production model - actor & the programme

The programme is nothing new. It has its genesis from the Bauhaus and via the migration of the MODERNIST GURUS to the US; the same sort of programme has been implanted into the curriculum of the MIT, School of Architecture. Through the generosity of the Malaysian Government, JPA to be specific, at one time, to send the crème de la crème of theMARA scholar to the US, some of these scholars had the opportunity to dip into the these ex-Bauhaus programme and surface upward to be brought back to the Malaysian School of Architecture particularly the misnamed School of Housing Building and Planning, University Science Malaysia through the undying spirit of the avant garde‘Guru’ of individual of this sort, En. Wan Burhanuddin(on the rim of retiring into the business of HOLISTIC HEALTH CARE then architecture); to be installed into the naive minds of the 2nd year freshies of whom, at the material time, the author was one of them. The curriculum was rigid for the sake that there are more old gardeexisted since the inception of the programme and the birth of the phrase “if you want a degree, go to the school and if you want architecture, go to the club”, takes form as a manifestation of the sort of suffering and loneliness one of this sort of avant garde has to bear in the mainstream school of Architecture in Malaysia. The seed of seeing beyond the four walls of the formalized curriculum has been sowed to create an undercurrent of movements in the students club which co-incidentally shared by all schools of Architecture including the AA which has manifested in the forms of publication named ACROSS ARCHITECTURE as compared to the official publication of AA FILES, Picking on this premise, the Architecture Club of USM has initiated a series of publication raging from INTERSTICES to AMOK at the students’ own pocket money without subsidy and aligned with the manifestos of the Architectural Workshops, at the time has managed to put forth a declaration to be further crystallized in the more current workshops in UM and UIA and to be met with a pre-mature DEATH of the commercial and institutional onslaught of insufficient funds and the lack of momentum and commitment.
Unlike the local scenarios, the neighboring school of Architecture across the Straight of Tebrau, namely NUS has a better luck due to its fame and the fact that it is the only school of Architecturein Singapore. This school hires experts from all over the globe. The ex-Bauhaus programme was infused in an Atelier Concept of Master-Pupil of which the author has the opportunities to experience from the credits of SIF-ASEAN Student Fellowship Funding which meets it natural death somewhere in 2004, from the prominent Dr. Edward Ng, now lecturing in HKU. The emphasis on Urban Design in the Singapore experience is prominent and it is not surprising to note that the UM curriculum, from the perspective of Prof. Wood, has a very strong grounding on Urbanism for which along side with the accreditation process from LAM has been criticized as being too urban scale inclined rather then building scale inclined. Again, the paradoxes of what is Architecture, an urban matter or just a building tech-tonic has been raised similar to the age old question of who is the planner for which LAM-PAM itself has a difficulty to qualify and just don’t mentioned what Housing, Building and Planning stands for as for that the genetic make up of architectural strand has been mutated and transformed into new species like COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE, totally beyond the scope of this discussion. The disgrace of lack of regard to urban design issues has led to the many embarrassments within the built environment fraternities some of which has been highlighted in thePAM-Discourse in the 80’s with the participation of Mega Stars liked Kisho Kurokawa, Dr. Ken Yeang (now, a Dato’), En. Hijjas Kasturi, Datuk Lim Chong Keat and the prominent educator from the AA the late Alvin Boyarsky. The shed of dirty linens are obvious and until today, not much improvement has been recorded unlike otherwise the revival of new classicism via the Putrajaya Master plan in accordance to the Middle East Model, of which spark another debate on its socio-cultural contextual relevance. 
In the college things are different. Firstly, with the concern of legitimacy as a recognized school, the school of Architecture should not have existed. The author with many others would have probably out of jobs following strictly by a matter of recognition of the programme by LAM. Only with the virtue of LAN that the programme has been made legitimate but to an extend that, all of those in the system know too well, the graduates are not recognize as Pt I in the career path of an Architect. Secondly, college is not a drafting school either for the Diploma that is offered was tagged with the title Architecture for which the school serves as feeding platforms for overseas universities. In view of the paradox of such nature, with the lack of both direction and niche architectural education model or philosophy, again the ex-Bauhaus programme has been modified incorporating the 3 scale of artifact, building and urban in the modus operandi ofdiscourses, implementation and documentation within the scope of master, project manager and crews has been implemented and tested and this time around the subject isDESIGN STUDIO 4. Presenting herewith are the accounts of such experimentation with the overview of the Brief and the products brought to you from the People who believes there is still tomorrow for Architecture.

production model - actor & the programme

Motivations and talents are the most difficult variables to be juggled upon by Studio Masters and these has led to the syndrome that Studio Master almost dictate what, how, why, when and who should be presented in the crit sessions and all these were just shows properly executed by the end of the semester so that everyone including the school has a story to tell for the satisfaction of the person who pays and the institute which delivers. By the end, who is to care about if the kids are spoon fed and could not stand on their own feet like a zombie?

