geometry

If there was anything about math that I had vaguely liked, it was geometry.

There is something about the order, balance, symmetry, form and pattern in geometry that is pleasurable, even poetic. Maybe because these are qualities mirrored in nature, with its own bag of patterns and form, its own rhythmns, cycles and hierarchies that order life. If nature is the work of a perfect Creator, then in art - man's creative outcome - the principles of geometry have often held both their aesthetic and spiritual grounds on what could be considered perfect or beautiful.

I finally watched the Louis Kahn documentary My Architect that L had passed to J some time ago and had J talking about Louis Kahn virtually non-stop for days. Like J, I too had these scenes, images and ideas from the documentary that refused to leave my mind. And if there's a word to sum up these post-viewing thoughts, it would probably be geometry.

The documentary was made by 1 of 2 illegitimate children that Kahn had. Nathaniel Kahn knew his father through weekly visits up until his death when the filmmaker was 11. As such, his search and quest to understand his late father forms the other narrative of the documentary. For all the order and public monumentality of Kahn's most famous buildings that the filmmaker's eyes (and camera) scan, these views are balanced by the seeming disorder of the relationships in the intensely private personal life of the architect. And in a relationship between parent and child - a relationship not by choice, a relationship of inheritance and hence repetition/pattern - the need for order All of this makes the narrative of Nathaniel Kahn's search for his father among his work all the more poignant.

You could say that there is a similar pattern of contradiction yet beauty in Kahn's works. For all the austerity and grand scale of Kahn's works, they seem (at least to my untrained eyes) premised on the simple geometry of forms and planes - a circle, a triangle, a square, their intersections - and by extension, the geometry of nature in play with the structures. There is seldom any ornamentation. Instead, there is only the space itself, or the patterns inherent in nature/materials or the process of creation, or the forms and patterns and sense of space created by the falling or bodies of water.

What more, for the cold austerity and grand scale of Kahn's works, they also appear to have touched individuals at a personal and almost spiritual level. The documentary ends, for instance, with Kahn's last work - Bangladesh's parliamentary building in the capital Dhaka. (R above- photo by Karl E Roehl). The interviews with the Bangladeshi architects who had worked with Kahn on the project were strangely very moving. Both in fact spoke with tears in their eyes! After all, it was on Kahn's return journey from a working visit for this project (the buildings were completed some 9 years after Kahn's death) that he died of a heart attack in a train station and lay unclaimed in the city morgue for 3 days since the address in his passport was deliberately crossed out.

A man who spent his life creating spaces with a sense of place dies without an address, alone despite having 3 families, and bankrupt despite the wealth of meaning he has created for the users of his buildings. If irony had a geometric value, one could call it a dark symmetry.

school of hard knocks - an annual report

the new Lasalle College of the Arts building - it makes you wish you were a student there - image by J taken at last Saturday's Rojak.

Secretary Amps: Boss, it's been 368 days since you became boss...
Boss Amps: ...er, yes, and you want a pay raise?
Sec Amps: For that I'll ask my real boss! No, just want to do a little interview about the past year, see if anything has changed.
Boss Amps: Oh, ask difficult questions.
Sec Amps: No lah, just wondering if there was one thing that really stood out in the last year - whether it was something you learnt, or thought about, or was most significant. Just one thing.
Boss Amps: [pauses and wanders off to watch America's Next Supermodel for the next 30mins instead] I think...it's become really clear, especially when I think of the people I've met who are so unhappy doing what they are doing, that it's quite important knowing what you like and just doing it - not thinking too much. I've also met so many people who are doing just that. Taking that one step, then seeing where it leads, before taking the next. There's the uncertainty, of course. But for me, that also means getting back my own time. Although there are some really busy intense times, there are times - like this afternoon - when I can take some time off to watch a documentary about Louis Kahn... And that's another thing, getting to read and learn a lot more - about architecture especially. Louis Kahn, Alvar Aalto - I really like their work. And being able to think about the links between architecture and graphic design... What about you? What do you see?
Sec Amps: Hmm, maybe because I'm looking in from the outside, but I am just envious, jealous almost. I think it's been a great year for you, and some good work. Plus all the people you've worked and made friends with.
Boss Amps: But it's not all that rosy. There's the uncertainty -
Sec Amps:Yes yes, I know, growing the company etc...but you've got your own Mirra chair to sit on!

So ends our annual report. Friends, there are many other lessons of course, "practical ones" learnt the hard way about financials, production, deadlines, outsourcing, collaborations, competition, IPR... but for those, we'll leave it for the 4th, 5th, hey 10th anniversary.


portraits taken for the company's annual report at the train station.

get lost!

image by J

"The street is not perceived as a complete entity in itself, with a beginning and an end, so it doesn't have a name...Instead, aside from the name of the township, indicated by the suffix 'ku' or 'shi', addresses only have three numbers: the 'chome', a sort of nieighbourhood or small quarter subdivided into different blocks; the block and the building itself, which is often numbered chronologically according to the date it was built, and not gradually, by physical position.

