Felix Suen
indeterminate frames and open territories
structure | negotiated systems by felix wing lam suen
23
My heart was becoming my own foreigner—a stranger precisely because it was inside. Yet this strangeness could only come from the outside for having first emerged inside…the intrusion on thought of a body foreign to thought. 1 — Jean-Luc Nancy
Within current modes of globalisation the notion of the home demands to be reconsidered. Its socio-political definition is constantly being challenged by economic shifts, constant densification of cities and the effects of rapid modernisation. It is often articulated as a place or a structure of economic instability and the cause of modern alienation and isolation as housing prices either plummet or go beyond reach except for society’s economic elites; the skylines of many cities are now filled with tower after tower of anonymous glass boxes and endless hallways of doors attributed to faceless neighbours. In critiquing these issues my project re-imagines an alternative version of home: one that addresses architecture’s inherent weakness, its innate ability to alienate and factionalise in the process of creating space. This innate and inevitable weakness in architecture can be found within the structural tectonics of the architectural object – zones of indetermination where materials and voids meet in order to create the frame or subject of architectural space. These zones, if expanded to a habitable scale, can be used to create alternative social conditions that are not fully defined programmatically. These are potential spaces where relationships between the community and the stranger may develop and where the borders that usually determine the relationships between inside and outside collapse.
1 Nancy, Jean-Luc. Corpus . New York: Fordham University Press, 2008
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