Our Narcissistic Eyes and The Architecture Of Visual Images

-Caravaggio, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, 1601. 'Regardless of our prioritisation of the eye, visual observation is often confirmed by our touch...'-Juhani Pallasmaa.

A sprouting and deadly habit of ocularcetrism is approaching, posing greater and greater threat to the survival of architecture. The misleading confusion of an Western classical thought, started from Plato's time, has narcotically spread through the entire world, pushing the art of architecture to its end. It is the over-dominant of the sense of vision over the other four senses of our human body, architecture now are made and appear in front of us as mere visual journey of artificially generated images, short of plasticity, aura and the authority of presence...called it the 'retinal architecture'.

I had once argued with architectural instructors on my building design's visual impact in contrast with the surrounding context, they remained unmoved and defended the importance of visual scale and set a set of rules of how building must look, over-stressing the importance of its visual presence than of its functions. This proves unquestionably even the educational system has fallen into the addiction to the Architecture-Of-The-Eye.

As philosopher Martin Heidegger observed, the modern world has plunged into a highly nihilistic and narcissistic expression of pleasing the dominanting sense of eye. Our narcissistic eye views and demand architecture to be solely as a means of selfish self-expression, detached from its original mental, social and organic connections with real people and real culture. The nihilistic eye see everything as a set of images, disengage and isolate our soul from the real intimacy, materiality and tactile aspect of true architecture. The postmodern world have since becomes a meaningless visual journey of fake images, brought about with the help of technology like CAD and 3D imaging computer software, symbolically reinventing the misleading cultural signifiers, rather than was born as integral part of it. The senses of touch, smell and hearing are now the secondary routes of evaluating everything including architecture.

Juhani Pallasmaa in his writing 'The Eyes of The Skin' states: 'The cancerous spread of superficial architectural imagery today, devoid of tectonic logic and a sense of materiality and empathy, is clearly part of this process.' (the process of the cancer of treating architecture as mere visual images). The hegemony of the eye is deadly, as it increasingly separate the 'self' from the real world, the relationship and distant between people and his habitat now are confined between his eye and artificial graphic, and not the tectile, close and unconscious way we experience architectural space traditionally using the 5 senses. We are now unable to generate architecture that is truly speak for the majority people and needs (the interior world). We are now merely the 'spectators' of architecture, and are not inseparably belonged to it.
-The cancer tumor of the architecture of images and graphics has invaded education institutions.

For me, the death of architecture starts with the detachment of human bodily senses (not only the visual) from the physical materiality of it. This is because the term 'architecture' was a specific term, historically referring to a human culture that is guided by their bodily made craft, driven by the 5 senses, creating poetic beauty out of the chemistry between each of them, the same way a bird shapes its nest by its bodily movements, bees shape their honeycomb by their teamwork, or our indigenous mud architecture shaped by the very organic haptic and muscular craft of the local people...These are architecture.
-Architecture of People, by the People, for the People...Intimate, existential, true, functional, the articulation of 'fit' as the real beauty of architecture. Whatsoever, the connectedness between the human's self and the worldly incarnated environment has ever be so close before the invention of our narcissistic eye and of course the computer imaging.

Since the time of Renaissance Alberti's jugment of architecture as visual perception, proportion and harmony, the sense of eye has suppressed the other senses as the dominant yardstick of testing the good and bad of architecture. This classical thought inherited until our time culminated in Corbusian modernism in which he once wrote: I exist in life only if I can see; One need to see in order to understand; Man looks at the creation of architecture with his eye,...plus his famous etho: 'Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light'. These undeniably set and define and resulted in our time's preoccupation with the 'architecture of the eye'.

Now, they are the architecture of the eye, plan of the eye, elevation of the eye, city planning of the eye (le regard surplombant), they pursuit the 'Hygiene of the Eye', where pleasing the sensory pleasure of the eye has push the importance of our cultural, emotional and utilitarian participation in making architecture, to death. The existential plastic and spatial experience had gave way to the hyperbolic advertising and psycological persuasion of fake but striking visual computerized images. They are the dead instantaneous impact of our narcissistic self-expression, these architecture unable to sustain the test of time.
-'le regard surplombant' or architecture of Seen Above. Its 'spectators' are among people standing in front of the presentation graphics or birds and...flight passengers maybe? but certainly cannot be appreciated by users standing in front of the wall.

