life = education = life

Here's an excerpt from the article Hann wrote about in the previous post regarding the work of the Population and Community Development Association's work in building schools in the rural areas of Thailand. The account was written by Jessica Shortall, CEO of Catalyst Strategy Advisors. Jessica is making the trip as one of the first Population Development International fellows, whose task it is to learn about PDA’s work and share that knowledge in their own communities and with others working in social enterprise.

“If you know how life works, you know how to educate.”
- Khun Wichean, headmaster, Lamplaimat Pattana School

Lamplaimat Pattana School (LPS) is calm. This is the first impression I get upon approaching and entering this beautiful village school (grades K – 5). It’s a private school (with startup funding from a wealthy British businessman) with working farm plots, shaded outdoor spaces, rabbits hopping around the grounds, indoor and outdoor plants, and high ceilings. The children, sitting in stockingfeet on the floors of their classrooms, are just so…calm. They laugh, call out answers, and play games, but not in that manic, over-sugared and low-attention-span way.

We soon delve into the complex system that is contributing to this calm atmosphere. School starts every day with a 20-minute meditation, in which the children and their teachers do simple yoga, coordination exercises to focus the mind, and low-brain-wave meditation. The children’s attention is then drawn along throughout the day and the whole semester by a 10-week curriculum centring on a single subject of study. Students decide the subject with their teachers – this year one group is studying fish, another electricity, and a third, clothing. Through this ongoing project students write stories (improving their writing, language, and thinking skills), learn English, do science experiments, study history related to the subject, learn skills (like sewing, for the clothing project), create art and music, and gain digital literacy by doing research through the school’s bank of internet-ready computers. What about testing and government benchmarks, I ask Khun Wichean, the headmaster. “I don’t take government tests seriously,” he replies. “We use authentic assessment here.” At LPS this means the teachers assess students across all categories (what most of us would put into silos and call “subjects” like reading, maths, etc.) in each project. The children do in fact do well on the government tests but this is more of a box to tick than a goal in itself.

Drawing from any thinking it finds useful for its paradigm of life-as-education (from Montessori to Steiner, neohumanist thinking to Eastern philosophy), LPS sees its students not as “boxes we must fill with knowledge”, but as humans who need to decide for themselves which knowledge is important, and who need tools to go and get that knowledge. “Everyone doesn’t have to know the same thing,” he notes. True: that’s not how life, and good old Adam Smith’s specialisation and division of labour, works.

Read the entire account here. You will find at the same link, her experience with the PDA. I studied the PDA for my dissertation and was very inspired by the work of Meechai. Read Jessica's blog posts for a better idea of what they do. You can also the link to PDA's website at the bottom of the sidebar on the right.

The Open Hand

Attended a lecture on Corbusier and Chandigarh. What brought the Swiss architect and Nehru, the first Prime Minister of Indian Republic who fought for India's independence with Ghandi, together? Why would Nehru invite the westerner to design the Capital of Chandigarh, the new capitol of the Indian Punjab State?

When the British Colonial power left, they divided the Punjab State in Northwestern India into half according to religion. The silly categorization of human led to ten million people exchanging border: Muslims were forced to the Pakistani half and Hindus, or rather the rest of the non-Muslims population were forced to the Indian half. Lahore, the original capital ended up on the Pakistan side, hence Chandigarh was chosen to serve as the new capital for the Indian Punjab State.

Nehru and Corbu envisioned a modern city for the state. What they had in mind was not a modern city which imports the industrialization or market economy of the west, but a city which embraces the modern idea of independence. It was the era of Cold War, every nation has to decide which side of the two sides to take, but Nehru refused to pick either. He maintained the position of "Non-Alignment", believing in the independence of man, of nation-state. Corbu supported his vision wholeheartedly, and the Open Hand was the symbol of this partnership in faith. That was the foundation that Chandigarh and the Chandigarh Capitol project was founded upon.







We all know already Corbu's other architectural visions for Chandigarh. How he spent tremendous amount of time observing the Indian way of life, the people that he is building for, the cows that he thought was part of the plaza. He knew he had to take into account the village to the north of the capital, how the complex would be built with baskets concrete passed down on the heads of the Indian women chain. He felt with his heart, measured on site with his eyes, and went back to plan with his mind (Cubist operation). Deeply humanistic. At this point, he was rethinking about his position in archi in general. Machines and modular man helped him understand something, but it was not it. Ronchamp, La Tourette and Firminy were to follow (my personal fav).

