I think architect is a profession of the thinker.
We think a lot for different level of understanding to observe our daily life.
But also good architect has good sense of observation and also sense of creation which can connect between what you see and what you create.
Thank you.
Our age or our generation has been educated from this modern way of thinking.
When the product arrives, there is a site plan.
The site plan is white.
You have a tabula rasa of the frame of the boundary.
Inside you can do anything.
It can be housing, it can be a museum, it can be an office building.
People ask you to do it, but still something we forgot, which i think important to understand this site had a memory, and then we trying to dig to discover underneath of this site plan that had not been written and never nobody explained.
So this is what we wanted to start from this digging down where the site has different past.
This is what we wanted to connect from something somehow cut from the modern planning strategy.
But actually we wanted to go backwards to really understand who lives there, how this place wants to be, and we ask to the place what place wants to be.
Any project where we start, we start from this research that is called archaeological research to find memory from this project.
Where the memory would be beneath of our underground world.
And as if archaeologists going to the desert.
There's nothing on the field.
But we don't know why they dig and then dig and dig to discover sometimes staircase, sometimes walls, sometimes the pots that never been written our history.
But because of they start digging, to collect, to understand who made these pots or who construct these walls and who came to arrive this land to start constructing technology.
So this is not only particularly this place, but there are exchange from different civilizations, different exchange of people.
By digging this kind of memory to start understanding, to associate what happened before and what has been brought it into the culture.
And then that, visually speaking, from images, but also all the research, are more archaeologically or scientifically analyzed to understand from different cultural point of view.
So images are beginning, comes from the books or comes from the internet, which also collect very fast to accumulate different way than the books.
Both are very important.
The images are the beginning for us to inform, to be the inspiration.
But since we are working at an international collaborator, The same images that we associate, we fantasize, very different from the way the Europeans or other French or Italians to the Japanese or Taiwanese, or the way we see the words through the images are very different way of our background.
Therefore, this image becomes sort of map of our way of thinking, and then to discuss about the base of like almost a sketch on the wall canvas.
So this 20th century of modernism was driving force to create the future, and this future has to be new and forgetting the past and free from the power, freedom from the religion and freedom from the built society to be exploring for our future.
But we forget so much things and we lost many things.
And so our challenge as an architect always think for the future, but we cannot imagine even 10 years later.
So we think to go backwards, even 100 years ago, to see the past, to see what happened in our life, what has been built from our life before modern time, to learn and to look at the life of the people and to not giving importance to the history or past but actually memory.
It's a living life that we trying to bring on to today and then trying to continue from the past to the future.
After thinking, all this approach to understand the history that we cannot change and history is very heavy and they tell you what is history about and we agree and we think this is very important for our human history.
It's being constructed our society and we should not change.
But our interest is memory is memory is not always written in the history and history is always a linear way to understand the way it's been written.
But sometimes people looking at the opposite side of the world.
These histories are not the same way of history that other people have.
Therefore, we are interested in more memory of the place where it's not in the list of history, but this memory is always digging to be the present.
That is very important for us to create architecture.
Especially, people forget, but the place remembers what happened.
So we wanted to bring this memory to the present time, and also memory moves from when it's been excavated, when it's been rebuilt of the present time.
When we speak about place, we know this is a place, and you know this feel like you're in a place.
And also, when you talk about space, somehow you can frame to feel like oh, that's the space and you can measure, you can kind of think about the space.
But when you think about how to find a place in the space, it's very ambiguous.
In 20th century, we built a lot of spaces, but we lost a lot of place.
And so somehow this sense of place that has been lost it.
There are a lot of airports or factories or mass production of supermarket.
You don't feel the place anymore.
So this is sort of opposition of the place where you feel there are something you have sensitivity of, you feel the placeness.
But this production of the package of space as a product, it's been mostly produced and mostly repeated.
And then infinitively, you can keep creating space and more space and more space to be able to construct.
This is one of the challenges as an architect.
How do you see this creation of a lot of space and space and space, and how we believe architecture to create a place for people?
This is what we are trying to challenge.
So when I think about the architecture, I start thinking about the place and space.
In between the place to the space, we know about the place, we know about the space.
But we don't know in between where the place become the space or where the space in the place.
We know about time, and we know about memory.
But we don't know when the time will become the memory and how memory can contain the amount of time.
So I'm trying to dig to understand one more step further, digging what it means to place.
It is about singularity.
Place exists only one place and cannot be replaced.
Therefore, place is only one place exists in our planet.
Space is about infinity.
We create a space.
The space can be divided into two or divided into four, or space can multiply to be continuously produced and produced to create a lot of spaces.
And the time is about continuity.
Time never stops and it's always continuing.
Human.
We're trying to make a period to stop and make things to be countable or measurable, but time never being stopped and it's always continuing.
And the memory, it's about collectivity.
It's called collective memory.
It's not only one personal memory, but our human being is being accumulated from generation to generation and continuing all this collectiveness of our human dignities are made us to live our life.
What i'd like to work on the architecture is trying to dig this memory of the place, to collect, to think archaeologically, to create.
Slowly, archaeology become architecture for the future.
So this is how we like to construct this archaeology of the future.
When I think of memory, there are personal memories or singular memories that are quite important.
Materials or objects have its own memory.
It's not abstract things.
Memory can be structured.
Memory can be function.
And memory, it's about emotion, too.
So it is very much part of architecture that not only the memory has abstract fact but it can drive and it can create the structure.
It can function for the people.
And it give you the emotion.
Collecting objects has become a personal journey of my life to meet people and become friends, or the place where you have never been, to remember that you went there in your personal life.
As well as you find a piece of object that somehow talking to me, and then to think, somehow you encounter for piece of object.
Sometimes working in the mountain to find a piece of stones.
I don't know why, and to have a chance to keep it part of your life.
Then, because of this, somehow taking this one, collecting the object, almost found object, bring back to home or bring back to our atelier, to be surrounded by this piece of memory of the objects that are somehow keeping it part of the life.
And then to imagine that materials are personally important but also become sometimes the inspiration of this.
Somehow it touched my life and touched my inspiration and stayed in my thinking.
Then suddenly things connect together.
But I cannot always explain why I found this one, but I remember where I found it and why this came from those places and then talking to the people gives me something that I cannot see.
But the person who tells the story behind about object and this somehow to pass on the memory to me and I can pass to this other people.
So this one that I like to also think of the memory.
So lately I've been thinking about the future, And it's a very simple question what is the future to us?
This question makes me to think there are two different kinds of future.
One is a new future, and others are memorable future.
Because we have been kind of desire to attempt to create always new future, and a new future brings a new future.
But new future sometimes getting old and we forget and then we look for new future again.
But what we like to think and I'm much more interested in is a memorable future.
That future always being memorable and then future become memory and memory and become the future.
And this continuous loop of coming back to create the future and this become the memory and that become future.
And that's what I have been thinking as archaeologist of the future is always thinking all this memory to dig and then finding a memory for the future and that become memory for somebody and that can continue to the future again.
So this is nothing to do with new and old, but it becomes always continuous idea for carrying our life, to be.