Architecture of the Eye alienate people, they are isolated in the selfish distant realm of vision and illusion, lack in tactility, more of a scenography than as the mother of all art and science. Architecture is DEAD!
-The persecution on the murder of architecture must start with the trial of her, as the forerunning advocator of 'visual architecture'. Most of the 21-th century ego-centric and narcissistic styling in architecture are desasterous to the sustainability of human as an organic being. Dictionary define narcissism as 'Excessive love or admiration of oneself' and 'A psychological condition characterized by self-preoccupation, lack of empathy, and unconscious deficits in self-esteem'.


"The taste of the apple...lies in the contact of the fruit with the palate, not in the fruit itself; in a similar way...poetry lies in the meeting of poem and reader, not in the lines of symbols printed on the pages of a book. What is essential is the aesthetic act, the thrill, the almost physical emotion that comes with each reading." -Jorge Luis Borges


"The dancer has his ear in his toes." -Friedrich Nietzsche

Charles Darwin and The Natural Selection of Architecture

-Limited edition 2 pounds coins commemorate 200th Anniversary of his birth. 200 years since the first human found the great truth of his origin.

In the midst of 19th century England, a young man, both an attentive observer and a naturalist put forth some of the most critically fearsome questions that human have ever asked for themselves since their creation. Under the great whitewash and influence of the Genesis at that time, everyone was treating it as an indisputable history of facts, but one man, he, he read it under a very different kind of microscopic lens and overturned the concept of reading the Genesis as history to reading it as a fairy tale. In the process, he asked:

-Why would there be so many species of animal and plant?
-Why there should be thousands of kind of birds?
-Why would fossils of the depleted animal's body be found under the deep ancient rock where it would take far more than 10000 years for the process, while god said life were created only 4000 years ago B.C.?

All of his answers to these questions have since propelled some fierce interrogation to the ambivalence nature and the idealised specificities of the traditional claim that animal and human are created by god. After his years of discovery and research, including his famous journey to the Islands of Galapagos and the Amazon forest to study the origin of the diversity of species, he concluded his thesis in his publication called 'The Origin Of Species' in 1859, which this book has since render people all around the world both hate him and love him.
-His idea that ignite furious and shame among churches.

His answers are to suggest that the diversity of species of the animal and plant include the human, is caused by a single natural law that is undergoing endlessly until today since the first microorganism is created on earth. The species diversify themselves, evolving new species through time, using the concept of natural selection, where nature hold the task of selecting the best batch of living creature produced from the previous generations, which possess the highest biological adaptability to cope with the changing environment, to continue to exist on earth. Human are one of those well-evolved new species, with higher and better adaptation to his environment, generated from his previous ancestors, from the primitive organisms to the branches of fishes, reptiles, plants and insects, and after that monkeys, apes, human, peacocks... The branches divide and diverse in the process of forming the 'Tree of Life'. The evolution is still undergoing within the human species to continuously suiting him with his surrounding. This process is neither final nor random, neither well-planned nor divine-guided. It is a common law that had created the diversity of species and the 'Tree Of Life'.
-He wrote 'I Think...' in his notebook of 'Transmutation of Species', suggesting the first Tree Of Life.

His groundbreaking answer has debase the phallocentric and inconsistent ideal of religious claim of our origin. His dislodging answer and proposition to the self-enclosed idioms by the previous imagination and creativity of human towards the story of our origin have solve many puzzles and doubts that were budding, even from under the church's roof at that time. Every life existed on earth is a product of the 'Natural Selection'.

Our specification and self-justification that human is different from nature has proven to be wrong. His formation, his character, even his habitat (we call it his Architecture) are indeed intertwined within the general law of Natural Selection. Nature select the best type of habitat (Architecture) that survive the coping with its environment, from a mass batch of diversity of architecture generated. The evolution of the diversity (theory) of architecture has never ended until now. This process is neither final nor random, neither well-planned nor divine-guided. And the first human to realise it was...
CHARLES R. DARWIN!
(12 Feb 1809 – 19 April 1882)
-The 'Time's Meter' of human's evolution, starting from a tiny worm.

Deconstruction: The 'Differance' of the 'Difference'

In relation to the Opposition between Good and Evil; Mind and Body; Reality and Appearance; Self and Other; Identity and Difference; Interior and Exterior; Reality and Fantasy; Order and Chaos; Presence and Absence; Black and White...
"DIFFERANCE IS NEITHER PRESENT NOR ABSENT. INSTEAD, IT IS A KIND OF ABSENCE THAT GENERATES THE EFFECT OF PRESENCE. IT IS NEITHER IDENTITY NOR DIFFERENCE. INSTEAD, IT IS A KIND OF DIFFERENTIATION THAT PRODUCES THE EFFECT OF IDENTITY AND OF DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THOSE IDENTITIES"


...always in remembrance - Jacques Derrida.