In this programme it has been noted that the interplay of group works coupled with individual efforts brought about the result that the talented will be motivating and helping the non-talented to achieve a common goal. By the end it is not a zero-sum game that the kids are playing but a mutual win-win situation, so much so that the master only act as the ‘provocateur’ and the kids are self motivated, stimulated and lastly, intoxicated by the demand of the programme itself that the studio is similar to Seven-Eleven ® operating hours for one will not know what to do without working, sleeping and eating in the studio and absenteeism is of the minimal. On both counts of simulating the real life experience of working with EQ rather then IQ has been pre-dominant that the power of Synergy is derived from mutual understanding, cohesiveness and consensus rather then ego-centric, defensive and individualistic as portray about in many of the real life projects and to a certain degree the Late Modernist Movement of ICON-ography. The standards are set forth by the groups themselves with minimal intervention from the Studio Masters. Therefore, the work of the masters are limited to only tearing apart the kid’s misconception as the saying goes ‘if its aren’t broken its not worth mending…’, only then the process of mending takes place with opening the door and the kids walk the path. So, the studio centralized on just not talk the talk but walk the talk. Not surprisingly in the heat of the last installation of the Lucas’s Star Wars ® Trilogy, the masters are known as the localized Siths®, Vadeh & Dukus.

In this light, presenting to you the groups of Kids as the experimenting proto-types.

production model - new kids on the block

The stage has been set in PJ new town commonly known as The Sate. A location being the new administrative town of another new township along the central rim of the Klang Valley. PJ needs no further explanation for the fact that its emergence as a satellite new town was largely due to the population pull factors of the localized industrial evolution and the push factor of the overcrowded CBD of Kuala Lumpur. Set in the oasis of greeneries which eventually lost its charm to the bombardment of industrialization, a new township was sort after to start anew as a fresh new chapter in PJ. This give birth to the State with the most an foremost a regrettable usage of tax payer’s money, as opined by certain individual, emerging from the vortex of void and discarded piazza, a phallic icon tower clad in absolute darken glazing, and again, designed by the principle of modern planning, surrounded by soulless and characterless international style shop office of mortar and concrete, a fashionable statement of the 70’s and 80’s, some considered a classic example of Brutalism ala Malaysia. By the same token, it is never a new strategy that Putrajaya has taken which is to say to start a fresh and by virtue of this setting, the kids are now requested to investigate the context in the perspective of a child and as a matter of fact, this has turned out to be the entire theme of the Studio – Child’s Play. The varied forms of its manifestation both in conceptual, discourse and building artifacts are being carried through the entire semester as experimental proto-types with the test bed setting within another building designed by award winning architect, housing the school of architecture but never to be considered a bioclimatic building by both localized and internationalized glossy architectural magazines, from the basement to the abandoned roof top gardens, and the result was another spectacular discourse in architecture worthy to be dwelt in the realm on concepts then to put into the forms of materialism which in return spark another new discourse in Existentialism.

The task was simple; the kids were requested to go to the site, without pre-arranged bus trip, to view the State through a color filter and to put into records such observation. In contras to the run of the mill, site investigation they had seem so familiarized with, all to their surprised, they began to see things the unorthodox way beyond their normal view of perspectives so overcrowded with the distortion of signs, colors and symbols of realities that they began to have a grip onto the spirit of the place or genius-loci through the surreal for which they had a difficulty into documenting it let alone, describing it. That is phenomenologicalto such an extend without the needs to dwelt into Christian Norberg-Schulz’s writing on genius-loci. This they could remember for life and others were history.

production model - mind, body & soul

With the stage well set, then who are the actors? The kids, of course. With the actors, theirgroups and their visions, all that were needed to put up a good show were the costume, the mask, a script and a good platform. All within the single theme of Child Play as a unifying force.

