Bedtime Architectural Stories

“ Just as some belles, when they are old ladies, still cling to the fashions and coiffures of their exciting youth. But it is harder to understand why this form of arrested mental development should be passed on intact to succeeding generations of planners and designers”  - Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The Garden City and the Radiant City ideals are truly eighteenth century urban planning romanticism, with their rejections of urbanised society, excessive and unnecessary romanticism about the nobility and simplicity of ‘natural’ or primitive man. Everything should operate in a rational, regimented and harmonious way. This zone is for work, that zone is for live; it follows by inconsiderate insertion of civic space and large footprint of park and vertical towers that accommodate cars. Those grandeur urban renewal schemes replaces ‘slums’.  They make sense until we discover that they are at an expanse of city diversity of street vitality. They are go...

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 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...