Of Nietzsche And The Nihilistic Global Culture

-Portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche. Oil on canvas. Nietzsche standing on a bridge looking over the swirling world. His expression of deep thinking counterpart with the deep blue mountain.

3 weeks of excessive work has worn me out. Turning the pages of some Nietzsche's writings sparked back some quick adrenaline flowing in the vein, fascinated by how this 19th century intellect predicted the emptiness of the modern world.

'The attempt, for example, to use the theater as an institution for the moral education of the people, still taken seriously in Schiller's time, is already reckoned among the incredible antiques of a dated type of education. While the critic got the upper hand in the theater and concert hall, the journalist in the schools, and the press in society, art degenerated into a particularly lowly topic of conversation, and aesthetic criticism was used as a means of uniting a vain, distracted, selfish, and moreover piteously unoriginal sociability' -Friedrich Nietzsche.
-Architecture as mere street art - vain, distracted and unoriginal sociability.

Now and here, in the early years of the new century and in the middle of Asia, a mutation of architecture is undergoing, towards the nihilistic nothingness. The last sentence of that Nietzsche's line perfectly encapsulate the state architecture now. It was once the microcosm of civilization, the mother of all art and sciences, but it is now present in our days as a mere 'street art', short of identity and uniqueness, it is the 'free time toy' of society flush with financial capital, but of relatively scarce human capital. It remind me of a rich barbarian's closet: racks of fashionable designer outfits, could be easily worn onto the cold and naked body, of someone with an empty mind and soul. Architecture has now fail to be the best testament of the art and craft of his creator, it is a buying of the nihilistic dissoluted and shallow trans-global-culture under the patronage of consumer-driven capitalism and free-flowing capital. A paradox, a mutation.

The cause of our architectural emptiness is the sprouting middle class nouveau riche of the commercial amenities - the product of globalization and the favourist tyrant government. Architecture has degenerated from an important human enterprise to something diminutive in cultural significance, a fruitless hobby of our wannabe cultural capital who eagerly seek the touch of 'signature, studio-based star architecture firm' on their corporate edifice.
-The Malaysian government mega project - MATRADE Expo development with its controversially no open tender selection, this time said to be 'inspired by traditional Malaysian rubber seed and it blend with its surrounding natural context', we can see neither of the two claims ironically in this 'boutique architecture'.
-Another designer outfit on a culturally hungry body, another facade play, another alien - the new $628million MATRADE Expo with the government tyrant and 'ALIBABA' patrons looking on. There are already 6 major convention centers in the Klang Valley that are under-utilized including the $600million Putrajaya Convention Center. They are the 'White Elephants' of the privatization of GLC policy under NEP.

By blank-slake approach, designer-type firm are attracted to these developers who are short of interest in environmental and cultural contextuality, a platform which they exploit their creativity freedom in making form which is always nothing more than a naughty play of exterior building skin-deep-elaborate facades made of multiple playful material but yet supported by a modern framework of steel and concrete. Those 'play' they would argue to be traditional motif inspired, a clinical excuse of their exploitation in design freedom.

These designer-type firms is increasing in number, with steady technical expertise, they are in a position ready to generate icons and images to rebrand a new cultural identity of these desperately showy and money-fancy developing countries. This flock of firms opt to bypass opportunities in their own developed country that has strict code enforcement and property rights plus their architectural civilized and highly intellectual community. They stifle in favor of 3rd world's markets that embrace open, quick and trend-setting solutions to their economical boom. Their freedom in design always result in product that has little cultural attachment, a paradox between the regressive local cultural reality and their dramatic modern alien, carrying the tag of global culture of universality and essentialism.
Dubai - the wardrobe of the barbarian's outfits, the dead corpses city of the Gulf. These false landscape that falls onto some culturally unique Asian cities resonate a paradox between the nihilistic global fashion and the cultural void of our 3rd world society.

These 3rd world country nouveau riche who eagerly seek for their architectural tour-de-force have yet to realize the embedded mockery of their cultural and intellectual emptiness. Local society no longer has the authority to shape their own built environment and architecture. This is how I define architecture NOW in 2009...

Of Fascism Behind A Democratic Mask

-A Venetian mask protect and permit wearer to freely interact with people of all social status in a traditional Carnevale. Malaysia has it worn 52years, still counting.

