The Rear Second Floor Presentation Room Journey

So now I have the final jury before the tables behind me, and I'm moderately content with the way I performed. I showed the panel my process since the beginning, offering drawing after drawing in A1 format with added animations on a telly. I was proud of the detailing that went into the project, and I talked a lot about how the fragments I found on the street informed the final design, an infinite skyscraper, thin as a wire. Perhaps too much, because when the presentation was done, I was asked by one of the teachers, head of design at the Bartlett: "If you had to put all the descriptions of the project to the side and then explain it in one sentence, what would you say?" I was slightly disorientated by this question, but I should have seen it coming, because as much as I am anti-context I'm also anti-concept; my works are contradictory mini-universes of thoughts that feed on each other, often lacking a central point or definition. I can't remember what I answered, though. Then, another teacher who had seen my project last autumn (and called it "awful") said that I had developed so much, he almost couldn't believe I was the same person. Heh.

However, I'm not done yet. Now comes the time to push hard for the final tables, so I went to school again today to work on a new drawing. I'm always the happiest when I bring out a new sheet of paper, ready to be inked with whatever weird shapes I can invent this time. I'm not a particularily fast drawer, I like to take my time to concentrate on the small things and not rush the craft just because I have a deadline. If you work hard all the time, and not just a few days before the crit, you will make progress. It has been said that design is 10% inspiration and 90% transpiration, and I'm inclined to believe that. So, ram it and push it again, as those groovy Jamaicans would say. Hope for the best, people, and be bold.

Off Into Deep Space

Fell in and out of sleep in the studio today, lost in the afternoon after staring at my new drawing since ten in the morning. Strange combinations of words started whispering in my ear, as they often do when I'm tired. Sometimes I write them down to use in my archi-poems, a kind of spice from faraway waters in my mind. I have compiled a portfolio of my work to send to Lund, to see whether they would let me into fifth year should I return. But now, when things finally are starting to flow, when I can rise early in the morning and work diligently during the day and enjoy it, I'm not so sure whether I want to go back anymore. Gah. I don't know what to do. Better just sit still and wait for the final crit, one step at a time. I don't even know if Lund will accept my work, because it's hardly got anything to do with building anymore. It's experiments, prototypes, ink and poetry. A place like the AA is one of very few where I can actually be myself and be appreciated for it.

I'm wearing both my おまもり on my bag. One is for luck, two cancel each other out, or so I've heard. Perhaps I'm a backwards person, because the last two weeks have been good. Really good. I'm making friends, I listen to stories and I write my own. I like to just sit and listen to what's going on around me. That's why I can't work well at home, because the silence is suffocating, it reminds me of all the lonely days I spent in bed just staring at the dust settling in the clouded light. But those days are in the past, and the days that are coming will be different.

Each of us has to do what one finds important. I get up, I go to school, I work, or I don't work, and then I go home again at ten in the evening. These are the weeks of crits, myself, I'm on Friday, but I'm not stressed. I will present what I have, and hopefully that'll be enough. My drawing school has morphed in and out of fantasy and now occupies the vertical, along with sushi for lunch, a "detox box", whatever that means, with salmon and - of course - avocado pieces rolled into rice. I wonder who makes them, where he is, if he's ever been to Japan, like I have (twice) ...

My room is slightly cold, so to get out of bed is always a way of challenging my own comfort. I follow my routines, and the routines my body sets up for me. There's an old man begging for money by the Dominion Theatre, "God bless you" he says everytime I walk by. Sometimes I give him a smile, sometimes a pound, a leftover from dinner. Everyone's working hard to be themselves, even if that means being someone else. I think I'm slowly maturing out of this sturm-und-drang-period of my life, finding a path that is clear to me, a path I'd like to walk to the end to find out how many forests I will pass on the way.

Do you need acknowledgement to know you're alive?
The argument that our meaning is only to reproduce
seems suspect to me, as suspect as a Tschumi lecture
how everyone is presenting what they've already done.

Hammers and drills across the road, students working on new models and installations. I'm taking arbitrary decisions, letting my feelings guide me to what's important. It's not that I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm doing it in a intuitive way. Skipping breakfast every morning, or just silently eating a bun with some freshly squeezed juice. I'm sleeping less as well, a sign that my sickness is gradually leaving me, and I can enjoy the day as it comes. Lunch with meatballs and pasta in the sun, this is how it should be. Doubts about my future - what is best? What will benefit me the most? I now know that I want to do architecture, but not necessarily buildings. A month is such a short time, and yet I only have one month left of my third year. I read the yearbook of my previous university, and was disheartened. On a technical level, it's okay, but on an intellectual and formal ... it just leaves you in a sigh.

