the end-stage of a building’s life, in conservation and documentation and even redevelopment – are architects only to document and move on? Does a building just die? Or can it live on indefinitely while preserving its heritage?While she did not answer my queries directly, I sort of found my own answers through the discourse that followed. I came to the conclusion that buildings do, eventually, die. Prof. Jacobs’s view that “buildings must die” led to revelations on decay and consumption – that architecture can be treated as a process, not as a product. The architect’s job seems to be over once the building is completed, and tenants take over and give the space added meaning instead. Perhaps one more question should be: how can the architect be further involved in the life of a building? Debbie treats buildings as having a life as well; they age as society ages. But dying is a natural process. Perhaps it may be too idealistic to want to save each place in words, photographs, videos. Sometimes, all we can do is to preserve memories of important, iconic buildings past their prime; document; and these serve as reminders of a bygone era. And the new building erected in its place will hopefully try to remember what stood in its place before and reflect that in some way.But likewise in a metropolis, there is ever-growing consumption and buildings may just get conserved and repurposed. As ‘new’ buildings, they, too, have to then reflect their heritage in some form; pay homage, and tell the world not to forget what it was in its previous incarnation.Maybe when architects design, we have to try our very best to understand every aspect of the plot of land. All the better if the building hasn’t been demolished. We need to understand its history: what was growing on it before; what significance did previous buildings have; what does the client need and how do we take the past into account and design, for the present, a place that grows into the future, grows old along with its residents and tenants.It strikes me that in much of what I’ve learnt about history so far, it always seems to involve the Hegelian dialectic in some way or another. Let me amend his words to a slightly different meaning of current and counter-current: for every movement, there is always an anti-movement; and then something else appears to synthesise the two; and then another counter-movement appears, and so on and so forth. For the ‘Dark Ages’ and Gothic, there was the Renaissance; for that, there was the Baroque; for the Baroque, there was the Rococo; for that, modernism and its multifarious smaller movements that comprise it; for the busyness of every life in Singapore, we Singaporeans have developed a deep nostalgia for pretty much anything from our childhood or that survives to be more than forty-odd years old. What will be the next synthesis that we come up with?The Saturday Projects:By three architectural assistants more or less fresh out of architecture school (I assume). Jolene is in Harvard on further studies.They talked about the architect not as the main maker, but rather, the tenants are those that take over. They are the second part of the story that has been left out (so far), the human, social aspect of architecture.They also examine and ask questions on what happens when the HDB flat, in all its ubiquity and hence anonymity, becomes a place of violence. Anonymity becomes a camouflage, makes the familiar unfamiliar – something they explored with their exhibition that uses everyday objects whitewashed to become recognisable, but yet not the same.They ended by encouraging the audience to go for the NUS museum exhibition Sheltered.***************They imply that when we study architecture, we need to consider, again, architecture not as a product of the architect, but also as a process that doesn’t really end until the building is gone – and even then it may live on in things erected in its place, or in memory, or as a hollow shell, much like our Chinatown of today, and especially as it was in the 1980s.Undoubtedly, though, their views have filtered into my response to Debbie’s talk.A question by Dr Lilian Chee, At what point does architecture become irrelevant? :This is my own interpretation of the discussion that happened.Somewhere, someone talked about the lifespan of buildings getting reduced from hundreds of years to tens of years, primarily because of the material used (I feel), because concrete is so ubiquitous. It seems as though buildings that have been erected are knocked down, too soon, in Singapore especially. Perhaps architects can make each building so unique, so special and emotion-provoking, that they don’t deserve to be knocked down after a few decades? This links to the idea of impermanence raised by one of the panellists. Architecture itself will never become irrelevant. But pieces of architecture most definitely will. It’s part of the whole system: build, destroy, raise a new piece of architecture, and repeat. It’s bound to happen in land-scarce Singapore. But in the process, are we losing something? Are we losing our identity? And if there were a resource crunch of the future, then perhaps it would be prudent to cater less to a consumerist culture and instead design for more permanent structures instead.Comments from a sixtysomething-year-old man who asked interesting questions, giving tidbits of information such as the moving of the previous occupants of Pearls Centre to People’s Park Centre and Complex:Along with Hicks or some other online article I read that said that the tenants simply move to another part of Chinatown, where they feel at home in a certain environment: If we extrapolate, when will this moving about stop? Will there always be places like Little Thailand in Golden Mile Complex, or Yangtze Cinema? Or will they eventually fade away when the government reaches out and crushes it? What will happen then? This brings to mind Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino, talking about the hidden aspects of cities. My belief, though, is that every city will always have its hidden dark side, and that when one part of it is exterminated, it simply grows back somewhere else, finds a way to survive on the fringes.
*In conclusion, I’ve attended fourteen talks so far since the start of school, beginning with the ArchiEducator’s Forum. I believe that these discussions and lectures are part of a vital discourse on architecture. As architects continue to design, we must continue thinking about these essential questions, find our own answer to them, and adapt our ideas as times change, and influence the rest of the construction and civilian world when we really have a strong message to bring across. 

