NUS Architecture

hehz. i saw the aptitude tests too dee, there was something like "draw up ur ideal SDE" and there were horribly drawn up "perspectives" of fancy looking zaha hadid crap. i am gg hard onto this one - they look shit, i can draw better in sec 2, and for skeptics out there to start thinking "oh zihao's just talented" or "zihao cant be so arrogant to think himself above others" i got to insist i got my skills through fucking hard work and practice and in no sense am i a talent. pisses me off when i hear pple like angie or debbie coming up and say, its not fair, he knows how to draw. fact is i started drawing perspectives after learning from alan woo and has been training at it since then. but those test entries irked me ultimately for the level of contemplation and skills seemed to belie the fact there is pple interested in architecture anymore, even at entry level. i just cant see a future for such idealistic thinking with little effort to improvise in the 3 hr test itself. those dudes gotta try alot harder.

heng chye kiang was in his office, telling hwee lee how too choose 120 or 150 out from those prospects and results. half guys and half gals. to him they are statistics. to hwee lee its her excel spreadsheet. no student is gauged and remember for his or her character through her work, like a great swordsman is remember for his welding of his katana. thats what we become, passive numbers jumping off the matrix screen. that is YOU - u024463B. like a jailbird.

i start to believe shit in NUS studios, the culture as a whole. i had the great opportunity to be with nice pple like dee and amelee in studios which is nice and fun but generally studio culture had got to a point in time i learn little and over criticised in time. k, i m ready to receive tremendous repercussion in what i was abt to say. i m ready to be slammed down to reality on the basis of moral lessons on humilty and patience.

you go to studio day in day out, someone hands out a sketched plan defined painfully using the scale rule or cadded in comp, starts to describe in the sense "i want my users to..." etc in a godly deterministic way, pretending the same level of Modernist philosophy applied on a decidedly Postmodern form ripped from books would work. you start to listen to architectural discourses that are based in words and general stereotyped phenonomena and comparing the "great" writings of koolhaas, holl and frens and give scant respect to the draughtsmanship of corbu, lloyd wright and kahn. in many senses. you see pple start with lengthy site analyses but u end up tabula rasa-ing the entire context of site and scale, users and user densities. i appreciate the idea of concept, but i dislike the fact i am totally judged on the basis which i could produce work. i couldnt produce a work with a spirit unless i mend the spirit per se. but pple out there with the dumbest concepts were passed on happily, albeit with an ironically patronising attitude from tutors that these happy students just simply do not realise. i try to say i dun care, but some A panels on the corridors constantly remind u of ur "judged inaptitude" and u begin a procession down the corridor of "fame". it humbles and humiliates u at the same time.

look lets not be naive abt this, singapore is a capitalist society, post weberian, and idealogically locked in a stasis of Foucaudian principles. we are being subjugated as being what the society wants and expects of us. if the school sucks so much as we speak, some pressures for reform and change will surely befall. no, simply because of forces of demand and supply, because the outside world does not want "thinkers", nor do they want a "bernard tschumi" upstart. they need competant renderers like hann at least in the short run (but hann is doing himself a great disfavour by marketing himself that way). they fault the sch for not teaching enough so that these packages are still incomplete by the time it reaches their hands. and o so great academia teachers wonder what happened to the declining skills and passion of the students while pointing fingers elsewhere and insisting GEMs are great for us. i ve been to too many Aki meetings where joseph and chan talked abt accountability to the DEAN office headed by RE prudes. we have a obligation to answer to?! to whom? oh RE pple, who interestingly cld not tell the difference between A3 printing and A1 plotting. their stand, "yes i understand your needs for printing is different, but its just the size of the printer isnt it?" they expect doraemon to appear and pop, magically enlarge an A4 printer to AO size. that is the amount of denseness we have up there.

and great o discourses and discussions with the greater shiqiao helps too. words like "oh, you know tokyo university has the same design briefs for 20 years" when quizzed abt how come the brief seemed so similar or "i dun really care abt how literal or simple your idea is, just start drawing on plans" or trying to explain my direction to him via parti sketches "stop these senseless doodling, start drawing something concrete" when these same "senseless sketches" received somewhat better response from the melbourne tutor saying these drawings explain stuff better than words. and the penultimate insult probably is "learn from hann, he can draw well, i trust him" when katie quizzed how come zihao produced site sketches and parti ideas while hann produced site "tracings" and a few lines of words and some wood tectonics drawings, zihao is hammered instead for being "slow". i dun come to studio to have my esteem and self worth hammered to the basement, but i come habitually to receive it and it comes greater and nicer in the form of "you are not interested in architecture", "leave your scholarly pursuits at the door of my studio", "this is not even yr 3 work", "you are extremely lucky not to be retained". oh yes, sure, i learn alot from shiqiao. yeah "use images not words", and if these images are traced and elaborately pencil rendered, they probably cld pass the idea better to those of a trained AA eye. and yes no doubt, i am indeed bitter. who wldnt? in this way, sandy could never ever be better than weihui.

crits seldom faze me anymore. no not that i dun fear it, but i learn lesser and lesser from them. i cld sit at the back and listen intently to what the student is saying, and i cld preempt the exact response from the crit panel. we have far surpassed our ability to crit with respect to work and drawings. i find myself unable to break a design out from my own contemplations and when a work does emerge, i grab that moment of inspiration tightly, knowing well that inspiration is as flawed as an imagination like those yr 1 aptitude test idealists are. but too bad, i ve 3 weeks for submission. my crits often give me responses that i already KNOW and are rarely able to question the "how comes" and "oh, so this is ur concept, i see ur direction and if u do so and so, it might be more elegant", i stand on the point of inevitability. i know how i cld be graded and expect my results and responses. in some ways, i am above the system which drives so many pple, i do not habor hopes on getting accidental good results. it had become more and more of hoping to get accidental "PASS" results these days.

this is NUS. this place rarely trains an architect, i keep all my sketchbooks to show the level of regression in some ways i had been experiencing. i told ruzica before, i'm now in yr 3 but i feel like i m smarter when i first started. if only i had a chance to unlearn everything and not to end up in this intellectual/skills stalemate. i m probably an impertinent fool who mixes personal emotions into rational work, this approach works in medieval times i guess for craftmen and artisans, this is going to hurt real bad for a contemporary condition towards the rationalisation of work and emotions. passions for hard work (eg weihui) and passions for architecture (eg lingxin) is radically dissociated if you haven realise. when pple mention, keep ur passion going, u got to start questioning what is he or she talking abt.

i'll still do my best, because architecture is like a lover, deep down u love her, but because as of now u are too poor or too unmotivated to become as good as her, u dun shirk ur passion and emotions. there are lots of ways to love someone, i've just got to find YOUR way. if u do give up, u lack the moral courage to stand for anything you have just said.

endnote1:
i hope the world is a happy place, but ultimately it will be happier for some and not so. The Animal Farm explains this better than anything else. a balance in the system relies on the marginalisation and oppression of some others. if you deny this, you deny history. it wld just be appropriate to believe you want your circle of influence to be happy and hold frens and teach them to sing, rather than the world. dun flatter yourself.

endnote2:
yeah a timely reminder that we shd travel more. not that we dont lol. i just whine abt the weather for fun, but it is indeed so cold these days even the streets are empty, you dont travel to Places without the People dun you? i am just pissed at the promise of spring but it gets rainy and cold everydays that it inhibits walking ard happily.

i am done with pissing, pls kindly refrain from putting up new to generate a mass orgy of negative thoughts, just put up comments ok? sorry for taking up ur time friends for being a whiner.