Nehru and Corbu shared two common things: Vision + Deeply Humanistic heart. And made Chandigarh possible.

Greenitechture

Here's a tongue-in-cheek look at why we need to do more as architects to build sustainably.

There are whole books that have been written on sustainable architecture. And the area of study is really quite wide, covering issues like new materials, harnessing energy, politics, business, etc. We recently had a workshop in NUS where we discussed many of these issues. I will try to upload our findings once I have collated all the information from the different groups.

I believe building sustainably will be the way the industry has to move towards given the global climate changes that we are experiencing, that is largely the cause of the Greenhouse effect. I doubt changing to an alternate means of harnessing energy - from fossil fuel (eg. coal) to nuclear is goign to be enough. There is a need to use our resources more responsibly and I will try to write about that in another post.

Agenda: Mediating Platform

Here you go. The inroduction to hunch 10, an entire issue dedicated to "theorizing the practice of mediation". Sorry for the length, take ur time to read it. Enjoy!




Mediators
by Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Dean of Berlage Institute
from hunch 10

Architects are famously unable to communicate, or even to explain themselves. We are, of course, not talking here of architecture as a mere service profession but as an activity that, beyond providing refuge from nature to human life and activity and organizing space, can also stage and structure social protocols, articulate tge public and the private domains, and represent institutions and power structures. The stereotype of the architect described in the media, but also subliminally promoted in schools, is a myopic, authoritarian and arrogant character, driven by a burning desire to implement his visions and obsessions. To become a relevant architect one has to nurture a certain dose of megalomania, look down on reality, and walk around in a state of permanent dissatisfaction. Architects are by default unequipped to listen to the public.

The reality for most of the profession has been much less ideal, and the amount of architecture that is allowed to be “critical” is actually very small. Most of the time, the roles of the architect is to implement the instructions of people with sufficient power to transform physical space to better suit their purpose. Developers, politicians and regulatory bodies hold real power to decide on the built environment, and practicing architects are mere accomplices on their ventures.

As the power to modify the built environment has become increasingly affordable and available to an increasing number of social agents, architects have become enablers rather than visionaries, subject to the decisions of others. In the developed and democratic world, construction, once an expensive and sophisticated technology, is now available to an ever-growing population of agents, and this has radically altered the traditional relationships between the commissioner and the architect. On the one hand, the architect has been removed from responsibilities that have been transferred to regulations or supervisory bodies. These bodies ensure that the deployment of construction technologies do not detract from the public good. And this does not stop at ensuring structural integrity, accessibility and environmental performance, but also the preservation of cultural heritage, and even the assessment of the “beauty” or “quality” of the architectural product.

Due to the progressive transfer of the public project initiatives to the private sector within most political and economic regimes, the capacity to implement architectural policies has been charged to market agents operating effectively within the existing legal frame but generally devoid of an architectural agenda. This mode of production has effectively removed the capacity of implementing architectural agendas both from the architects and the commissioners. The productive relationship between Michelangelo and Lorenzo de Medici, Nehru and Corbusier, or Niemeyer and Kubicek is now reduced to very small portions of the market as the construction of the environment is decided generally by faceless corporations and implemented by faceless consultants in a neural, risk-averse and heavily regulated legal frame.

However, as democratic governance, technological advances and market forces increasingly erase the possibility of a true architectural program, both from the architects and their commissioners, the opportunities to direct the built environment are re-emerging in a growing intermediate domain to which we are dedicating this issue of hunch. The rise of a new population of agents that we have called mediators is the phenomenon we have set out to elucidate here.

Mediators operate within the democratization of the decision-making processes in the built environment. As construction technology becomes affordable for increasing numbers of agents and sectors of the population, governmental bodies are forced to exponentially regulate construction activities, and also become interested in utilizing building for political goals. Within the pervasive democratic system, brokering the deals between political powers and the construction industry has reached increasing levels of complexity that require specialists to interface with a growing number of stakeholders in the process. Since architects have proved to be totally dysfunctional in playing this role, a new breed of operators has emerged in the industry as a specific and effective practice- a new domain where far-reaching effects can be achieved.

It is common for commissions today to include a composite of clients, often mixed public-private organizations, with no clear architectural program but full of architectural expectation. The mounting demand for change in contemporary cities has substantially reduced the strategic capacity of those empowered with commissioning capacity- be it elected politicians or the company CEO- and rendered architectural utopias as inadequate vehicles for effective transformation.

