Bedtime Architectural Stories

Many many years ago, when I was very young, I was curious about clubbing. But my friend was reluctant to go with me. So I encouraged her: why don’t you carry a book with you? Of course, I received a mockery look and comment. After many many years, I started to challenge myself with the question: why can’t you read in a club? Imagine a situation where nothing is definitive and everything is malleable. Club space becomes reading space becomes public space becomes office space and club space again. It allows for any shift, modification, replacement or substitution. At its most intense, it can even hold a coexistence of activities. I.e. to read and to club at the same time. Through their mutual interference is a chain reaction of new, unprecedented event. Architecture is no longer about the creation of object but the occurrence of event. The concept of programmatic indeterminacy was elaborated by Rem Koolhaas in his monograph ‘Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large’ Paris France Ho

Long time ago there is one man who is very wealthy, he studied mathematics and computer science but made his fortune though implementing a gambling system. Then he started to collect art. His collections are quite massive to the extent that there is no place to store them. He was thinking of why not design a museum to store the collections? This is the story behind the birth of MONA - Museum of Old and New. Over the years, MONA has been received with popularity, in spite of its relatively remote location. It becomes not only a container for art, but also an event space for wedding functions.                        Architectural strategies employed in MONA - Spatial organisation. Three storey void transforms the space and our sensations drastically. This creation of ‘nothingness’ is a perceptual bombardment to us. Sometimes it is not about the presence, but the absence.  - Materiality. MONA is an amalgam of sandstone and precast concrete. As Juhani Pallasmaa suggested in his book ‘ The

Long time ago there is a small city that sits within mountain and sea. It is so beautiful so that mountain is in your sight everywhere you go, this even happens to the city center. Citizens are dancing on the public space chess table, or spending the whole morning or afternoon in the outdoor area of the pub, sipping the infamous Cascade Lagar, wandering around the street, stepping onto historical brick pavement, connecting with enclosed heritage buildings. It is almost like a Harry Potter world. I would like to think that it is one of the best example of an idyll. This city is Hobart.   Here, heritage is not wasted artefact. Each building is a hesitant, a careful negotiation between tradition and emerging desires / functional requirement, they are carefully reappropriated as jewellery workshop, wool factory, cafes and shops. There is depth in the making of the city in contrast to the shamelessness of utilitarian efficiency.                        All photographs are © Copyright 2021 C

  Long time ago there is a small city covered in jungle, it is so small to the extent that it will perish without further development. Then the nation started to make adjustments, old buildings torn down, private lands are expropriated to construct for a better future, the entire city becomes a laboratory for modernist ideologies. United Nation are also involved in the planning of the city. The success of its development, this modernist development in an Asian world, shocked the Western world. They cannot believe that an Asian city has achieved all the modernist ideals that once seems impossible to operate. However, this flourish is at a cost of losing identity. Old colonial heritages are not preserved because the ‘makers’ of the city seeks for a complete new start. This ambiguity of identity is also articulated in the diversity of language spoken across the nation. The intelligentsias are upset with this tabula rasa and bulldozing and they hope that the people will align with them in