The results were mind boggling with a spark off of a discourse on Existentialism in the context of masking of the Self (Being) in relation to the Image of the Self (The Personas). The notion of communication among the phases of Noia, Para Noia and End Noia, in an attempt to address the notion of spectators and the performances in both realities and the surreal has been attempted. For the ease of understanding of the above said discourse read Jennifer’s rendition onExistentialism via the newsletter published by United Architect’s Corner. The translation of these themes into sub-themes had been further explored via the trans-mutation of the above notion into the form of the coffinto a habitable box which shall be described as we go along. Without fails, the kids were reminded constantly to derived ideas from these working prototypes as pretext to be implemented in the context of the massing model in an urban scale and the spaces and the skins within the building scale.

Cross references of ideas beyond the boundaries of scale has been rooted, again from another discipline beyond architecture – cinematography. The conceptual approach in the show Three Colors® and Sin City©has been debated upon where the characters of these shows were constantly appearing in the given context of totally unrelated events but yet constantly knitted tightly against the given fabric of time and space in a predominate pretext of color-scope against the silver-screen of Black and White or some times dual-tones in a constant debate between good and evil, masculine and feminine, obscene and decent. All for the sake of architecture.

production model - from the cradle to the grave

The box has a notorious nature for which in accordance to Corbusier, the spirit is difficult to maintain yet in many instances students of the AA had once attempted to break away from the box in a celebrated fiesta of martial arts and wines and yet Mies and his other companions cum fans across generations from Phillip Johnson to Zaini Zainur had attempted to redefine the notion of the glass box, just to say that you can’t live with it and you can’t live without it.

In view of the spectrum of life from one end of birth to the other end of death in an ad infinitum dance of the cosmological orders of Samsara, Trinity, what ever one wants to call it, the Box does play an important role at least once in an entire person’s life; well just say the office cubicle? With the similar notion at hand, the kids are requested to design and build a Box of Habitation in accordance to the theme of Child play coupled with the other sub-themes of another installation competition, for detail refer to competition segment, which would have the potential to explore the pretext of architecture at a artifact scale to be employed in the building and urban scale concurrently.

With the kids in person, clad in their costumes and masks, verbally chanting their scripts with actions, within the context of the site, which is the school housed in a pseudo- bioclimaticbuilding of glass and concrete, from the basement to the classrooms and studios, out to the court, up to the roof top gardens of air-conditional compressor units platform, from noon to past midnight, witnessed by the 2 famous localized Siths® studio masters, the programme head whom happened to be the localized Master Yodah with a watchful eye scanning what the localizedSith® is up to without knowing what has been installed for himself and a visitor from RGUdisguised in a Caucasian body with a taste bud for Tomyam and Laksa, all make an event so drastic and revolutionary that some thought that it was a treason in another form that will weaken the status quo of the existing establishment from nasty e-mails from the Physical Resource Department to the Building Management for a ban in spray paintings and smoking and endless complaints from other lecturers who said that these kids spent too much time in the studio that they failed their tests and quizzes, these lecturers had given and needless to say Overtime Claims by the 2 localized Siths for whom the Master Yodah would say the school has no budget for these. Again, all for the sake of Architecture.

production model - paradigka to urbanismo

Guess what, the visitor from RGU has not had enough for that night that he insisted to give a discourse in Paradigm in Architecture at a touch and go basis as the days to come for which the localized Master Yodah quickly pick it up as a public lecture with posters everywhere. A sign that the event of a studio is now the event of the entire school and there is more to come.

Paradigm is and has been a popular topic among the 2nd year student back then for reasons that architecture as a subject shall constitute the category of Science or Arts and the debate often centralized on the doctrine of Scientific Inquiry against Artistic Feels. However the writings of Thomas S Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolution, once and for all, put Science to its deathbed, thus the notion of paradigm becomes the signifier to a larger perspective of thesis and anti thesis of Ideas and Ideation.

Such paradigm shift that the studio had dwelt into has been considered the death of the authorin the generation of master planning not by a single individual against the backdrop of the urbanized scale massing model, we called URBANISMO, for which had caught the moderator representing as a practicing architect, by surprise, judging from a conventional viewpoint, that at this level, master planning has never become a sole work of an individual of a utopian sort, but as a collective efforts in a compromised and pragmatic ideal so consistent with the pretext of Jasper John’s drawing “Untitled (Skull) 1973” for which the art piece has been signed the conventional ways and yet “strike out” unconventionally to bring about the absenteeism of the author in person.

