_________There is a strong potential for stories to bring meaning to the places we live and work. Our memories are one such example, the way a certain mark on the wall may help to recall a certain memory of the time a friend slipped and fell while trying to balance on a soccer ball at your twenty first birthday. In this way the houses we live in can be seen as physical container for the memories of our personal lives. But just as memories are relived within our imagination when they are recalled, daydreams and fictional stories can also be played out in our imagination with similar vividness. Such as the way a certain tree in the backyard may give one the creeps after hearing a ghost story about how someone once hung themselves there. Even when we know that it's not true our minds create a possible scenario which none the less changes the way we relate to the tree, and as a result give it a new, deeper meaning.
These personal meanings whether real or imagined overlay themselves onto our surroundings constantly but it is only through time that they accumulate to become the comfortable environments that we can call a cozy home. So it could be argued that one of the responsibilities of an architect is to provide a home that can act as a receptive container for memories, metaphorically speaking a container that has many drawers to place the events of our lives. Better yet, make for an architecture that recalls past event, stories, emotions through a form of association.
_________One possible approach is to create a densely layered environment that follows an internal relational logic based on stories and their artifacts. This fictional 'world' could give the building a history before even being built.
One such process of the creation of this world was done in Kyoto and is documented here:
_________The entire process was based on the training process of the Marathon Death Monks on Mt. Hiei near the Seika campus. This extreme practice in which a countless monks have died or committed suicide takes twelve years to complete and requires the monks to run a 100km daily for a hundred consecutive days with other week long physical tests. This process is what changes an ordinary man into a bodhisattva and became the structural backbone to the project. Initially the monks are required to recreate by hand, two ancient books that become the manual for their journey, in it are listed the rituals and locations that the monks must visit. In my case these manuals were to be two objects that formed an aesthetic foundation as well restructure the relationship between two other stories, the historical account of the burning of the temples on Mount Hiei by the first shogun to unite Japan, and the fictional novel 'Kafka by the Shore' by Murakami Haruki which I happened to be reading at the time. Physically, it began with the collection of two objects that happened to strike me, in this case a bamboo seedling found in the bamboo forest behind the dorms, and the muffler of a moped found on the way to school. These two objects were analyzed as two independent systems, each had inputs and outputs as well as certain functions they performed.
_________These two objects were then converted to clay and united into one object. By using a homogeneous and plastic material such as clay the two objects lose all but formal qualities. In this sense the two objects can be combined wholly into one object on a purely formal basis. This blending creates a new object in which the two independent systems have a unique and dependent relationship, such as the inputs of the bamboo shoot are now supporting the shield guard of the muffler.
_________The muffler was then thought of as the burning of Mt. Hiei and the bamboo as the each of the two stories in 'Kafka by the Shore'. The two clay objects now became the manuals that restructured and combined the relationship between the two stories and gave birth to two new stories. These were drawn up as two possible mangas in which one random page was actually drawn up, the intent to give a sense the one page is just a glimpse into a possible world. These were set to take place on two locations by the proposed build site, an old building in the water treatment facility plant that was to be converted to an artist studio.
Manga 1
Manga 2
The manuals themselves also became objects that found their way into the stories as a sort of aesthetic seedling.
_________The characters, scenes, actions, emphasis, timing, compositions and themes in the mangas were then translated to become spatial perspectives as well as a unique material pallet, including dried mud, ceramics, rope and silicon that were combined based on the internal logic of the stories. This construction logic determined the connection of the prefab artist living quarters to the existing building and formed the public gallery space.
_________In this way, through a self-referential combining of various stories, the artifacts created in the process became the building blocks of a new aesthetic vocabulary and a construction grammar. The outcome is an environment of richness in materials and internal relationships.
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