I don't know. I know very little.

Better Than The Original?

To Do What One Can

New day, new habits. Living on sandwiches and beef pastry, drinking water, just water. My drawing takes time, but at least it's progressing. Each line is there for a cause, it separates the space from the matter and makes architecture, flat suggestions of architecture. Crit next Friday (not this Friday) and I have to write, draw and animate until then, with text coming in and out, people moving around like a stop-motion Alice in Wonderland film. Charities make ads in the subway, I text some money there, some money here, skipping the mango smoothie in Pret. This is what we call production mode.

Took a break in the library yesterday, and read the latest Mark Magazine issue. It's strange how media today has begun to take interest in video gaming, just as film was the target of much debate in the previous decades. It's because gaming has matured, it is now an art form on its own, able to induce both awe and wonder. In the future, we will regard the user created mods of yesterday as expressions of art, hailed in exhibitions all over the world. But first, games have to find their own place of artistic sustainability. Perhaps indie and Android gaming is the beginning, if it can only break free from its own nostalgia.

It's all good memories, the days I make at the AA.
If I can go this far, I can go even a bit further.
I open doors, for others to close
when I've passed through.

Walking in My Mind

I had an epiphany this morning.
Wrestling with the sunshine that attacks
from an open window.

I seem to have many epiphanies these mornings
hoping that one of them will be the final.
I'm a philosopher in a pot, telling only
the truth that I find, and expressing it
in the only ways I have.

When there is no shame
there is no suffering.

Lithium

Went on a drive with the old car, the bright golden one with new tyres and a CD player repeating Phil Collins' Take Me Home until you turn the engine off. I went to the sea, because I always go to the sea when I need to gather my thoughts. I thought about my doctor who I had just met, who told me I didn't really fit in any category of mental illnesses, since I have traits of many. I'm borderline psychotic, borderline Asperger's and borderline schizophrenic. I embrace the difference. Regardless of who I am, we are all the same. You don't need to understand me, just as I don't need to understand myself in order to live. I'm reading the old diary notes from four years ago, when I was busy finding out the "truth" to all things, my ontological philosophical period, which seem so far away now that I'm just writing about architecture and love and apple pies with custard cream.

I have a good home in London. I like it there. I like going to school. I like listening to the lectures and having a coffee, meeting new people in the bar, people you would otherwise never meet and never say hello to. I wish to myself, I wish I could just have a first moment again, the one when I saw you, but gmail knows my wishes and stores them away for me to read when my hair starts coming off. Still a long time from now, still we can watch the red, earthbound lights from the Metropolitan Government Office. There are many things I have yet to do, I'm not content yet, I still have to chase my shooting star.

Ear Manet

Small steps forward, slipping a bit, getting wet. No writing prize for me, but at least one nomination for our unit. Lots of drawing as usual, and animation. My teacher loved it, he said he "felt warm inside" when he saw it. The living ceiling undulating and pulsing to the wind, a building that is alive. (The girl next to me wanted to live in it.) My enthusiasm comes in waves; if I could only make it through the mornings, as good as in the evenings. I know, I've said it before. I've said so many things before, but I need to say them again, call them up so they don't disappear, as would a wish for a white pigeon one day bring the promise of a life on your own, shaped the way you shape things.

I'm glad I write so much.
Memories are good to breathe
to show how you're thinking
how you've changed, a little
and I suppose, we have little
ability to change ourselves
as do the situations we end
change us.

Drizzle

A day off from the hectics of school, spent luckily in my bed, in my room, with some orange juice and New York bagels. I keep on writing about architecture, because that's the only thing I know. I might be slightly obsessed, but thinking is also good for your mental health. To think is to do with your mind; there are simply people who are more accustomed to the tool of language than the hammer. It shouldn't surprise anyone. To write is to make magic out of the ordinary, to make the simple walk from your home to the grocery store pregnant with observation, emotion and imagination. But I'm different. I want the magic to be real, I want the awe to inspire us, to show alternative futures to you. No, not futures, just alternatives.

