Afterglow & Architecture.
Somewhere in Singapore, a five-year-old boy just dropped an atomic bomb by telling his family he aspires to be a bus driver when he grows up. Parents think it’s alright, he’s still a kid. Grandparents think if you don’t educate the boy, the idea might stay in his subconscious as an adult. Better consult an exorcist.
All grown-ups have forgotten that we never get to become who we aspire to be.
The boy who wants to be a bus driver likes things that go vroom.
Girls who want to be a singer like songs, skirts, dance.
Policemen? Guns and power.
Even when 18-year-old me said I wanted to be an architect, it was not because I liked buildings, but because I thought that was the right thing to say.
I did not become an architect, but the brief six weeks of being in the ‘best’ university of Melbourne were sufficient to shape me into the pretentious twat I am today.
Architecture juniors always start out worshiping Tadao Ando’s exposed concrete and Church of Light’s minimalistic geometry, but end up appreciating Kengo Kuma for his quieter way of merging nature with glass, and timber, the expensive stuff.
“The pandemic's greatest lesson for architecture is that boxes are hazardous. When you think about it, until now we have all been taught precisely the opposite: work is most efficiently rationally, and safely carried out in a box. Thus people have shut themselves up in their own boxes, then at a designated time each morning gotten into other steel boxes to commute to the big boxes where they work until a designated time in the evening, then gotten into boxes headed back to their dwelling-boxes. Despite the fact that with current technology it is just as efficient and less stressful to work outside the box, inertia and unthinking acceptance of the status quo have kept people boxed away.” - Kengo Kuma, Five Purr-fect Points For A New Public Space.
I found myself nodding to this introduction while I waited for my curry in Afterglow last year.
When my curry came, I took a photo of the book cover, thinking since it was bilingual, it shouldn’t be difficult to track it down on the internet later.
Little did I know, the book was the ‘brochure’ for a one-off exhibition about public spaces from the perspective of cats.
So I had to wait until my next visit eight months later, to ask Chika’s sister to purchase it from the Japanese Gumtree / FB marketplace equivalent.
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