My inspiration....my baby E

I have not been maintaining my blog for about one and the half years....and boy o boy.......there were major transformations in my life. 2009 has been great. Finally grad with my Ph.D, and attending my grad next week, promoted promoted and promoted.....and was pregnant, and delivered a cute bubba boy, Chan E-Than. He was the best thing of my life. Life is never the same anymore! E-Than is just so naughty, so adorable, so charming, so so so so smart! Nuff said, like mother like son! He is and will continue to be my inspiration.

As semester of teaching has just started, I am bouncing back to work again, missing E-Than all the way! I will hopefully keep bloging to update my baby-E's memories of growing up!

kit of parts: an approach to DESIGN

The kit of parts has been an approach developed from the 1960s. The following are some of the rules which govern the kit of parts:

• it is purely spatial, only use horizontal, vertical places and columns as space defining elements


• it is about space-making, not form-making; think about composition


• it is abstract; little attention is given on the real material and site context


• there are different possibilities of defining space


• it is indeed modenists in approach, think de stijl, think suprematism (meaning using 2D elements to give 3D effects).

The WHITE House

If you were to ask 'what style I like most in architectural history', I would say that it will be Modernist Architecture. I don't mean the monotonous, soulness and meaningless International Style, but rather, I meant the White Purist Box architecture of Corbusier. So, when it came to 'what colour' should I paint my house, without hesitation I said 'WHITE'! Although it was nothing like the Corbu box, I thought White would be a way to take away the 'ugly details' on the facade. The one thing I hated about the house was the facade; unfortunately, the Feng Shui master said that the best thing about the house was the facade. So, obviously I obeyed the advice of the FS master and took away every thing in the house, and retained the facade. I swing pass my house to check on the renovation progress, and I saw this WHITE thing, I wonder is this the WHITE house that I wanted? Should I have painted it any other colour? What else could it have been? What do you think?

Of course the house is not totally WHITE. Whilst the front was a Corbu WHITE house, the back was a rugged grey hollow wall. The contractor asked, 'how do you want me to finish this?' And I just replied, 'Oh, this is very nice. It's done. No need to do anything to it?' I guess, the perception of beauty is quite personal. Everyone who saw the wall said that it would be tough cleaning the 'hollow stones'; it's too rough, are you running out of money to plaster and paint..... But to me, this was the best space of the house, 'the wet kitchen', which I may never even use. To come to think of it, design is about imagination + design should solve problem. Not sure it these ideas did solve anything, but it was my imagination of what a 'house' should be. At least, it made my house quite different from the China-man Classical Column House or the mundane repetitive facades by the developer, or the floral gates, grilles, and ornaments which resembled Art Nouveau-ism.

It will be 2 more weeks to the end of my renovation. Looking forward to a house with a blend of modernity, brutalism and a sense of identity!

Joe & Veron's home ideas

Joe & me recently bought a new home in Bandar Puteri Puchong. Trained as architects, Joe & me felt that it was a possibility for us to realised our dreams, only to realised that the limitation was not imagination and creativity but $$$. Now we finally realised why our lecturer said 'in drawing, every line has a meaning'. Every line = $$$. Working with a limited budget, we explore different texture and materiality to create tactile spaces. The conceptual development of the space where derived from several broad ideas: the idea of traditional living space, the idea of raw and brutalist architecture, and the idea of spatial definition through different spatial volumes.

It's been 2 1/2 weeks into our new home renovation. These are some pix as sneak preview to what our house will become. Will post new pix once the house is up and running! We will have a blast!

A new beginning: the blog experience

Inspired by a blog set up by my colleague, Ian, I am now starting my blog. This blog will be a virtual platform for friends, students, colleagues to discuss about the creativity field of architecture, theory and design.