Jimenez Lai Quotes

Setting up absurd worlds with rules to violate - it's one of the things I hope to achieve with my work. The world is meaningless and therefore it's funny. One of the reasons why architects are often attracted to philosophers, partially, has to do with making sense of the world around us as well as the making of worlds. I think architecture could be understood as the construction of realities, or the construction of worlds. The moment you put something down on paper it forces you to organize and arrange these thoughts a little better. It is possible to construct small realities that contain political or philosophical responses, not necessarily just practical or economical responses. I believe architecture is a cultural output and I think Rem Koolhaas is one of the rare individuals who was able to really output architecture as cultural artifact. Many artists I enjoy have a large body of work, and eventually the message is derived out from the sum of its parts. The role of architecture, in terms of communication, is not going to drastically change either. Architectural drawing is a language with conventions where the rules can be deliberately misused; a well-composed architectural drawing can both contain correct and incorrect arrangements of meaningful things. Unlike sciences, literature as art relies on societal acceptance of a certain vocabulary. The obsession was so real and so prolonged. Sleeping was kind of like taking breaks from continuing the obsession. In some cases there are ways of thinking about what an architectural program produces - interior and exterior - that is not necessarily directed by an economic requirement, but is a diagram based on human actions, selfish or otherwise. The diagram of the house is a portrait of the family, a true portrait, whether it's sad or happy. It's important to write a mystery novel where the takeaway is not a giveaway - where something could be read over and over. The dining room is a building; the bathroom is a building. If we scatter this single-program architecture inside of a domestic environment, we can link an interior urbanism in a way similar to a village or a township of tiny houses. Every time I traveled to a new city, I would learn about local heroes I did not know about, and I would learn about their very impressive contribution to their cities. I think regionalism was a little easier before mass communication was made possible. This is not to say that regionalism doesn't exist anymore. I think it does. In order for architecture to experience its ongoing evolution as a language, there has to be a lot of adjusted copies between how architects draw, think, engage bylaws and constraints. I think of architecture as language, and I look within the intra-communication between architects. The idea of morphology of languages is something that I'm really interested in. Morphology happens over time. It's not necessarily a bad thing. As a visual discourse, architecture requires trained individuals to work on the refined philosophical debates. School gave me the necessary training, and I've built on this based on my own aesthetics, as most do. Aesthetics is both politics and philosophy, a series of agreements and disagreements between subjective minds. Architecture, in itself, at the end of the day, is a rational profession. When I would present my work as a student, often I would hear, 'Your project is too formal' - it's too form-based; it's too form-driven. Which is kind of shocking for a visual practice, for someone to say something discouraging about a focus on an exploration of aesthetics. If I were to arrive at a foreign country like Czech Republic, I don't have to speak Czech to understand the feeling of the local sensations through architecture. That is a kind of communication that no language can perform. What's interesting in archaeology is that we always understand other cultures by digging up their cities; architecture is almost always a way for us to formulate a diagram of how people used to live. I see architecture as a form of communication over time.