Along with this thought, the studios has undergone series of revision of the massing models, breaking of egos and finally comes to a sensible and compromised solutions, each correspond perfectly with the theme of the groups and the studio at large. With this exercise the question of form making has been eradicated for it the form of the buildings proposed are deeply rooted within the notion of the massing model to correspond with the given site context and consensus of the majority.

production model - from talkshop to workshop

Funny enough that a simple annual student of architecture getting together has manifested into a national event and some times, international, for architectural students with the interplays among others, PAM lobbying for student memberships, school of architecture deploying their students’ work vis-à-vis promotional venue for their architectural program, products and sponsors exhibitions, double standards design idea competitions, a whole lot of talk and talk from the main hall to the senate room for PAM school liaison meeting and many others that the design studio has now gone beyond the four walls of the pseudo-bioclimaticbuilding in PJ.

The kids hit the event by storm both in the deploying of their respective boxes (31 of them) in 3tons lorries for which the organizer has a problem of locating them within the campus ground, thus the status quo has been challenged, as well as dressed in red with loads of souvenirs, performances, props, unsold newsletters and hopes that they could at least bring something back, knowing the fact that they are the illegitimate school of architecture in the eye of LAM and PAM recognized school of architecture.

Within these extra-curricular activities, much better then that of the Rakan Muda® in certain instances, the kids had been exposed to other design dimensions such as T-shirt design, props design, drama and dances, graphic design that they are willing to participate in lieu of their mid semester break, all for the sake of architecture.

production model - controversy & democracy

Liken to any architectural product and the production of any architectural works of significant in nature, be it models, completed buildings, drawings, sketches, images, discourses and writings, one cannot avoid from stepping into controversial issues.

For the matter of facts, we might revisit the remnantsand the after effect on the rise and death of critical architectural discourses in the MA’s discontinued essays of “SEDAP MATA & SAKIT MATA” for the simple reason of defining the notion of self-censorship within the scope of architectural production in the studio. After all has been said anddone, with legal cases against the MA and theInstitute, writings of this sort proved that the architectural communities at large are not ready to cope with critical architectural discourses, unlike the essays classified as OUTRAGED & DELIGHT in the international architectural magazine calledARCHITECTURAL REVIEW, which contribute towards the search for a new agenda of architectural theory world wide. In this local context the impact is so vast that even students and academician alike stay within the comfort zone of the accepted notion of architecture and architectural production that none are so willingly to break borders all for the sake of guided democracy let alone, speak up for what they actually believed in rather then what they are taught to believe in.

The showcase of the Student’s Work as published in the MA and a letter to the editor by Ar. Tan Sih Pin, whom happened to be one of the better graduates of USM, is again, the classic example that amplify the notion of self-censorship & guided democracy that has been prevailing in the context of a local school of architecture that the production of architecture has been censored to correspond to a certainacceptable standards fit within the context of the recognizable program and the recognizable form of the architectural products in a double-standards mode of publication of the work of one school, which is seems to be much superior then the others, so to speak.

Within the limits of breaking these guided democracies and self-censorships, the studentsare encouraged to challenge the brief, debate on the issues and see beyond the conventional means of communication of the given site, tools and the building programs. The results were astonishing and well phrased by the visiting moderator from USMas described in the following pages and which might again, a matter of controversy.

production model - instead of a conclusion

Architectural education is unique on its own accord. When in comes to design it is even more so. Funny enough, these day designers or design architects are no longer active in the education scene and all we have are teachers who will conveniently dig up pages of text and force it right through the students’ throats without the needs to understand why, when, how, what and who to design for, and such scenarios have many reasons from the fear of crossing borders to the fear of venturing beyond their comfort zones and most likely, real good designer makes more money practicing then teaching.

When we say unique, it means that such a form of education is experiential from the needs to have a complete modus operandi from discourse, do and document to a complete cycle of closely knitted design activities from theorizing to ideation and finally production of architectural works both incorporating a cross border of design vehicles from the artifact scale to an urban scale, from one senior class to another junior class and hopefully from one school of design to another ad infinitum.

With such an effort, we would bring about a total revolution in the architectural education that seems to have no boundaries. It is a continuous flux of design activities from practice to theory and from learning to relearning and ultimately all becomes a habit, a religion and a lifestyle. When these parameters are blurred or ultimately erased, there is no control, no prejudices, no pre-conception and everything will fall within its own domain just like the notion of digital architecture where spaces are virtual, tools are imprint circuits, language is bits and a whole lots of lifestyle to sustain yet alone to understand such a digital revolution from the MP3 player to the Desktop PC and finally to the home every one lives in.

NOW, LET US SEE WHAT THE CHILDREN DO?