BODY & LANDSCAPE as ways of seeing
Body and Landscape as Ways of Seeing, a talk from Mr Eric Chen on 1 April 2017. Eric Chen from ArchiBlur Lab, is a Taiwanese architect as well as an installation artist. This talk is different from other PAM talk as it tend to experience architecture from a totally different way. He believe that architecture is not only a building but a tools to improve community and always related to social. Architecture to him is a language to serve contemporary social relations, such as interdisciplinary, pluralism, cultural exchanges, and innovating development.
For me, he is a very successful architect as every projects he done is not only as architecture but to define it. Why we need to make architecture, why architecture exists? Quoted from him that raised the question on why I choose this path from the beginning. Are architecture exists as profit making, compete to be the greatest or just a simple platform to convey message?
Eric Chen had apply installation art in the field of architecture. Most of his project is to raise the awareness or regain the lost memory from historical. One of his projects that attract me the most is the Urban Archipelago Project.
This project located at the southern city area of historical Taipei where many governmental organizations are located. The urban organization has a distinct hierarchy and energy, but its autonomy has destructed the continuity of urban spaces. The development of modern architecture stresses the eternal pursuit for systematic efficiency, visual superiority, and natural boundaries.
However, often because of the inability to resist time, the roof collapses and the stairwell shows non-geometric discontinuity, leaving walls with longer substantive temporality, or even a complete openness in the end.
He notice the circumstance and try to convey the message through architecture. The disordered time and space lead to dissipation of building function that causes the original space to lose directionality. The problem is that nobody notice the adverse effect of it. Thus, he use his architecture knowledge to reflect on what exactly a building is.
The urban floating Islands is the example to spread the awareness. He describe this project as “Time Machine”, a medium that cannot last long, can be gone anywhere or anytime. “Time Machine” is an invisible architecture that can move around freely. A free architecture allow spontaneous renewal of intervening body on the site and construction that redefine the relationship of boundary between urban and village. Transparent material as façade allow the structure to blend nicely in urban, not as a barrier but a platform for the locals to discover.
The Urban Floating Islands attempts to place three drifting "architecture" that are able to move, grow, and gather into the urban gaps of Taiwan. All these archipelago carry a different meaning on different site, different purpose treated with specific elements. On this basis, he engages in three layers of “empathy” in thought and practice, to critique the breakage of systematic, visualized, and natural relationships.
First, forming of a material texture empathy. The ideas is to allow the body to be in very close contact with materials. The local construction materials are layered and reflect the minute changes of different times and locations, catalyzing every joint progression of physical sensation and feeling. The variation of materials reflect the body’s limit and every possibility of physical sensory movement. In this trajectory of texture with complex substances, “empathy” through substantive textures is created for the creator and the experiencer.
Second, forming force empathy. Solidness is the first element that must be considered not only in terms of mechanical transfer, but also in terms of visual, so that the transfer of force is invisible and insensible. His creation forms and transfers the necessary forces in the construction relationship of substances, rather than only accounting for solidness and safety, but rather attempts to create an adjacent relationship, which jointly bears force through distribution of groups. The result will affect the bodies of every other person entering, as “empathy” of the forming force is effective.
Third, the empathy of common movement. The limitless expansion of architecture not only erases the body’s location but also breaks the relationship between the body and the environment that create a “negative correlation” between artificial and natural. The formation of architecture is no longer the issue of “one” building, but the formation and connection of tactile states beginning with the body, forming a combination of force, cities form environments and landscapes, ultimately returning to the body.
“Architecture” is the media that needs to be rethought and redefined in the formation of these relationships, forming an “empathy” with connected movements. Eric Chen have different kind of thinking on “Architecture”, he believe that we should practice more to find the problem, not waiting for the problem to appear. Use the skills we possess to improve architecture.