A small conclusion to Semester 1

Before starting to blog I must say that it is kind of therapeutic to blog about architecture and what I've learnt... But anyway... yeah the stress is coming back because it's 3+ a.m. and I have 4 guest lecture responses to do which were due yesterday according to my schedule. Sigh.


I learnt that it's good to keep an open mindset. (some stuff I learnt before or knew or thought about before hand, but let's just talk about my perceptions now without any other links to past stuff.)
Because architecture links to so many things. And also why, O why would I want to forget about the past? All the things I studied before and loved so much... all that knowledge that I was proud to have learnt and had a great time learning about. I must find a way to apply them in architecture. Draw links somehow from everything... The architect has to put himself in the shoes of so many. Think about what people sense. Who to design for? Why? So many things to answer, so much to learn.

I learnt that we must always question and look at context. When you know culture, when you know precedence, then you will understand fully. It's important to read widely and I'm thankful I can indulge. Read, question critically, form thoughts, apply, look at your own work critically and improve on it, always improve on it. Architects are always critical of themselves. You have to look at your own works objectively so that you can improve on them.

Dare to change everything, but also keep in mind the past and the future, walk onward while looking back. Think about everything both small and large. Dare to ask. Dare to explore. Dare to challenge.

Keep in mind context, look at tropicality if you're in Singapore. Think about progression. Know that the architect merely is part of the equation. The architecture is born, but then it takes on a new life and ages and grows with the people who inhabit it, grows old, and one day it is time to reinvent or die or something else. And when that time comes, there's a need to do something about it.

Art and architecture are linked. Art for architecture, architecture for art, architecture as art.

Pictures (Week 9 Architecture assignment)

Short buildings, middle buildings, tall buildings, tall buildings getting taller,

Blocks upon blocks upon blocks.

Brick and mortar, stone on stone, timber rarely, glass and steel mostly.

Green and brown blend in with a sea of whitish grey against an upward sea of blue and white and a downward sea of black and whitish grey.

Grids square grids diagonal grids up down left right all around.

Planes up in the sky slice planes in the sky

Lines on planes on grids

Dots that become lines that become planes that become grids

Perfection, it is unattainable. An abstract reality does not exist. Only the mind thinks it is beautiful.

Time weathers, washes away emotions, renders utopia otherwise, marching on, entropy

Knocking on the door, shouting that it is

Time,

Time to wake up from a dream.

Time nurtures the wrinkles in the old man and old lady, the little patterns scratched on the skin growing,

Deeper and deeper, Time feeding them nourishment of some kind,

Growing is what these do, in all directions and

Feeding upon themselves and

Growing from the inside out and outside in.

They stay strong despite the assault.

The spirit can never be crushed!

Sometimes only a skeleton is left, but the memory remains, what was once gaudy and

Young and idealistic,

But meaning, that most idiosyncratic and arbitrary of things,

 is as nurtured by Time as are wrinkles.

One only learns to savour the bitter with Time

But how sweet is the bitterness!

Dots grow into lines grow into adult lines grow into old big caverns that

Eat themselves from the inside out and turn into

Nothing.

But dots become crooked lines become crooked planes that intersect on

Crooked grids intersected by

Crooked streets walked on by

People who are bittersweet and equally chipped off on the

Inside, as things are from the outside. 

Only Human

I'm not going to talk much about my failures because well... nobody deserves to hear someone bitch all the time, right?

But I will say that I'm not as altruistic as I thought, or as unfeeling as I thought. It really sucks to entertain the thought of your ex... welll... Advancing in his/her love life. Even just the thought. I thought that I'd be happy, because I don't love her any more, right? But there's always this gaping hole that cannot be filled, even with hectic days and deadlines that rush up to you and swoop by, like the coming and going of a huge airplane at very low elevation that casts an enormous shadow that zooms past and leaves you bewildered, heart thumping.

And I will say that life has gotten me hard.

I thought I would be free enough to post constant updates on this blog, because you know, it's the same as army! All these thoughts that leak out and flow out and they're so precious but there's no way to collect them all. It's a little sad.

I've been battered and my ego has been shrinking. The amount of artsy people in architecture, or those who can rub shoulders and be friends so naturally and have the time to spend in studio; the realisation that I am just so much crap on the ground when it comes to formulating arguments and even writing - any writing - in the English language (not even considering Chinese or anything else); the sheer virtuosity that is available and overflowing form USP and everywhere else.

But at the same time, I know that I've just been giving myself excuses. I've been telling myself to buck up since Week 3 or so, but it just doesn't seem to happen. I can't seem to grab life by the horns, turn it around, sit on top of it and coast along just the way I want it to be. I can't be popular, smart, efficient, learn enough, improve fast enough. I've been equally ornery and socially awkward, with erratic sleep cycles and that pang of guilt when I wake up in the morning having done nothing. It sucks to know that your existence amounts to only so much.