What is relevant about mediators is that, in the best cases, they cannot afford to be entirely subservient to either a status quo usually represented by the client, or to the utopian drive, usually represented by the architect. They must move between both. Mediators need to develop a certain program and count on stable architects- often involuntary creators of the mediator’s vision- capable tot implement it. At the same time, the mediator’s program needs to be understandable to those empowered to make decisions, and is therefore contaminated, bastardized, street-wise and definitely anti-utopian.

Mediators fill the missing link between an ever-growing architectural public and clientele and the architects’ hermetic collective. Mediators are often architects themselves, but have developed specialized listening skills, their antennae enabling them to interpret the needs of individuals, organizations, or entire populations, and to translate needs into guidelines for architects. They often perform as matchmakers between a particular client or problem and a particular architect. Mediators help the public understand what architects can offer, how crucial architecture is and how it should be done. They operate as opinion-makers through a variety of means and media, and often with a greater influence than both politicians and architects. If mediators are well-informed, their opinion is hardly neutral. Their role requires them to be passionate about architecture and to often act as collectors of architects they coach and promote. Mediators have stables of architects they deploy when necessary or push forward in competitions. It’s usually better to have a mediator in charge than a bunch of bureaucrats going by the book with absolute neutrality and without an architectural program.

The mediators phenomenon has a global reach. And like other global processes, it too has evolved local varieties contingent on local cultures. The European climate has perhaps proven to be the most favorable site for the evolution of this species, probably owing to the strength of the public sector, an entrenched urban tradition, and possibly a historically enlightened public. European mediators are often grown from ranks of critics, journalists and academics. A proof of the remaining importance of ideology and public-ness in the European city is one of the most fertile milieus for mediators has been architectural magazines and cultural institutes. One could distinguish Jean-Louis Cohen during his period as a director of the IFA, Jose Luis Mateo as a director of Quaderns, Vittorio Magnano Lampugnani at the helm of Domus, Hans van Dijk in Archis or Ricky Burdett at the Architectural Foundation as characters who were able to develop a particular take on architecture and, in certain cases, assembles a consistent group of architects they coaches and promoted throughout their magazines, their roles as jurors and advisors to public administrations, and other commissioning bodies. Others have also emerged from the broadsheets, such as Luis Fernandez-Galiano and Dejan Sudjic, at El Pais and The Observer respectively, where they have been instrumental in creating broader public awareness and promoting certain approaches to architecture. In Europe, a slightly different breed of mediators, more directly engaged with governmental power, has emerged from public service. The cases of Jose Antonio Acebilio in Barcelona, Hans Stimmann in Berlin or Maarten Schmitt in Groningen are examples of non-elected technocrats who have succeed to implement incredibly ambitious programs of urban regeneration, previously reserved only for elected politicians or developers, and, most importantly, loaded with the strongest kind of architectural ideology rather than with neutral technocratic strategies.

In the US, while the climate has been generally less fertile, there are a few figures who have managed to steer meager public fund into architecture and eventually hit it off with a major patron. In America, mediators are generally less public than in Europe, as the public dimension of architecture is still less developed and the intellectual and public debates are often disconnected from city governance and the construction industry. Mediation across these areas is a difficult task. Developers have lost their appetite for the visions that Portman or Hines had had in the past and are generally skeptical about architecture. Consequently, mediators in America are restricted to articulate the exchanges between public institutions with architectural ambitions and practices of a critical edge, operating more often as lobbies than as orchestrators. Their public profile is much less prominent than that of their European counterparts.

One of the first American mediators is obviously Phyllis Lambert, where, for biographical reasons, the client and the ideologue coincide in the same person. Phyllis Lambert started her career literally as a client in the construction of the Seagram Building and evolved into a philanthropist and institution-builder with the creation of the Canadian Center for Architecture. American mediators cannot afford to sustain an ideological stance like their European counterparts and usually ground their operation in a cultural or academic institution or in the press, as professional debate is very detached from the local construction industry decision-making processes.

The most powerful mediators in the US are by far those connected to the media, and the only mass media in America with an interest in architecture seems to be The New York Times. Paul Goldberger and Herbert Muschamp have been important forces in lobbying for certain architects and certain commissions, but still much less effective than their European counterparts at producing political effects, possibly due to the lack of ideological consistency in their critique.

On a different order of influence, the most fertile ground for American mediators have been the curators of a few institutions. The Museum of Modern Art, The Wexner Center, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art have been probably the most effective promoters of architectural public debate in the US, producing debate in the US, producing local mediators with an ideological program, but still very disengaged from the real powers that shape American cities.

