umbau and design guerillas.

looking at how other people in other parts of the world take to architecture school always lends me some perspective; it also inspires in me that warm tingling sensation of camaraderie you feel when attending your nearest Alcoholic Anonymous meeting...

hmmm.... alcooooohooool.....

-shakes head out of dream-

ooh... where was i?

oh yeah, i was gonna say that what proves to be even more inspiring is the birth of new architecture schools, such as umbau. nascent endeavours that look to becoming big-time establishments always have the most mind-boggling/ fascinating/ quizzical/ awing statements to make. Umbau, in particular, is adopting a peculiar military stance of aiming to equip its students with guerilla design tactics/ skills, before setting these architectural "marines" out into the world on a "healing" mission.

the drive and mission of the school is undoubtedly admirable on many levels; i mean, come on! this school is going to instill in its designers a fighting spirit to, ironically, heal the world! how valiant! yet at the same time, i feel very uneasy with the overly charged military speak on strategising a change on the architectural scene. the aggression, even if we know with our meagre amount of perceived certainty to be directed at bringing about the "Good", can only mean violence at some point. remember that the biggest terrorists and guerillas of bullets, bombs, genocide and bloodshed are set on the same goal of bettering the world in the only way they know -- painful subterfuge.

Umbau is -- i hope -- unlikely to murder a designer they deem unworthy with a million paper cuts. no, that is surely not the way of design warfare. but violence, physical or otherwise, will always be the most abject and abrupt, and definitely tangible on some level. if umbau shall one day rise to become that very engine of revolution it hopes to become, then rest assured you'd feel its blitz. i hope by then you'd be on the right side of the war.


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addendum: 19 1234 Sep 2005, Monday

forgot to mention that one thing i really appreciate about this vision of umbau's is that it makes no pretense of perfect assimilation. too many times, design projects profess to an assimilation of its environment like as if nobody's ever going to realise that something's changed in their physical/ social landscape. in actuality, most, if not all, architectural projects are invasive and even alienating interventions, varying only on the degrees to which they effect this change throughout the concept-to-built/occupation process.

i have such a big issue with people who claim otherwise, hence suggesting quite plainly that they are a godsend to the site, that some of you might remember an argument i had with a particular landscape architect at a lecture back in nus. something about preserving the site by cannabalising rock materials near the site for a mantlepiece of a driveway sculpture or whatnot.

what has really got to take the cake is that his landscaping input was for a tourist resort on what used to be an almost undeveloped island.

preservation? riiiiight...