Modern Talking

2 months in at my present work place, what have I learned so far? Besides all that comes under the design studio work environment, appreciation amongst people; colleagues and bosses alike are abundance here. "Thank you", "good job", "great" are words that you hear every day, as natural as breathing fresh air con of a newly occupied building which happens to be where my office is now. That’s what you hear anyways, the office is pin drop quiet.

Are we as Malaysians not trained to say thank you as often as we drink teh tarik in the morning? Or are we just too stucked up? Of course we do smile a lot. That’s what most tourists would say when a camera is put on their faces and asked “what do you think of Malaysians, SIR?”

Did you notice that I wrote design studio instead of architect firm? Well it is an architect firm sort of but the environment is very much studio like. For one, we do not have CAD monkeys here. Everyone is a designer including our office manageress. She designs our yearly holidays, our cheques every end of the month, and sometimes our weekends by emailing us where the next warehouse sale is. Here I get to explore skills that I never had the chance to do before because of work load reasons. Within 4 weeks after using the program SketchUp, I managed to do basic 3d modeling enough for quick presentation standard.



These images are series of progression from week 1 of starting the SketchUp program, getting the basic form to Week 4, getting the materials in. There is no rendering applied, as the program name suggest it is just a sketch up tool. Very fast,very effective and get the message across effortlessly. No fancy lighting. No fancy materials. Just pure basic synapses to pen (in this case, keyboard) drawings. Honestly, the design is too Miesian for my taste, but working with the director on the design which by the way was part of Foster-ism a while back, I can fully understand. The design is very practical, simple and well, Miesian to say the least. If I have it my way, the whole pavilion will be covered with creepers, the form can be slightly organic maintaining the proportion of space for efficiency reasons (gfa & nfa wise) a whole lot less of glazing.

Back in the old days, Architecture 101, architecture students tend to go minimalist because for the fact that you need to draw a lot less. Bits of horizontal lines there, vertical lines here, one door here, flat roof there, elevate it for the floating effect and voila! you done. That was then, but minimalist or the original term modernist requires more poetic thoughts, combining essence of the surrounding elements. Here are some examples of the modernists’ approach combining the old and the new.