Asia is currently the area where the disengagement between public architectural culture and the built environment is more acute, and where public awareness and debate on the city and architecture is less present. This is due to a strong local tradition that identifies the arhictect with the builder rather than considering architecture a theoretical discipline. In Asia, mediation happens through the materiality of the construction and generally the only agents entitled to discuss architecture publicly, and to advise politicians or industry captains, are those few well-recognized architects that, after establishing themselves as successful technicians, have been allowed to develop an attitude to confront politicians with wider issues.

While I must admit that, except for Japan and Korea, my knowledge of the ground is limited and I may be mussing important data, I am certain that the most advanced place in terms of mediation is Japan. During the years of the “bubble economy,” a local specimen, locale called “producer” emerged generally from the private publishing or curatorial sectors. Producers were basically charged to administer excess. While everyday practical problems were solved efficiently by what is probably the most sophisticated construction industry in the world, progressive clients called in the “producers” to generate a controlled disruption in the hope of yielding innovation. Japanese mediators were not articulating relationship between political power, the public and construction programs, like in Europe, nor between institutional power and the professional debate like in the US. The most important skill of Japanese mediators was to communicate with outsider, rather than addressing the subject of the local built environment. Many “experimental” projects were given to foreign architects, as they were usually unaware of the sophistication of the systems developed by local contactors, and had a higher capacity to ignore local conventions. Mediators usually the only ones in the industry able to communicate with them, and to defend their work from the clients themselves by creating an area of impunity around the projects they managed. Shozo Baba, the former director of Schinkenchiku, and Fran Kitagawa, from the Art Front Gallery, are probably the best example of this breed in Japan. After the bubble economy, the “producers” seem to have lost ground as the public interest in architecture through public projects has paradoxically led to their demise, as experimentation is now driven by small and enlightened private owners with enough knowledge to give small projects to experimental architects but not enough cash or interest to pay for mediation.


Despite the growing importance and scale of the practice, architecture’s mediators have not yet been recognized as specific agents in the building industry. Nobody has offered them a tribune upon which to explain their opinions, programs, ambitions, and tribulations as a collective. This publication, primarily based on the lecture series with the same title held at The Berlage Institute in Rotterdam during Spring 2004/2005, is a first attempt to theorize this practice of mediation.

.................................................................

The role of mediator is definitely not a safety net to fall back on. Instead I see the act of mediation in line with re:Act's philosophy of advocating architecture for the "public good". I hope re:Act can gradually develop into a mediating platform for SouthEast Asia, actively promoting architecture through inter-disciplinary collaboration, governmental and public engagenment, debate and education (Xchange, Xecute, Xplore). This is exaclty why re:Act was set up in the beginning.

In any case, the platform cannot be neutral. Architecture for humanity cannot be the main agenda, for it is the ethical basis upon which the discipline is founded, preceding the existence of the discipline. The question is HOW can we do it.

MEDIATOR is what Asia needs

Today I met the 'Species' (Hunch No. 10, 9).

Like other of his kind, he is trained in Architecture, but does not do design work now. He is by no means close to giving up architecture, but in fact loves it too much, at least enough to make him decide that he wants to devote the rest of his career advocating architecture and getting it built. He is usually hired by the owner, resposible for not only making sure the owner get what he wants, but also that the money is well-spent on good design. The architects love him too of course, for he is taking care of all the dirty works that they don't want to deal with, like convincing the client and coaxing the contractors. He is the architecture's MEDIATOR (11), John Mass.



John Mass, the owner's representative for SANAA's Glass Pavilion of The Toledo Museum of Art and a graduate of Cooper, was here to share with us the battle of construction of the amazing glass structure. Needless to say, the recount of the fight was filled with juicy details like how everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong and how everything was built except those shown drawings. However, I am not going to elaborate the story here because it is worth another story on its own, and more importantly, I realise his service is exactly what Singapore if not Asia (except Japan) needs, in order to avoid the unfortunate disaster of the IR design selection and SG missing the chance of putting itself on the architectural world map from happening again.

People of money and power and project have to realise at one point that efficiency and cost cannot be the sole determining factor in building. These two criteria are crucial if it is a means to achieve better humanity or architectural ends, but is deadly if it is the end itself. It's about time to start factoring in the 'soft cost' incurred due imcompetancy in design or construction management. Quoting John, "The difference between a good piece of realised architecture work and a bad one is definitely not in the cost. Piano's High Museum in Atlanta costs about 1000 per square foor, Morgan Library in NY was 800, SANAA's New Museum is estimated to be 500, but they paid only 300 for The Toledo Glass Pavilion." Appreciation for design doesn't cost a lot, and ironically ended more cost-efficient than the projects that set out to be cost efficient, and in fact the value add and quality that the good piece of work adds to the urban life is priceless.