I still keep the box that your watches came in, thinking, if it's here with me, a piece of you is with me, a thought, something we both like. I liked your watches. I wonder, what are we pursuing? Do we even know where we are, at the moment? Do you know? You are in your room, but is that enough? Are you happy? Have you made the right mistakes? I want to write a book of Tokyo. Just live there, just walk around, judging for myself what it is I see in this country of other ways, like the Persian letters sent home. London is too cramped, too much of the same that I've already seen, traditions, brick and plaster. Who is your favorite architect is as hard a question as which is your favorite book. I like books with pictures, just as I like buildings with words. Once upon a time ...

Follow You, Follow Me

Turned on my mobile phone this morning and saw an email from my teacher in History and Theory class; turned out I had been nominated-to-be-nominated for the AA writing prize, and he congratulated me. Or us, should I say, because we were three. It doesn't mean I've won anything, but it's nice to get recognition for a task you tried hard to do (the whole afternoon). I like to write, and if you do what you like, you become good at it. I'm glad to have TS out of the way as well, more than happy, actually, because I've been worrying the entire spring about whether I would fail TS, and thus fail the year. I still wonder: did I really pass? But I did. I did.

I also think I'm finding my preferred method in architecture, by illustration and, now, animation. It's a special feeling to take a flat drawing, scan it, cut it apart and then bring it to life in After Effects. It's deceivingly low-tech. It's also fun to see how different our projects are in the unit; one girl is making a steam powered workshop for a long-dead Victorian architect, another is researching into rights of light and lease on the site, a third is wrapping everything in insulation, and so on. And then there's me, with my paper lanterns. I don't know about the other units, but I'm thoroughly happy to have chosen Inter 2.

Dry facades of aging brick
ravens jumping over the corpse
of a fish and chips take away
students playing with a pink ball
kicking it out from a smoking break
yes, spring is certainly here.

Pass!

Are you alright? I'm fine. I walk the road to the tube station, I buy my chocolate snacks, disregarding my dentist's advice (I have strong teeth). School is always nicer when the sky is blue, and tomorrow is a Bernard Tschumi lecture I will probably disregard as well, although my teacher recommended it. He was happy to see me, more than happy, actually; I even got a teacher's hug, rare as they are. A breakthrough might've been reached, I now know why context is important, I swear, I'm converted, perhaps not in theory but in dirty pragmatics. I have models to build, ideas to materialize, because, apparently, I have a duty, a responsibility to myself, to externalize my thoughts. It's not easy. I'm a bit frightened actually, because I fear I will lose the poetic if I suddenly start to make sense. It is a tighrope challenge, to be concise and precise and still hold on to the lyrical. A bit like this blog.

Still no computer for me, except for writing. Doesn't matter. My pen is my cursor, my hand knows how to move, if slowly, across the A1. And you don't need to scrap anything, every line is there, permanent, water- and saltproof. Routine is my friend, away from the hallucinations that confuse my mornings. "Word salad" was the word my doctor used, far away in 2010 and the first time I was signed into the hospital. A bit like dreaming.

The Adventure Continues

I change more quickly than the spring weather, but that's how I am; can't help it, won't help it. A revelation on the plane to Heathrow, suddenly everything fell into place, no errors, only possibilities. Wish I could cover the entire site, but I will have to do with a lesser footprint. Perhaps everything can be covered in concrete? Erasing Calthorpe, parodying the maximum redevelopment plans for a sleek skyscraper to pierce the clouds. The Shard is a violation of the rules of the game, it is the antithesis to contextualism, but still, no building would last without enough ambiguity to carry some hope for the future.

The double octaves of an 80's italo disco hit - what isn't there that Italians do better? (Moroder, I'm looking at you.) Not that I don't want to go there, but a vacation in Provence isn't that bad, either. I want some electro hindi chatter, so trust Yasutaka Nakata to bring the beats. Autotune is not dead, it has just transformed into something more kei.

また 来週

Some cookies, some milk. Still green apples from last year.
Your face is turned away when I don't want to answer.
Tomorrow I go, again, but only to return soon
this is my home, this was always my home.

I let you hold my hand on the highway to Beppu.
You were confident enough to drive with the other.
And now you are in the big city, with people
who you care about, then, I thought I should not
bother you with my fears, I thought, I should
leave you alone, for as long (or as much)
as you need, to understand.

Perhaps I'm lying to myself.
Perhaps I'm lying to everyone
who once came close to me, but
I'd like to think it was the truth
the truth painted with black strokes
in your living room, on the tatami mats.