There are too many ambiguous and lopsided systems exist in this country. Not hard to be identified. Both blaming its cultural and demographically diverse background, and finger-pointing to its geographical default, might sometimes lead to rational explanations on how messy this country is. The democratic propaganda is still loud in the air. But actual actions beneath this propaganda, usually undemocratic, are unintentionally perpetuated and manifested on one aspect that claim to be the most communicative mirror of a nationhood - its architecture.

This is not Mussolini's fascist era, nor the country need giant rostrum to tell the world that we want to revive socialism. But as Sigmund Freud once said, 'real democracy have never existed, there lies a animalistic irrationality and violent in every human', silent practice of fascism behind the protective mask of democracy is both possible and feasible. A recall on the history of Mussolini's regime and its fascist architecture vision struck me in association on what is happening in Malaysia.
-Palazzo Dei Congressi of EUR - the fascist edifice.

I examined the 4 aspects of fascism with its level of real practice by the Malaysian government. There are four main characters of our nation's conduct in close similarity with the one used in pre-WW2 Italy. There is a 'dictator' with centralize authority on all systems, be it our controversially elected P.M., stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism through over-flavouring a certain race and the gradual marginalization of other. All these dictatorial policies are undergoing silently beneath the mask of constant democratic propaganda.

In pre-war Italy, Marcello Piacentini under command of Mussolini almost single-handedly built the idealized New Rome for the tyrant. The whole city was almost completed by the 1942 Rome Exposition before the Axis power were plunged into war. Its fascist architecture share resemblance with the dictated new public architecture of the 21th century Malaysia. Both communicative in its overwhelming statement of totalitarian oppression of other seemingly inferior cultures. Its socialist realism architecture leave nothing abstract, leave no implicit hint, for this sake it resorts to the 'carved image' of classical language. Thus, it reconstructs the semiotic triangle, the firm relation between signifier (architectural element), reference (eclectic classical reference) and signified (the superiority of a certain party).
-False monumentalism and intention for manipulation - a national shame.

The purpose of these kind of building is to certain the 'uncertainty'. Clearly communicated in those building's symmetry, the firm centres and routes, big walls as well as those historically well codified architectural elements (classic and local vernacular), in a reasonable mixture.

Those imaginary 'SELF' of racist and dictatorial ground would not last long. The 'mask' itself would 'unmask' what is behind. The ill-fated are now end up trapped, like in the Piranesi's Carceri d'invenzione - The Imaginary Prisons!
-Geovanni Battista Piranesi - Carceri Plate VII, The Drawbridge, 1750.

3 Musketeers' Pilgrim and The Beginning of An End Of A City-State

-An implicit clock gears metaphor of the rigidity and robotic nature of Singapore.-APEC as the clock gears repairman

Not a Hajj Pilgrimage though, nor this place inherit masterful pieces of architecture, that worth 3 Malaysian musketeers to set on a highly intrepid trip. Singapore has always been on high and low. This time, the high of the APEC summit and their doomy domestic worries has set a highly intense and contradictory display, suggesting the beginning of an end of their great 30 years of triumph, all found through the eyes of 3 Malaysian architecture musketeers.
-Harbourfront - 10 Nov 2009 - courtesy musketeer R.Y.TAN

The ever so predictable, systematic (or even robotic) tiny island nation, this time poise in front of me with a different messages, that could well suggest deeper truth from the average understandings from the mouth of others.

The 48 hours of hectic voluntary ushering in the Suntec Convention Center couldn't provide the points on our intrepid undertaking, without it impose strong hints for our better interpretation on their work ethics. The typical dictacting, systematic(even robotic) and the unbearably narcissistic nature of the nation's conduct manifested throughout the whole preparation for the summit. As usual, fear drive them forward.

Our architectural pilgrimage, unmask some masked reality of their high and low. Their Yeang's National Library, Kurokawa and Tange's office towers downtown plus all the ultra-modern high profile signature architecture are in opposite gesture with the worries posted on newspaper of educational, cultural and mostly, economical concerns. This pilgrimage tell us that the first are served for the survival of their ailing later. The mood under the Convention Center may be the same. Singapore treat APEC as the keystone of their economical arch in the future, with the rising economical powerhouse in the world increasingly impose greater pressure on the tiny island country. As usual, it is unmistakable. The fight for an Utopian free trade zone over AsiaPasific region and Singapore's subsequent survival is the masked reality. Harbourfront's mega casino is in the making, while the last grasp of Confucianist school of thought is in the brink of eternal banishment. The impending gambling culture means laissez faire capitalist economy is in their highest ethos. Singapore have made decision on the cultural-identity crossroad while they compensate their cultural sacrifice by instilling back Chinese oriented teaching in their school curriculum, in which the first is much a heavy bill.
-The other 3 musketeers in the making - Harbourfront Casino