But how do we expect the policy and decision makers to know if their in-house representatives are too caught up with admin work and the design archiects are either too busy or simply unequiped at selling their designs and making things happen. That is why we need MEDIATOR to "fill the missing link between the ever-growing architectural public and clientele and the architects' hermetic collective" (9), having developed "specialized listening skills, their antennae enabling them to interpret the needs of individuals, organizations, or entire populations, and to translate needs into guidelines for architects" (9).

John's agency shares a relatively small piece of limelight despite having the above mentioned projects happend. To fight relentlessly day in day out for someone else's design is no easy task. You need more than the technical skills involved- you need a big selfless heart, and endless of belief and appreciation for the art itself. It is not surprising why Ricky Burdett said the following when commenting on mediating The Tate Modern project architecture in london: "If u've got the talent, the ego, and the ability to be a great designer, you probably don't end up doing what I do because you want to design things" (42).

So, I asked, "What motivates you to go on fighting everyday, for your job is built upon the conflicts of different interest groups? Don't you ever get tired of fighting?" To this, he said, "You know what, whenever I feel tired I just have to think that I have contributed something to Toledo and made it a better place, even if it is only slightly."

Frankly, the title 'MEDIATOR' only describes their job, their importance is no less than the key stone in the Roman Arch, and teh tarik in my life.


ps: check out HUNCH no. 10, an entire issue dedicated to the Mediators.
pps: Mediator seems like the perfect profession for someone who doesn't like design or who can't design, but is too deep into it or too late to quit. it is tailored made for those who love or know archi too much to quit, but not enough to want to focus on theory or design to become a critic.

Cities' Systems & Geopolitics

Yoz! Sernhong here. A very Happy New Year to everyone! Its been a while since I have put up any blog entries. ReallyArchitecture [react] just had an AGM 2 weeks ago, a successful one that managed to overcome the geographical boundary problem which we fear yet embrace at the same time. Kudos to the inventor of the Internet! All of us from Singapore, Los Angeles, New York & London met online for a video conference and had a meaningful and fruitful 3-hr meeting session!!! We all look forward to a fruitful and adventurous time ahead.

The Spring semester just started for me here at SCIArc. In Wes Jones's studio now. Since the blog also serves as a way for each of us to share our experiences and architecture education, I am putting up a series of stuff which I have come across, as well as stuff which I have done. I hope they will be beneficial to you as they have been to me. The topics/issues range from architecture digital intelligence to urban strategies and political empowerment. Hopefully, these can stir up a dialogue among ourselves to think about the following: the definition of ’the architect’, the architect’s role, architecture & practice, relevance to society, impact of intervention & individual’s purpose as an architect. Feel free to comment.

The 1^st of the ‘series’ is an extraction of a seminar brief by this
media-artist-cum-architect-cum-film-maker called Ed Keller. You can check out his office’s website www.aumstudio.org. This semester he wants to push everyone to possibly come up with a manifesto from the studio work. The stuff he is looking at got to do with Geopolitical issues, Power of the city, 21^st century borders, city morphologies, tipping point of each city, etc.

Here goes >>>

Scenes from Syriana (top) & Code 46 (bottom)

City Systems

(Below is an extraction from the Post-Empire Urbanisms course description, by Ed Keller)

“ Cities have historically functioned as ‘ambient’ environments, with many cultural, economic, political and aesthetic systems inflecting each other and creating complex urban ecosystems with lifespans in the centuries. The city comes to life through the overlapping ambiences it can host: either as a kind of software, in cultural movements, or a kind of hardware, in the physical forms of the architecture of the city itself. The unique nature and identity of any urban location emerges in an irreducible resonance that is produced between that ‘software’ and ‘hardware’. In the case of the contemporary global city, the intensification of this relationship has produced a more radical set of bifurcations, no longer resolved as the outcome of a binary logic (‘ambience’), yet rather as a monolithic temporal construct of parallel realities.

… … Design of the city now has to ask how we can harness globally networked systems of capital, transnational entities, and technologically enabled relationships and use them to energize the city.

