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?