The Brave Silk Worm

I don't wish for much. I don't have anything to wish for that I haven't already got. The world is spherical, I'm right where I belong and yet I want to be somewhere else, somewhere closer to you. To find us at different paths, but with letters we sent there is a place for us to come together, even if it's just a small room, a small bed. Why do we have to wait? How long can we hold together before we both break from the pain of being apart? I don't know what to say to comfort you, except "just wait", if that's ever a consolation. So much bad poetry, so many things I should've said but never did, things I hope you understand anyway, that what I said wasn't necessarily truth but true only for the time being.

Heavy drops from the sky, tomorrow. That's what I want you to see, to see me fall in your lap, when we're both searching for a warmth that could substitute forgotten hands. Now, I wish you could see me. I'm standing here, shouting your name to the sea, but the sea won't listen, won't carry me to the place at the edge of the vertical Earth. I'm here alone, thinking: what are you doing? Is the moon rounder in your city? Are the paper lanterns shining brighter? Don't be so quick to learn from your mistakes, because first you have to make them. So make them well, cry before and laugh after them.

Far Away

The dust blows against the car from the fields around, as I make my way from the sea to my home in the far flat lands. I keep thinking about you, the things we would do together, the meals we would cook and eat, slowly, while looking at each others eyes, trying to decide what to say when there is nothing left to say, if we need to say anything at all, that is. Sometimes the silence of thought and the touch of two hands is enough, that's when we understand our intentions, which were never selfish to begin with. To make a case for the selfishness of men is as easy to make a case for the opposite, but we believe all the things we read when we're in high school, when we think we have formed an opinion that no-one else has, and we're only betraying ourselves.

What do you want me to say? I can only tell you the things I've already said, but they need to be said again and again. Just like listening to the same songs again and again, we need to be assured of their existence, that there is such beauty in the world, that we weren't just ghosts floating in loneliness between morning and afternoon. Find a bit of luck this moment, this very moment when we need each other, and think of the times when we are there, the good times we shared under the blossoming trees next to the smallest castle in the country. Funny, isn't it?

In The Shadows

Out of all the homes I make in the world, it's nice
to return to where it all started, to be content
with the wayfaring spirit that swirls around you
like a morning rain that soaks the concrete terrace.

London is good to me, but I want to do other things
walking around, thinking even more, never stop thinking
and play a bit on the piano, old jazz records and coffee
I think I've found out that the things I want to do
are the things I want to do, the things I enjoy
while I'm doing them.

Our favorite place is just a stairway to the river
no need for grand narratives, or pompous theory
just a walk along the river, there and back.
Can I kiss you first?

Stuff Is Happening [Feat. P-Ola]

Mist flowing in from Denmark as I prepare to begin my journey into the depths of carpentry. Whoever said I wasn't a handy man was lying; not that I'm particularily good, but I can make results when there's a demand for it. My problem is more in thinking the big thoughts all the time and not caring enough about what's here and now. Better just stand back and enjoy the fluttering birds that immerse me in front of the car as I've finished the tasks of day, see, it it strange how we just work more and more, as if work was the only way to live, the only measurement we would have of success. But on the other hand, I don't think high of Western self-fulfillment and New Age-airyness, they're both just chasing happiness, when happiness is here, in just being, and doing what is in front of you, no big questions, no solutions, no ideals. (The ideal is the mundane.)

Light is falling less quickly now that we're in April. April already? Yes. Soon it will be summer, hot days with sunshine and shaded dinners of newly picked potatoes and parsley. A summer like spring in Japan, walking around in short sleeves and watching people frying meat over the grill and enjoying a beer or two. That's something good, isn't it?

Cold winds blowing in from the sea, as we load the car roof with wood, for experiments. What we will use it for when the TS deadline is passed is for others to think of, I'm merely a vessel for creation, one who dreams up ideas and carries them through. Still thinking of what to do, what to do with all these hours that keep floating away. Still must be happy for the strength I receive, a visit to the doctor scheduled for next week will stay on the same medicine levels, nothing to change, why change it if it works? Waking up early every morning, rising early, sometimes sleeping with the blinds up, just to soak in all the sunshine I can get. Stuck during the late evening with deep techno in my headphones, good music to fall asleep to.

Life is bigger than architecture, but that doesn't mean I should stop thinking of it. I should only stop talking about it on this blog, so music! Music! Music! Whatever happened to dubstep and this new brostep stuff? Who is it that invents these stupid genre names? My little brother digs hardstyle, which to me sounds like circus music, but to each his own. I downloaded Beatport's top 100 to my HD, and was amazed at the mass of neo-anthem-electro-trance on sale. Is this what people are listening to these days? Dancing to? I don't know ... I'm too old for clubbing, or rather, I've already had my greatest nights out. I hope the Prodigy never gets old, it's the nineties in a box, r-a-v-e in its most intense application. Breathe, I say, breathe.

