MEK
MEKdesign is an extension of the professional work by Clara Murado, Juan Elvira and Enrique Krahe, architects and graphic designers with office in Madrid and Delft.
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Teknobyen Studentboliger
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- Nov 13, 08Environmental design is being taken into acount more and more in architecture design these days. This is something good, but we believe it should not only rely on the building's performance.
A participative managment in the environmental issues would be much more effective at long term because it builds good "environmental" habits in citizents. The user should percieve he/she is an important part of it. - Mar 25, 08
One more Japanese connection: When we started the student house project, I read “Norwegian Wood”, by Haruki Murakami. I was just attracted by the title, and didn’t expect any further connections with the process… As Watanabe (the main character) described the residence he used to live in, I found an amusing link with myspace project in this kind of ‘universal’ feeling within the dorm of curtains being semi-permanent parts of the window that no student even thought that could be washed!
- Nov 13, 08
Outdoors or indoors... such ‘door’ is no longer neatly distinguishable.
Let’s think of an open environment, a fresh exterior, of streets and parks melted and introduced inside architecture. Let’s think of an interior that assumes the conditions of the public space, unprogrammed and multiple... a place that sometimes is a bit wild... In the Europan9 project, this space is a mixed-use two-storey hyperlounge in which different ambiances are located, where to play while waiting for the laundry, or where to attend a lecture while baking bread.
- Nov 13, 08
- Mar 25, 08
The intensification of empathic relationships with objects, or the action of turning almost anything into an object of affection became a social phenomenon in Japan. Maybe there are some interesting issues that relate to our lasts posts, related to identity, interaction and the creation of objects of affection.
Nowadays kawaii (cute, mignon, liebe or süss) is everywhere in Japan. Every one of the 47 japanese prefectures has its own kawaii-like representative pet, the same as the police force or the state tv. Big commercial airplanes decorated with 6m high Pokémons are kawaii. Totoro, Doraemon, Kitty, Tamagotchi, Momo the PostPet, etc. are kawaii. Kawaii is the most used word in colloquial contemporary japanese. Kawaii is small, rounded, infant-related, soft and amusing. Every designer of the enterprises specialized in character design like Sanrio or San-X, must produce at least one or two characters a year (although some of them have been born in the good old b/w tv days).
According to Hiromura Masaaki, industrial designer and author of some of these characters, the key is communication with a maximum number of receptors: "to create a character successfully there are two basic requirements, it must be kawaii and simple; because of it we develop simple and lovable shapes, with clear and brilliant colours. Creating a character that simbolizes a communication media is a means of connectind different generations and different people who, otherwise, wouldn't communicate."
The anatomy of such characters would be as follows: globally the features of a sexless, mute and defenceless, with no corporal orifices and vaguely insinuated limbs. In a broader sense, kawaii also refers to whats lovable, simple, atractive, artificial and available, humorous and kitsch.
Kawaiiness gives personality and subjective presence to commodities that otherwise wouldn't be nothing but mass-produced and impersonal. - Nov 13, 08
- Mar 25, 08
An architectural product, a building, is a character: then we should as architects how to model their personalities, their dominant features in order to enhance their communicative capacities. Buildings are ‘urban messengers’.
Let’s see buildings as a set of ‘individuals’ with their own identity, with their own singular characteristics. Buildings do set an empathy relationship with the user. This affective relationship must belong to the specific tools of architecture. Therefore, architecture operates with objective materials and also with subjective bonds an relations with users and objecs around them. Following this line of thought, context deals with transferences between project and ‘everything else’, aimed to link user and ‘building’. These links are finally identification codes.
We could think of buildings starting from their performative capacities before the user and its context, beyond any other concern, like abstract form producing. As a matter of fact such ‘form editing’ should emphasize those performative capacities and even maybe hide those architectural codes that blur those capacities. Architectural abstraction, complexity or monumentality could be transformed therefore into something apprehensible, legible. The domestic object turned into a pet.
Baudrillard defined the object as the “perfect pet”. Objects are the only ‘beings’ that emotionally affect us without any restriction to our personality whatsoever. “Objects are the only beings whose coexistence is truly possible, because their differences do not confront people, as it is usual among the living creatures, but they tamely converge to us and sum up esasyly to our consciences”
And follows:
“The object is a dog whith everything taken out extept fidelity”
Therefore, the relationship between architecture and user, if appropiately articulated, can be intensified if perceived as an object of affection and not a presence unconnected to our own experience.
Next post: On Kawaii
- Mar 25, 08
There is one more item I think might be interesting for the project. There is a nice sentence in Saramago’s memories Cadernos de Lanzarote: “the home returns to the home”, when referring the day his private library arrived from Lisbon to his new house in Lanzarote. The library is the home. This arises a subject I’m very interested on: which mechanisms are spread out for architecture to be socially accepted? When Toyo Ito started building Sendai Mediatheque, a parallel, regulated process arose: programmed acts, meetings, publications... anticipated in some way the innermost experiences of the building to be. The expectations created around the building site would almost as intense to those within a family awaiting a new baby... Pretty much like creating a layette!
I believe it is possible to build a sort of pre-relationship between the students house, the city and the students that can be efficiently implemented by collaborating with NTNU (fortunately they are in the mood for it), by developing workshops and experimental constructions on the site, a simultaneous open, and transparent process involving citizens and students… that might even end up living on the residence! - Mar 25, 08
I am proposing you guys a new possible concept to develop and intermingle with the others. Artifacts that have the capability to modify the experience of domestic, that break the automatisms of architectural experience, or that of collective space. An electric door-bell changed the experience of space a century ago dramatically... Just also one example of this contained in our project: sliding 'garage-doors' on student rooms). Names for this área are accepted. ('Little shift big change' objects as a provisional one).
- Nov 13, 08Virtual chatrooms are very popular social networking spaces that offer an interactive, user submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos and videos internationally. They are the most effective public spaces in the context of global societies whose community-building depend growingly of the search of common affinities, and not of phisical proximity of urban squares. They guarantee situations of real interchange, and those of action outside its virtual boundaries. For this can be a banal tool and at the same time a tool for the management of action and upheaval, for the association and coordination of people. Barthes pointed out that the space of conflict, of friction, is the public space par excellànce.
Chat rooms are also the places where avatars meet. Places to freely and temporarily transform and literally wear alternative identities, a kind of accelerator of identity, a personality laboratory. The temporal exacerbation of the construction of the imagined self. - Nov 13, 08
MySpace Building unifies situations of extreme intimacy and privacy, with those of extroversion. My room is my world. A mechanism that allows the expansion of our identity, and ultimately of interchange and negotiation with others. One own’s space is a laboratory where it is possible to test the abilities that later will be experienced in every act of interaction.The best room is that which stages a small world of our own.
