Jimenez Lai is a faculty member of UCLA. He is also the founder and leader of Bureau Spectacular, a design studio founded in 2008 and led by Jimenez Lai and his partner, Joanna Grant.
The idea of morphology of languages is something that I'm really interested in.
The world is meaningless and therefore it's funny.
Every time I traveled to a new city, I would learn about local heroes I did not know about, and I would learn about their very impressive contribution to their cities.
I think of architecture as language, and I look within the intra-communication between architects.
In some cases there are ways of thinking about what an architectural program produces - interior and exterior - that is not necessarily directed by an economic requirement, but is a diagram based on human actions, selfish or otherwise.
To apply poetic license or to apply incorrect arrangements requires the idea or the understanding of correct arrangements - becoming an expert of the conventions of correct arrangements in order to misplace them. In other words, misplacing things with the understanding, or even the mastery, of normalcy is actually quite poetic. These are rule-based operations.
The diagram of the house is a portrait of the family, a true portrait, whether it's sad or happy.
Every time I traveled to a new city, I would learn about local heroes I did not know about, and I would learn about their very impressive contribution to their cities. There are nuanced senses that only people from the region can understand, and no amount of globalization can change that. It's almost like a maxim of a sorts, when you think about language, the way that people speak in a location. It does happen with architects, in terms of how they engage cities.
I think architecture could be understood as the construction of realities, or the construction of worlds. One of the reasons why architects are often attracted to philosophers, partially, has to do with making sense of the world around us as well as the making of worlds, and in our case, the realities we create can be as real as concrete. These kinds of ideas, of wild imagination, go into the question of how you make a world.
The obsession was so real and so prolonged. Sleeping was kind of like taking breaks from continuing the obsession.
Communication requires cultural context, and technology facilitates our ability to cross-reference ideas over time. Charles Moore were saying: Enough with the sterile, context-less architecture. Enough with the functional-minded frame of operation. How about a little mess? How about a little, let's say, syntax? A little quotation using history? How about some other meanings or symbols? I think that's the only logical reaction when you have to thoughtfully manage the communication of a lot of information.
Architecture, in itself, at the end of the day, is a rational profession.
One of the reasons why architects are often attracted to philosophers, partially, has to do with making sense of the world around us as well as the making of worlds.
What's interesting in archaeology is that we always understand other cultures by digging up their cities; architecture is almost always a way for us to formulate a diagram of how people used to live.
Morphology happens over time. It's not necessarily a bad thing.
I'm thinking about the idea of poetic license. People say that about certain writers: "Oh, the grammar sucks, but it's just the poetic license. " We accept it as being an art form of sorts: the incorrect rearrangement of meaningful things. Unlike sciences, literature as art relies on societal acceptance of a certain vocabulary. We're just making sounds out of our mouths if we don't both accept that what I'm saying has very significant meanings, and I'm accurately targeting what vocabulary I use and how I arrange each word.
I believe architecture is a cultural output and I think Rem Koolhaas is one of the rare individuals who was able to really output architecture as cultural artifact.
The dining room is a building; the bathroom is a building. If we scatter this single-program architecture inside of a domestic environment, we can link an interior urbanism in a way similar to a village or a township of tiny houses.
I don't really know what's going to happen 10,000 years from now. We've been biologically modern for, what, almost 200,000 years? Let's go back to the cave paintings: I think the moment that someone landed a charcoal on a wall to describe reality, that's language already - that happened on a vertical surface, which, even though they didn't build it, somehow we could understand it as architecture because there's a cavity that separates the inside and outside. That's 40,000 years in the past.
I think architecture could be understood as the construction of realities, or the construction of worlds.