‘A Loner’: Design-built project of Year One Studio
DEBATING THE distinction between art and architecture can quickly become tedious. On the one hand, “Where is the building?” is a question often asked at the Architectural Association, while on the other, the work of an entire AA academic unit might be cat
I was again reminded of this tension by an unexpected comment delivered in a recent Year One Studio critique: “The work of Group One wrongly interprets the brief. This is more of a humanitarian project than an architectural project.”
Of the sixteen participating student groups, only Group One’s work was specified unfavourably in front of an audience of 160 students and 16 tutors.
The brief, which was titled “Everyday Life Spaces”, called for architectural interventions to 16 existing houses in Phak Hai district, in Ayutthaya province. Its objective was to enhance the happiness of the home-owner by providing an architectural solution to a problem encountered every day.
Students were required to interview the owner, measure a designated house and present a design proposal that would result in a 1:2 wooden model forming a space of approximately 2 cubic metres.
Sixteen models of 16 houses were exhibited in the courtyard of Chulalongkorn University’s Faculty of Architecture a week after the launch.
The outcome of Group One’s observation of Charoon Ruekchamnean’s house was not the improvement of stairs, walls, doors or windows. The students built an upright object of two adjacent spaces to signify Charoon’s persona – a happy loner.
During the site survey, Group One had an “abstract conversation” with Charoon in that his reply to whatever questions they asked was invariably “I live here by myself.” His perception of his habitat was coloured by painful moments from his past. His wife had left him and “going out” to the market was his only leisure.
From the perspective of the students, the interior of his one-room house was warm and dark. However, Charoon did not perceive heat and darkness as his problems. He had two portable fans.
Inside his dim room, he puts on sunglasses adjusted to fit his face with red rubber bands.
On the wall next to his bed, the students found a handwritten poem with the message: “Being alone, be aware of your thoughts; being with others, be aware of your words”.
Charoon was already happy in his home and wished nothing to be altered.
Group One proposed a supplement to the tectonic aspect of the brief, and called it humour. It is not by accident that the 4-cubic-metre space, entitled “A Loner”, is based on the planning of two squares of equal areas.
Only one person could enter each a 2-cubic-metre space at a time. Each cubic space accommodates one of two bodily activities necessitating privacy: a man standing upright, projecting a space for dressing; and a man in a squatting posture, projecting a space for defecation.
In the first room, a viewer faces 2-metre-high walls in pastel green. At eye level and below a looking glass, students exhibited a new poem that expresses Charoon’s domestic philosophy: “Being alone does not make me feel lonely. Being with you excites me”.
Perpendicular to the green wall is a partition of old wooden planks nearly reaching the floor. An 80-cm-high void leads one to the second room, which was designed to be looked up to. On the ceiling, gaps between the wooden planks surrounded by a metal envelope catch the light and create shadows.
In this space is a replica of a squat pedestal toilet the same colour red as Charoon’s own toilet.
Despite the bewildering reception to Group One’s project, as a tutor I was proud of the work. The students were decisive in acknowledging that no architectural resolution was called for in Charoon’s house.
They questioned the nature of the brief, chose to work on the concept of happiness as defined through their conversations with Charoon, and overall delivered a project that expanded and interrogated the idea of architecture – an achievement in and of itself in the limited range of a seven-day project.
The majority of the guests and critics crawling out from the installation did so with smiles on their faces. Why would one wish to exclude this project from the domain of architecture?
Architects are generally concerned with orderliness, cleanliness and beauty, the triad in Sigmund Freud’s conception of “civilisation”. But disorderliness can also be a powerful conveyor of experience and emotion; furthermore, particular representations of disorderliness reflect rural aesthetics.
Group One successfully provoked the tension between what is art and what is architecture.
ML Chittawadi Chitrabongs is a tutor of Group One, Year One Studio, Department of Architecture, Faculty of Architecture, Chulalongkorn University.