… … Today’s development of Geotagging, locative media systems and the like are symptomatic of a new genre of representation and communication that will radically transform the city. Likewise, a new paradigm in both theory and narrative [written and filmed] provides us with glimpses of parallel realities which function as futures that we can anticipate with a mixture of dread and delight … … The global spaces of contestation for resources, identity, infrastructure, military control, or desire that we see in films like Demonlover [Assayas,2003], Syriana [Gaghan,2005], or Code 46 [Winterbottom, 2003] are not science fiction speculations, but verifications of the wildly reterritorialized reality we inhabit today.

… … The ‘time’ of the institution, which organizes a kind of monolithic memory structure on a political and cultural level – contrasts dramatically with the time of the individual subject, which is filled with myriad unpredictable details … … Urban morphologies are now on fast forward, as they adjust ever more rapidly to global systems that provide individuals, collectives, institutions with constantly shifting ways to interact. Architecture operates as a key link in this dynamic relation, in its capability to slow down such time, unlike many other disciplines tied into the practice of generating urban morphology. This seminar will study these emerging ‘Post-Empire’ landscapes of control, systemic tendencies, and new freedoms.”

Well, I am taking this seminar to aid in my thesis(summer 2007) and trying to relate to how the morphology of not just Singapore, but Asian cities, particularly East Asia and South-east Asia, have developed and how it can potentially develop if we can understand them more and get a grip on the ‘systems’ in the midst of globalization. Personally, I feel a slow but sure subtle displacement of the architect’s role in the development of cities’ morphology. It also brings us back to the issues we discussed during the ‘Architect in a Bottle’ forum in June 2006. As Sylyng might agree, these also will link to what we have in mind for the theme content of the REACT’s newsletter, now in its 4^th draft review.

MUJI!

Update on Let's TAP exhibition, June 2006.
MUJI's gonna be our sponsor!
And you think dreams don't come true...

Collaboration with Big Fishes

Well, the recent debate for our group is whether to collaborate with NUS' The Architecture Society, and being the newsmonger that I am, here's the few thread of thoughts that were exchanged through emails. Collaboration with NUS will definitely give us credibility. But at the same time we lose our guerilla-like-think-tank independence that flourishes in email exchanges and the all-equalising web. In the long run, however, reACT will have to stand on its own two feet. But what about now? What about these fledgeling years when we are trying to establish ourselves? Would we need to work with every TAS president that comes along for 5 years or so? That would stymie our work if we have to account to different people every year! And what kids they are. (age wise). Tsk tsk. :)

But, as Janita says. Let's talk.

Janita:
Definitely think its a good idea to collaborate. We will run through with DMC. I'd hate it if they try to intervene with our objectives and goals though. Will we lose independence?
Ngai Keong:
I have a feeling that what we're doing is actually a conflict of interest. This may sound very cynical, but they're not really interested in education. They're more interested in running a business! They'd be more than happy that we do our things independently.
Sern Hong:
Still, another way would be to put some of the professors/school on our 'advisory board'. if they are willing, the advisory board will be an official element in our group. This will add credibility for us. We need an agenda. need to strategise b4 any meeting & action. not wise to just barge in to any meeting. to share my 2 cents worth, Jan and I prepared a powerpoint(much like a marketing sales presentation) to DMC last year. It was rather a success as they are convinced about what we want to do and how they can benefit. Basically, we tuned the presentation in such a way that it is about 'how SDE can benefit and how they are important to us'. Still, though, i am not comfortable linking with the school, there are certain 'elements' in it that will support us. we just have to seive that out.
Szue Hann:
Yeah, was worried that they'd intervene with what we're trying to do as well. We can talk about it during Fri's meeting. Might be late cause got class til evening though.

Check out our contact's email, from Expeditio, from Kotor, Montenegro. www.expeditio.org :
Will be great to have some architects from East Europe come down to Singapore, no?

Tanja says:
Thank you for your kind invitation to be part of your
exhibition / discussion in Singapore ... Of course we (a representative of
EXPEDITIO) would be very happy and honored to take part in it - to present
our work and share with you our experience. Maybe we can
also discuss about some common project ?! There is a lot
to learn from each other, I/m sure ...

Let me know if you need anything from our side to prepare your
event. We will think about some possible people to recommend.
We are not informed more then you about Platform 9.81 - just
from magazine ORIS ... We do not know them personally ...

We have some nice contacts in Slovenia - some interesting
architects (middle generation)... For example, today, tomorrow
and the day after we organize a lecture by one Slovenian
architect in Belgrade, Podgorica and Kotor (for students
of architecture and architects). The topic is:
"The Nature and Elementary Language of Space"
We have made also one short movie about space (build environment) that will be
presented after lectures (20 minutes) ...