I should learn how to fold paper cranes again.
I should wear the socks I bought from UniQlo.
I should work.

My Workspace

Azure Hell

Too much computer trouble makes Oliver a sad man, but I try to interpret it as a message from a higher power, gently convincing me to abandon computers altogether and dwell in the realm of drawing and carpentry. After all, what would a TS about drawing be if there weren't any drawings of the actual machine? So I continue the path ahead, to wherever it leads me, and adapt just slightly to come off as a necessarily grumpy old man. A short journey to the sea, rolling and thundering high with the wind blowing in with its chilly 5 degrees, the aerometer on the roof spinning around like a dancer, the scaffolding on the chimney revealing further projects, always a new project for the days when spring is supposed to be here. Still some snow on the hills, still some evergreen pines on my way home. This was an adventure all right, and I found if not myself, then something that looked just like it. Leon Krier, let's get funky ...

Goodnight, Miss Yesterday

Woke up today to a world that was strangely my own
one which I had created, and yet I keep looking up ahead
wishing for a path along, a thing to commit to, and still
I know it's there just in front of me, I'm just afraid
to touch it, afraid to be left behind again, so
I'm running around in circles listening
to the same songs I had in my iPod
of high school's long gone days.

Flying like a bird without wings I land where there is room for my shadow
but when you come around to my cramped hotel room, I become free
and I no longer need my glasses to see ahead because you are there
close enough for me to breathe the same air as you breathed
following your iris from ceiling to window and into me
into my hidden theatre where I store away my past.

Sweden is still lurking under the snow.
Copenhagen is still waiting for rain.
My home is made the same way I left it.
The photos of my grandmother, with her
accordion and guitar, and the plans
I made for tomorrow, when I have time
to do what I couldn't do, didn't do
when I was with you, I was busy
dreaming awake.

Sakura Castle

Good song I heard on TV in Oita.

Kitsuki

Last day at school for the spring term, next time I'll be around the sky will be brighter, the sun will be warmer, the ground will be blossoming and no cold winds can convince me otherwise. A classmate commented positively on my scarf, and thoughtful as I am, I had matched the colours of it with that of my socks, that is, orange-blue-purple. Colours are good, without them we would live in a poor world, just as a world without smell.

I tend to live on food that's already been prepared, my flatmate keeps joking about how it's been ages since last time I cooked. And it is true, I don't like cooking. Food is just something necessarily unnecessary that has been forced upon the body, like sleep. I'm looking forward to the day when all food is prepared within little pills that we slip down the throat, and "lunch" will be replaced by something more fun, like reading. "Read-lunch", "runch"? Or "lunch" in Japanese. I told my brother I wish eating could be replaced by thinking, and the more you thought the more you would eat. He said: "If that'd be true, you would be so fat you couldn't move." So, maybe this traditional "eating" business is for the best.

A chilly afternoon in the library, on våffeldagen, apparently, "waffles day" as it is in English. No waffles for me yet, I still need to work on my TS, doing sketches for the machine I'm going to build, going from detail to whole, from fragment to coherency. People flooding the Underground, still having the time to offer a seat to those left standing. The human spirit is only ego in its mind, but sometimes we choose pain instead of pleasure, because we've gotten used to it, to not eating, to freeze. A man in a camo-jacket sleeping on the bar desk outside of Tottenham Court Road, apologizing twice, as if for his own existence, the mere fact that he's sitting beside me. Cyprus crisis on the phone, listening to the theme from Titanic. I suspect I'm more cliché than I think.

And as the day comes, I realize that it's less than a week until we will see each other, and as I neglect my daily tasks to read your letters, I recall what it means to be together. We walk the streets in thought, we brush the same doubts off to dive into each others' hopes, where we are no longer afraid, where we know what it means to cry, of happiness. I will arrive to you on the train platform, and you will be waiting there. And what will we do? Perhaps just embracing each other, not letting go, no words, just two bodies becoming one, and two of us holding hands, making up one link. We are both too stubborn to go, both not wanting anything but the beauty of small words, like, "hello". Finally hello.

The Easter lilies bow to the snow
The cars race by, neglecting
I walk on, little by little
I unearth spring.