Week NUMBER TWO

This week I was not able to attend the lecture and tutorial due to illness. But here are my reflections on the reading and my "identity collages", the task set from last week.

The task set from last week was to create two "identity collages" - one depicting your current identity as a designer and the other depicting your ideal identity as a designer ten years from now.

This is my current design identity collage.

The oval image in the bottom left is a representation of my tattoo. It symbolises the heart - the central oval is the heart itself, the lines around are the pulse, the pressure waves in the arteries - and represents our presence and fragility as bodies in space. This is included as a central theme to my designs.
The image in the top right is a representation of an artwork I did which puts further emphasis on my interest in the body and its structure.
The white stones and the tall steel structure are two artworks by artists whose concepts resonate with me. The stones are by Anthony Goldsworthy: an artist who arranges found natural materials into spatially and visually beautiful compositions. The structure is by Richard Serra: an artist who works with steel on a massive scale to refer to and challenge our notions of space and sensory experience. The concepts behind these artists' work are things I aspire to achieve as a designer.
The antique text and the wallpaper are included to reference my want to make an informed but still beautiful decision.
And the origami instructions represent my need to complete tasks in an orderly, linear fashion and my need to be able to organise tangents if they arise.

This is my collage of my ideal design identity in ten years.

Currently, my career goal is to make aged care facilities and communities more holistic and better suited to the older person. I hope to have considered every aspect and made at least a small difference in this area in ten years time.
The fabric, penny-farthing and pink version of my tattoo represent my aim to have taken an individual and beautiful approach to each challenge I would have been presented with in the last ten years.
The floor plan, concrete block, text and vibration graph represent my aim to have been professional and informed in every task set.
The mud-rendered house and water images are included to depict my aim to be sustainable in all the projects I complete.
The hands represent collaboration with the demographic and with other areas to achieve the best possible outcome.
And the structure image is a picture of the skeleton of a yurt. This image represents my strong goal to have built successful, warm and enriching communities.

This week's reading - Wallpaper* Person: Notes on the behaviour of a new species by Neil Leach - made some really interesting observations about the commodification of architecture. The mention of aesthetic dominance in today's society rings true for me. The other senses are often ignored, especially with regard to the cyberspace interactions that are rife in the society! It is scary to think that the social norms of this society could evolve into complete auditory silence in the future, except for the tapping of keys.

In the text this sentence brought the image of a world of silent communication to my head:

On the train, in the street and in the countryside, strange one-way
conversations take place with an invisible, silent 'other'.

But this was part of a discussion about narcissism as a collective personal ideology. The evidence of this is plastered all over myspace pages with "selfy" shots galore. Even in our homes, it could be argued that the choices we make with regard to furnishings could be a reflection of our want to surround ourselves with elements of our selves. Similarly, I've heard it argued that producing a child is narcissism to the core! I think that narcissism could be an attack to pose against any personal choice made by an individual.

What this amounts to is the ability to recognise oneself in the objects around
one, in the reflection of one's own aesthetic aspirations.

I wonder if this concept that Leach is talking about is present in all "cultures" around the world or whether it is only in those aesthetically saturated First World countries.

And are the aesthetic aspirations, that are born from a predominantly visual world, outcomes of the aspects of our culture? I think yes - because of the conclusion we came to last week about the cyclical relationship between architecture and culture.

From this text I have gained that the commodification of the aspects of today's visual and fantasised society presents an interesting base point for us as designers. While the rest of the world is designing sleek discreet air-conditioning units, we could take up the gauntlet to design for the other senses exclusively! We could reject a design that requires vision to be experienced and design something that refers to a breeze. We could wake the Wallpaper* people up and give them something to EXPERIENCE!

Archi-Culture Cafe NUMBER ONE

Hello :)
With this blog, I hope to reflect coherently on tutorial activities and readings set each week for a unit called Architecture, Culture & Space @ QUT. I am studying in my third year of a Bachelor of Design majoring in Interior Design.

The reading - Chapter 7 Making Culture Usable of the book Culture, Architecture & Design by Amos Rapoport- really helped me to understand what we will be dealing with in this subject. Before I read the text, I did think about "culture" as Mexican Sombreros and Japanese Sushi. I thought "how terrible that I have been stereotyping this whole time!". But at the same time I thought how I would not be able to design for culture as a broad term if someone asked me to. Although, it seems to me that dismantling culture as a concept should be the logical step for me as a designer anyway. The first part of receiving a brief would be, for me, to analyse and research all possible avenues and aspects (well, in an ideal world anyway :P ). So the reading was just a helping-hand in analysing and breaking down "culture" for design purposes. At the same time, though, it was a VERY helpful helping-hand that opened my eyes to the kinds of aspects that would be important to consider when breaking down "culture".
I feel inclined to put the word culture in inverted commas for the whole rest of my life, as I will never look at it the same way again.

The first activity in tute number one was to list ten things we would pack into a suitcase in a disaster situation. The things had to fit into a suitcase, ie no people.
I noticed that the people at my table all wrote similar things, with only a few extreme differences. This made me think of the possibility that the group I was in have all been raised with seemingly similar values, and how interesting it was that we only had a few differences. The results though, were influenced somewhat by our discussion of the task. There were a number of rotations of groups throughout the session.
The next activity was to discuss and record answers to questions as a group. There were a number of questions, but only the first one was explored as it was so rich with possible answers that both groups I was in got caught up spending all our time on it.
The question was How can the relationship between Architecture and Culture be understood?
In my first group we decided that the relationship is a cyclical one. The architect or designer designs for one of the subcategories of "culture" and the resulting design becomes an outcome or product of culture - visual evidence of culture. Within the group, the question was raised about how it came to be that culture and architecture mutually feed each other in this cyclical way. We discussed the fact that both culture and architecture have evolved over time. This little paragraph was the result of our discussion :)
At the beginning, it would make sense that architecture was all about protection from the elements. As time progressed, and as humans and seperate cultures evolved, the purpose of architecture still basically remained the same. However, values, beliefs, lifestyles, etc had to be applied as well. As the culture evolved, and its aspects were applied to architecture, an interdependence between the two must have developed.
In the next group we discussed the cyclical nature further, as they had come to the same conclusion with their previous group. We discussed that maybe the aspects of culture which were applied to architecture might have come back around to influence the culture itself. So, for example, the small spaces in Scandinavian architecture are there because of the climate - it is freezing and small spaces are easy to heat and keep warm. But potentially the small space could influence the social norms of that culture with regard to something like personal space.

So I think that overall, the relationship between architecture and culture could be understood as a very rich cyclic interdependence.

:)