◍ Speech Preamble :

NEW ARCHITECTS FOR A NEW ASIA

Speaking to architects as an architect is peculiarly challenging because of the inherently narrow focus and confusion regarding scope and scale. Since buildings are the focus, the design of buildings as singular art objects has become all consuming. Architects have been driven into this corner by the market. This is therefore the big issue. This has to change.

Two things. Let me at the outset be clear about scale and the other is scope: Product design is pico scale. Interior design is micro scale. Building design is meso scale. Urban planning is macro scale. Regional planning is super macro scale. Scope: the world is in crisis. Climate, geo-politics, environment, finance, social injustice… T

the Bauhaus hit the right note at the right time then. The Arts and Crafts movement, the Luddite movement, the Beau Arts, all missed the mark. Industrial capitalism was the prime mover. The Bauhaus initially articulated the freeing of the senses while in Weimar. In Dessau it applied the creative spirit into industrialism and into building design by inventing compelling aesthetics and methods. In Berlin, it was crushed by Nazi politics and also by its drift into authoritarian design ideology under Mies. The Bauhaus then decamped to Britain and to the USA, there it blossomed in MIT, Harvard and Illinois.

The Bauhaus became the model for all architecture schools worldwide. Of course, nativists like Frank Lloyd Wright reacted against this. Wright’s Usonian Architecture failed to stem the tide of European Industrial aesthetic that grabbed corporate business imagination. This took the world by storm, became the de-facto International Style and of course it became the emblem of modernism and progress itself aspired to by the non-West everywhere. Westernisation became modernisation. Architecture style thus served corporate capitalism’s domination of the world.

As Asia transitions into a new phase, we must rethink all of these received wisdoms. Our ancient traditions have much to teach us if we care to learn. There is one important lesson it has to teach. It is in the ancient Chinese formulation that cosmic order is made up of Heaven, Earth and Man as distinct entities. Man is unlike in the West caught in the dialectic between good and evil needing atonement and thus redemption. The Asian man is an independent entity capable of initiative. This is the ancient Chinese model. It is this initiative that we might now invent and deploy our energies to invent a New Architecture that goes beyond catching up with the West. We need a new spatial and formal vision. Indeed, a new aesthetic. The invention of this language is my persistent purpose…but we must understand the forces arrayed against us.