Joon Blue

To imagine something as truly yours and then realize that it has never been is a traumatizing experience of betrayal. Unfortunately, architects tend to be cynical about their field and work not because of their know-it-all attitudes, but because of repeated denials and separation from their ideals. The ideals are typically the fantasy that their project truly belongs to them. Unfortunately, only a few architects are blessed with such reality; the only ways architects stay passionate and sane seem to be: only accepting works from clients who have generous budgets, desperately theorizing everything to bestow some sort of relevance to the course of architectural histories and theories, or grow dull. Most practicing architects fall into these categories, sometimes overlapping a couple of them.

I have struggled with such a crisis for a while myself. It took me almost a decade to find meaning in the type of works I do, which are heavily multi-family residential remodeling/commercial tenant improvement projects. The projects are small, sometimes mind-numbingly easy, sometimes unnecessarily complicated and frustrating, and sometimes challenging and fun. The projects are almost theoretically irrelevant due to the client characteristics, scale, and budgets of the projects, except that they are much more sustainable than demolishing and building new structures, involve complicated political nuance between the owners, residents, and the government, and provides a critique of the ordinary everyday lives, which are all very mundane and exciting at the same time.

As I kept on working with the existing apartment buildings, understanding the duality within the fragments of our lives that only seem so singular and simple, then, has become my obsession and focus. Seeing the mundane and unique within residential apartments built in the 60s, navigating the tension between the communal and private economy in multifamily designs, excavating the layers of the sacred in the lands of the secular cities, etc. through the lens of architecture keeps me not only relevant to my beloved disciplines but also has developed ways of appreciating the world. In Arendtian terms, they would be the actions that shape world. Architectural disciplines have shaped my life uniquely animating.

One day, I coined an expression (to myself) “practice as the project”. If architectural projects are works done as part of the practice, therefore components of what identifies a typ of a practice, there are only a few practices out there. There are fancy architects, serious architects, fancy and serious architects, and the rest. However, what if every architects’ practices are focused on their unique methods, vessels, or channels of world-building? We have already started seeing variety of practices that adapt unique skillsets and methods of manifesting world-making; some develop software, some become architect developers, some are involved with the local communities and some are designing installation arts. As for me, I want to reveal and curate hidden layers within our contemporary society, the margins, the sacred, the crisis, etc. More will be discussed at an appropriate time; for now, the point of the post follows. When practice becomes a unique way of being, the project of being and becoming, it celebrates architecture as an autonomous pursuit of identity and love toward the world.