The House Project_Bangkok: June 2012

Context: Architecture, History, Memory & Everyday Life

During the Summer of 2011, I passed this house every day, on my way to work, and photographed it on three or four occasions, from the street, marvelling at its 'remarkable geometry' and pondering over the 'mystery' of its fragile existence.

The opportunity to set up a research project, which would redefine art and design as research — in the spirit of Action Research — during a visiting professorship at King Mongkut's University, led me to propose the house as the subject for a collaborative group project. Looking at the built environment around us, in the heart of Bangkok, the house seemed to challenge everything that planners, architects and the rest of us have come to regard as a 'house'.

The responses of children to photographs of the house confirmed this.

Not to disrupt the life of the 'architect' of this self-built, 100% sustainable project, and give him his due, we have taken the upmost care to respect his privacy and anonymity.

To create the conditions under which he could give us a master-class will remain, till the end, one of the key ambitions of this project; but it seems increasingly improbable. The master-class will have to be inferred from our personal experiences.

The initial aim of this project was to explore the house through a series of media propositions/interventions, which would attempt to describe and interpret it, from a variety of perspectives, and consider some of the implications behind its structure and its existence, as a house; drawing some lessons from it.

Our ambition, at this first stage, was to generate 'insights' through visual propositions.

Considering the owner as an improbable 'hero', I also acknowledged his status as 'victim' (of society and circumstances); for I doubted that any of us (privileged as we are) would have the courage, resilience and resourcefulness to survive in these conditions.

Let it be said, however, that the owner likes his house, as it stands [for its symbolic value?]; although he recognizes that, eighteen years on, it does not, yet, function as originally intended (but he is optimistic that it will…).

In the meanwhile a friend has built him an alternative, safe accomodation, alongside the house, resting against the wall of the apartment block on the next plot, probably using material taken from the house; thus weakening it further… and unwittingly accentuating its decline…

Our intention in this project is not to romanticize (nor aestheticize or intellectualize) the house — treating it as a picturesque urban ruin or as a phlosophical puzzle— but to acknowledge it for what it is: a remarkable, utopian 'creation'; a living allegory, than may remain beyond our grasp; in spite of our efforts: a secular (humanist) annunciation in a materialist world…

In the course of this project, it is expected that all participants will assume the position of critical witnesses towards their own practice and challenge their epistemological and methodological assumptions, in the spirit of Action Research.

This is easier said than done. The tendency of some participants to see the project as an opportunity to generate individual 'works' rather than collective propositions to be combined with others is all too evident; a reflection of the expectations the art world places upon artists as individuals.

The project will culminate in a cross media installation at H Project Space, H Gallery, Bangkok, in August-September 2012. The exhibition will present a selection of media interpretations of and responses to the house and to its architect' s approach and motivations; highlighting its exemplary value, against the tragic conditions under which it has grown, and its relevance for the present.

The exhibition may be read against D.H. Lawrence' s critique of civilisation, as expressed in his book Apocalypse.

Saturday, 23 June 2012