This unusual system did not escape Barthes, who wrote, 'The roads of this city do not have names. Of course, there is a written address, but it only has a postal value...and will make sense to the postman but not to the visitor...This residential annulment seems quite inconveninet to us, as we are used to thinkning that what is most practical is also most rational...Tokyo, instead, tells us to once more that rationality is just one of several systems...This city cannot be known except through some sort of ethnographic activity: you need to find your bearings...by walking its streets, by looking around you, through habit and experience: each discovery is both intense and fragile, it cannot be repeated, and only its trace can be left in our memory: in this sense, visiting a place for the first time is like starting to write about it: as the address has not been written down, it has to found its own writing.' "
- Tokyo: City and Architecture, Livio Sacchi (Skira Editoire, 2004), pp95-96.

In a way, we find our bearings in all cities or neighbourhoods through habit and experience - since habit, experience and memory are all part of how we know. But actually numbering buildings chronologically...only Tokyo! If on our island we numbered buildings Tokyo-style, all the "smaller" numbers would not exist.

Well, it's been 4 years since both J and I were lost wandering those kus and shis and chomes. And it'll be 29 days later when we next do!

after the red lights

all images by J

It's a great sign that there's been, in the last couple of years, more residency and gallery spaces initiated by arts practitioners. Great because I hope it's a sign that there's a larger sense of community, and a recognition that coming together, instead of staking out turf, is the way to outgrow our small pond/island mentality.

Of course, in the late 80s, there was already the Artist Village, and the late Kuo Pao Kun's The Substation at Armenian Street. The former no longer exists as a physical space, but the latter still survives today with its small blackbox theatre, a gallery, classrooms and a courtyard that has been turned in a live-music cafe/pub Timbre. And early this year there was Emily Hill



Nonetheless, these "artist communes", studios and cafes have always inhabited cities, whether planned or unplanned. Wherever the real estate is affordable, typically in depressed neighbourhoods, artists have always found their way there. Over time, their presence would lend not only life but a level of "desirability" to the place. City planners have sometimes used the arts therefore to revitalise neighbourhoods, introducing art programmes to their schools or community clubs.

But as always, I digress! Friends, what I really want to introduce is post museum by the good folks behind p-10.


Post-Museum

Located at the end of Rowell Road (yes, that infamous red-light lane in Little India), Post-Museum takes over 2 shophouses and gives them a new coat of paint and reinforced flooring, while stripping bare their walls to reveal the raw bricks underneath. Bricks and mortar aside, the space comprises artist studios, a room for an artist-in-resident, offices, a exhibition space/gallery, a library and a new vegetarian cafe called Food#03 with its own in-house baker!


Level 2 studio spaces at Post-Museum

This Saturday, J and I went down to a small fundraising show at the Post-Museum where artist Chua Koon Beng showed 18 charcoal sketches of the different people who have contributed to or interacted with the project - construction workers, a designer, a baker, an artist, the owner of the shophouses, the foreman...

We have always enjoyed the projects curated by p-10 that we have managed to see, such as this or that. But what I've always enjoyed and admired is that not only do these folks really do make things happen, they've kept their hearts and heads in the right places, and they are open about it.

J tells me, for instance, how he likes the fact that among the objectives listed on their simple A4 photocopied introduction, one bullet point reads "Making improvements to our lives and the world we live in". Another 2 bullet points read "Reponding to our location and engaging the community in it" and "Making greater connection between the arts and the society at large". When we spoke to JE, one of the p-10 team, about their location at Rowell Rd, she had said matter-a-factly that they hoped to also bring a new and different energy and life to the street as the space evolved.

These objectives are not what anyone would normally declare given all our easy cynicism. But if it is important, then saying it is the first step to doing.

And how amps wish the team well with these objectives over the next decade or even more!

=========
Post-Museum is at 107-109 Rowell Road. The team is looking for corporate partnerships and private investment. You can:
> Leave a message here or at the p-10 blog if you or your company/organisation is interested. The last I heard they are looking for a sponsor for some hardware/electrical fittings for their exhibition space, and any other form of corporate partnership.
> Check out the works by Chua Koon Beng, which are for sale between $1,000-12,000 to raise funds for the programmes of the Post-Museum.
> Visit the gallery or bring some friends for a meal at Food#03 when the place is completed by the end of this month.
> Take the chance to first visit the Museum of Shanghai Toys a few shops down at 83 Rowell Rd!

repeat after me

The public administration and politicians on this island are both rather fond of the prefix "Re", as seen in this instance - Regenerate. Rejuvenate. Realise. Remake.

So this conversation took place over the weekend at the "Remaking the Heartland" exhibition going on at Toa Payoh's HDB central.

Y: Excuse me, can I ask you a question?
Man at the Info counter: Yes, yes? [watching the still blank survey form in my hand]
Y:Er, can I ask if the Potong Pasir stretch at Toa Payoh will be upgraded under this programme?
M:Potong Pasir in Toa Payoh meh?
Y:Yah, have. The little bit of Potong Pasir ward under Chiam See Tong?
M: ...
Y: I mean, is this programme "generic" or, er, only for PAP wards ah? [smiles, acts cute]
M: Ohr - this programme is generic, supposedly.
Y: So every estate will benefit?
M: Yah, supposedly.
Y: Oh I see, I just wondering. I live in Toa Payoh mah.
M: Ohr - generic programme, but it - it all depends only on the timing.

I was curious, and he was - at least - honest.