The island is founded with no more than swampy land, before they eventually realized the importance of westernization and capitalism on the survival of their city state. The two subsequently embraced without more consideration, and their citizen are now enslaved to the giant regime of western consumerism, nonreturnable and blindfolded. Squeezing into the rank of Middle Class is in the mind of everyone here, the rank which capitalist crave for, a giant rank consist of high spending power slaves, who wander narcotically in the trap of rivalry, envy and sarcasm circle. The politically and socially inert Singaporean is undoubtedly a sample consequences of the Sigmund Freud and Edward Bernays's long forgotten psychoanalytic theory in tamming the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy. Consumerism and the subsequent people's psychological pursuit of imaginery self-portrait (or self-branding) are everywhere, from the self-and-brand-conscious student to the highly narcissist office-woorking class, the two are modern forms of cocaine invasion and political dictatorship. Singaporean in real need of help...
-Yeang's National Library revisited - 11 Nov 2009

The mistake of their urban planning authority 30 years back of allowing the development of many low density housing could be traced everywhere on the island. The initial planned target of maximum 6.5million inhabitant is now on its 4.99 mark. Until it reach the point 6.5, I am wondering in what style, the highly mass transit oriented transportation will collapse. The rising rank of middle class would means more and more automobile on the road which has now reach its ultimate buffer, the incursion of foreign labour then also will force its mass rail transit to its brink. In housing, this means more dominos on more reclaimed land, courtesy of Malaysian soil. These are all closer and closer to the much awaited modern vision of Ville Contemporaine.

This give reasons for them to worry. But those fear would still drive them forward in the beginning of its end...

-Towards an intrepid traveller...- 13 Nov 2009 - train.

Post-Functionalist, Beauty and The Struggle of Representation

-An oil refinery silo that demonstrate sheer functionalist beauty of assisting nature's tasks.

Modern era represent beauty of functionalist thinking but functionalist thinking couldn't be singly represented by modernism. Functionalist perspective of absolute beauty has deeper root and longer history than what the Utopian and dictating modernist had single-handedly claimed.

One day in Athens, student Aristippus met master Socrates...
Aristippus tried to challenge Socrates' view on the relationship
between 'good', 'beautiful' and 'usefulness'...
Aristippus:"Can you describe what constitute 'good'?"
Socrates: "There could be nothing good in itself but only in relation to something. A thing must be good for something in order to be good."
Aristippus:"How about 'beautiful'?"
Socrates:"A beautiful wrestler is unlike a javelin beautiful for swift and powerful hurling."
Aristippus argued that the two answers given by his master are overlapping and repeatedly the same. Socrates then explain:" Is a dung basket beautiful then? Of course, and a golden shield is ugly, if the first is well made for its special work the later badly!".
But for Aristotle's Functionalist theory, a work of art that is truly 'beautiful', is one that could function to complete mother nature's unfinished design of the world. The higher rank in life scale, from insect to animal to human, the more nature require them to assist her task. Provided the rational faculty of art, man is able to come to nature's aid and the art done by human functions to fulfill her uncomplete task. (example: an oil refinery plant is a beautiful work of human art to solve the incapability of nature to convert oil into power resource) A physician/doctor use the law of nature to do the heal of health of a person, when nature made mistakes and incapable to do so. The skill and machinery of a physician carrying out his job, has help nature to reach the desired result of providing health. This is the true reason and the beauty of human art.

The end of modern era see the lack of rational understanding of the beauty of architectural art. Those classical faith and thinking of functionalist beauty faded and the whole post-modern world plunged into a deep abyss of identity struggle in the search for 'beauty'... called it the Struggle of Representation. One full century of functionalist modern rationality proven to be too cruel to some ill-fated human, who always wish to live in idealised imaginary world (especially those in third world country which literary understanding of the meaning of modernism is lacking), the 'hamster wheel' of Struggle begun. Morality neglected, the responsibility of completing nature's unfinish task pushed aside, the naive, emotional and irrational reviving of the fading identity barricade the human eyes! The Struggle continues...
-The rude and banal etnocentric post-modernist revivalism - a giant Golden Shield?

'Man shouldn't be able to see his own face - there's nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes.Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself. The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.'

- Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet