Baxter Territory3 Cooking_Dining

Much of the world is entering the routine of long work hours and reduced domestic experience. The result of this has been the proliferation of small condos and apartments that favor lives that rarely come home. Due to the size of the kitchen and dining space, these homes would never be thought of as spaces of hosting guests, and just having a dinner with extended family becomes an unbearable chore.

Recently, in response to the fast food culture, a counter movement towards slow food has emerged. This movement represents a different philosophy on the importance of the dining and kitchen space and their centrality to the culture of domesticity. It is interesting how a simple change in the philosophy about the food we eat could radically alter the structure of the homes we live in.

Directly related to this, I'm interested in how this relates to diplomacy. Diplomatic tact will often/usually involve bringing those we must negotiate with into our domestic space. Through this act, we deepen ties with those whose relationships are most important to us, and thus personalize the decisions that were only political prior to the exposure of our personal lives. This is one of the most sensitively orchestrated moments in diplomacy but also the most personal and real. We should ask ourselves what is the domestic experience necessary to make us comfortable with a new acquaintance whose initial relationship is likely an extremely formal and uncomfortable one? Is it the contemporary bachelor pad, watching the local sporting event on the wall mounted flat screen or a space that privileges a more cozy communal setting with (good) food and (relevant) conversation?

The rapid lifestyle that has forced us to all but abandon our most important dining culture here in the states has begun to be completely abandoned in the next wave of modernization happening in Asia. What effect will the domestic space that represents lifestyles of all work and no play have on our ability to be diplomatic and create pertinent relationships with the people we need to know better in order to coexist? Have we completely exported the ability to host guests from the domestic experience to restaurants. As a result, have we lost our ability to personalize relationship building across impassible cultural and class boundaries that divide us? Is the domestic space I speak of only important for the richer classes because they have to manage these relationships or is the cozy domestic space a universal necessity?

Baxter Territory2 Expat-Repat

Europeans are building "Kasbah" buildings all over the place, while Shigeru Ban builds refugee structures in Africa. Countries like Japan and China use western architecture to help their argument that they've modernized. Some places have been colonized or modernized for so long that they struggle to remember what their local architecture used to prioritize. Frank Lloyd Wright brought back new ideas from ancient Japanese temples and bath houses that influenced his designs of the new American domestic residence. Prior to the proliferation of information, we already lived in a world that mixed up global ideas to solve local problems, but today the process has accelerated.

Today, I can take an overnight flight to Mongolia to look at their yurts in the grass plains, while simultaneously, on a single screen, comparing them online to the tent structures of Berber peoples in northern Africa, reading about the ground breaking inflatable structures of archigram and video conferencing a meeting with my project manager and design team back in the United States.

I'm interested in the impact exposure to other cultural solutions to similar problems that entirely altered the urban landscapes of cities across the globe in the last generation has evolved into something entirely new during our generation. How is the ability to instantaneously engage such distant realities altering the potential of design, and is it?

Ex-pat, refers to the idea that an ideology is inevitably exported when an uninfluenced person travels to another place and offers their expertise. The expertise that they offer is often based in philosophical foundations that differ completely from the thinking of the people that they wish to assist. The result of projects in this situation often end up being something blatantly foreign amongst a sea of projects that all share a similar aesthetic. This implantation of foreignness then leads to an integration, by the locals, of the strengths of the new into the customs and skills of the old, resulting in a wave of something new.

Re-pat, refers to the reverse of the situation of the Ex-pat, when that professional, who by being immersed in that other culture, has been deeply influenced by the immersion in that new lace and brings back expertise discovered there and by default begins including those ideas in the designs he/she does. The result would be the introduction of simple strategies that alter the way design and construction are done at home.

This process is inherently diplomatic. What level of attention and respect do we give to cultural strategies that have developed over thousands of years when we can access the schematic information about it instantaneously? To what depth do we understand the meaning inherent to the styles and strategies we then implement into our own contemporary designs. Is the Kasbah I mentioned above, not based on Monarchical social structures? Are we properly understanding the implications of a thousand year old structure meant to control its occupants when we build it today as an open democratic building?

Revelation, Transparency, Interaction

I remembered this project Window 2.0 by Khoury Levit Fong. The drawing above is from their website (News: Feb 18th Window 2.0 on exhibit in the LWR Gallery.) This continues with the more abstract idea of diplomacy being applied to all architecture and in this case the simple idea of how we build transparency into our structures. In this project, a "window" can be put on any interior wall allowing those inside to look out while those outside will not know they are being seen. The idea is that an actual window may not even be needed anymore. We could build a 2' thick concrete wall and then put a screen on the interior to give the sense that there is a window to those inside when in fact there isn't any aperture at all.

We as architects have the ability to design what is seen, by who, where, and when. This gives us incredible agency in designing how business or government will interact with its constituents. Deciding what is seen and what is concealed is the most critical action in diplomacy and we as architects will be asked to design how those strategies of revelation are deployed.

Historical Reinterpretation, Renovation, Bureaucracy

UNESCO needs to negotiate with the local community.

This house I visited in Seoul, South Korea was fascinating in all of the powerful interests it was forced to negotiate in its reinterpretation and renovation into contemporary usability. This home is part of a strictly preserved neighborhood of old homes that have come to represent the ideal traditional Korean home. Over the last few decades, the active preservation has become more and more intense as Seoul strives to become a modern global capital on the level of Paris and Tokyo. The woman who renovated this house spent five years jumping through the many bureaucratic hoops, including community organizations, local and national government, and non governmental agencies that needed to be satisfied before she was even allowed to touch this home. Interestingly, she noted to me that the architect she was designing this renovation with was someone who did not survive those many negotiations.

In affect, through renovation, this woman revitalized a home that likely would have been razed to build a multi-story mansion when a more powerful developer obtained the property. So she did in some ways "save" the home and the history. The controversy is that she changed the nature of the home while simply maintaining the image. Paper windows became glass, interior mud walls gave way to plaster, and passive ventilation was replaced with a conditioned environment etc.

The greatest difficulty of this situation in many places around the world is the negotiation between the desire for preservation and the reality that in order to preserve, normal life and local communities must also continue to function. Normal life for the owner of this home was a need to create a 21st century design studio while maintaining a centuries old home. The conclusion is what is in the photographed above. As UNESCO’s power expands, we may begin to encounter more need for diplomatic solutions in situations like this.

*A fun fact of this neighborhood is that it is British residents that are the most active in pushing for preservation while majorities of Koreans prefer to modernize. **In addition to this, the houses are actually, in part, the making of Japanese colonial politicians who moved into the neighborhood at the turn of the 20th century.

Explication, Revitalisation, Temporality

The Dutch Landscape Architecture firm OKRA, as part of the revitalisation of a downtown square, installed strips of corten steel, from which light and mist emanate visibly at night. The strategy is part of a plan to explicate the history of the city. The corten steel is the width of the old wall and the light and mist makes visible the extents of the original Roman settlement and cathedral’s shere of influence. This project negotiates between the past and the present in how it reveals historical information while also injecting new life into a city square especially at night.