I've been questioning myself. Why did I, how did I even get a scholarship? Why am I in architecture? Why am I in USP? Why am I not enough of a leader to be accepted into CCA exco or house committee? Why am I not smart enough to be efficient enough so that I can finally go home, spend time with my family, and do something about the familial situation? Why am I neglecting my loved ones when they are the most important?

But of course, sometimes you just have to keep working at it, pray hard, and hope things change.

I'll leave the introspection to some other day, probably after submitting my portfolio on 25 November. Then I will finally be free enough to look back. Look back on JC; on NS days; on Europe trip and my past relationship; to clear the bones in my closet and learn from them and bury them for good.

For now, I will just hope to do things, structure and regimentalise [sic. lol] them. Do push-ups before bathing every day. Do a sketch every day. during the holidays, read books and them return them as fast as possible. Aim to walk around buildings and draw them and take note of things and suggest ways to improve. As Dr Kim says, WHY? WHY do you not like something? You have to be specific. As Dr B.M.D. says, HOW? HOW do you explain and show people the links? These are the  main takeaways for this sem. 

A Brief Summary of events

Well, well…

It certainly feels weird to post again.

Also, why post when nobody reads? Why type? I guess it has always been for my personal enjoyment and as memory and will remain that way… Like how a kettle steams and you either collect the steam, make it heat something else, or you let the pressure drop naturally when the cap is lifted at times. Although blogging isn't exactly very useful per se.. but it does help collect my thoughts and make me more ready to start the next day.

Looking back, it's such a wonder that I managed to log almost a hundred posts back in J1. How does that even happen when one is too busy living life? How do most people even find the time to do things when they're mostly on social media… I certainly cannot find an answer and that's why I don't use instagram or twitter. A self-admitted dinosaur.

These past few months, I've learnt some during a temp job at an outdoor retail shop, made an itinerary, went to Europe to patch a relationship, toured around, and came back single. And now, university's starting. So many exciting opportunities, but the one thing clear to me is that I still have a lot to improve on, especially in terms of self-discipline. It's arguably the single most important factor in why I am so dissatisfied with myself.

Being single feels almost natural nowadays. Maybe one can call it maturity, experiencing so many different feelings and having lived for another two years, going through phases of life. Graduating from junior college, going through army, getting attached, touring countries, breaking up, meeting new people through camps. Through all of these run the connecting factor of people. New ideas and experiences, pushing boundaries. But yet I still come out of all of these alone, slightly aloof. I guess that is the natural state, because two or more cannot exist as one person, right? Even if you get married or have a very close friend or sibling. So I'm back to my usual slightly melancholy self. More outgoing than before, slightly more dependable, but otherwise I don't feel that I've grown that much. I'm still so small with so much more to learn and do and become.

I don't feel deserving to have SL as my girlfriend, or anyone else for that matter. But of course I'm lonely now. How to be sane and go about doing work when relics of someone you've loved for four years are scattered everywhere, all around you? When you, Mr Protagonist, turned antagonist, forced the relationship apart, broke a heart or two. I don't think I'll ever stop questioning and trying to find answers. What could have been done better. What went wrong. Even simply living in the knowledge that someone else is going about her life only half-alive and knowing that you're the reason is a heavy burden to carry. It's carrying the knowledge of being a sinner. That you're tainted, will taint anyone who comes close, got too much growing-up to do and so avoid everyone in fear of hurting anyone. So, dude, wrap yourself in armor, plod through life and do your best to fly until you can answer yourself.

Success

After-ORD life has not been very slack. While I would dearly like to collect my post-army thoughts and blog about those days (as I have been wanting to for a year and ten months), deadlines do not allow for it…
I have failed, been failing, am failing. I guess most of life's events are partial success-failures and it's up to our own personal perspective to determine which is which. Yet the truth is obviously grey. And I seem to lack to ego filter that most people do and instead acknowledge the grey truth for all it's worth.
Anyway, I'm currently trying to add more discipline into my life. While leisure has no measurements in time, productivity on the other hand seems to be gained through an iron will. Like so many things in life… Freedom seems to only gain wings when you define it by a certain set of rules, such is the beauty or nature of the world. High-profile writers make their best work by dedicating fixed amounts of time to writing daily. This brings to mind Malcom Gladwell and his 10,000 hours theory… You put in the hours, you get results, no qualms about it. So when I feel like it, I push my deepest self into the highest-security containment I can find, lock it, chain it, no thoughts about any insecurities or other strays that serve to distract, tell it to bid its time for when I am alone or with my closest, smallest circle of people whom I can be that quivering tiny mass of shit (not all the time… nobody deserves that treatment) and start on work.
Ah, someday I long to be that ideal person who juggles every damn ball well… Pray it not be a farce.