On Dreams

It's not
What you thought
When you first began it
You got
What you want
Now you can hardly stand it though,
By now you know
It's not going to stop
It's not going to stop
It's not going to stop
'Til you wise up
…
So just give up

Wise Up, Aimee Mann (Magnolia, 1999)

More than five years ago, when I decided to return to Indonesia and focus my work in the field of education, I read a book that inspired and captured the essence of what I thought I would love doing. The book, “One Day, All Children …”, was written by Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America.

Teach for America is a teacher corps inspired by the Peace Corps. It recruits the best of recent college graduates in the United States and places them as teachers for two years in some of the worst public schools in inner urban and rural America to help improve the quality of education in these schools.

Over these past few days, I reread the book, and went over the sentences that I underlined five years ago which, in retrospect, still rang true at present. As I was reading it, I could still feel a fire burning inside me – mixed with a regretful pang that I am nowhere near where I envisioned myself to be. What went wrong?

Kopp started out the organization at 21. Like most recent college graduates, she was idealistic, ambitious, and full of energy. And she started big: her aim was to raise USD 2.5 million, recruited 500 graduates from top universities, and placed them in several parts of America within a year. She poured her life to realize her vision. The reality of realizing a dream, like most of us know through experience, is far from easy. But she persisted, found the supports she needed, and made it.

Starting big was the one thing I didn’t do. I don’t mean to say that I didn’t get anything. On the contrary, I learnt and experienced a lot. Most of the time, I had been happy and content with my small dreams. But now I am drained of any energy to even continue my small dreams. So I have decided to wise up, and give up my small dreams. I will start plunging and paddling myself to realize my bigger dream. I hope the course of life would not stray me into the comforts of small dreams again.

Reality wears down small dreams.

ADDED:
What's your dream? And where are you in respect to that dream? What do you think is the biggest hurdle in realizing your dream?

Bags for Food

This image was one of several that I received recently in my inbox. The text said:

Handbag Euro 32,-
Food for a week Euro 4,-

I've heard of people buying handbags for thousands of US dollars - and on waiting list too! Hope the same people can't wait to contribute to poverty.

St(r)aying away from Reality

Graduation time is in the air. Yesterday, a post in one of the mailing lists I subscribed to forwarded Bill Gates’ remarks to graduates of Harvard, which I find very inspiring, particularly this part:

“… But taking a serious look back … I do have one big regret. I left
Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world – the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of despair.

I learned a lot here at Harvard about new ideas in economics and politics. I got great exposure to the advances being made in the sciences.

But humanity’s greatest advances are not in its discoveries – but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity. Whether through democracy, strong public education, quality health care, or broad economic opportunity – reducing inequity is the highest human achievement. …”

Then today, from another mailing list, I read another speech by Amartya Sen that was prepared to address a conference back in 2003, which was also centered around inequity, particularly how this contribute to human insecurity and raising fundamentalism throughout the world since September 11.

“… schooling can be deeply influential in the identity of a person and the way we see ourselves and each other. … there is need to pay attention to the narrowing of horizons, especially of children, that illiberal and intolerant education can produce. It is also important to recognize that lack of public facilities for the schooling of children often contributes greatly to the appeal and popularity of religious schools run by political militants. … Indeed, the nature of education is quite central to peace in the world.

...

There is need not only to discuss the importance of our common humanity, but also to stress the fact that our diversities can take many distinct forms and that we have to use our reasoning to decide how to see ourselves.

The importance of non-sectarian and non-parochial curricula that expand, rather than reduce, the reach of reason can be hard to exaggerate.”

Too often we see educational institutions as ivory towers that st(r)ay away from the reality of everyday life and too many educational institutions being used as means to promote doctrines. I just hope those who have graduated from school realize these.

About a Boy (Who Wants to be a Tour Guide)

Several weeks ago, while on a business trip in Ubud, I took a moment to go see the famed rice terraces. As is typical in tourist sites of Bali, the moment I got off from the rented car, a group of people swarmed around me to sell things off. I walked quickly passed them and cascaded down to be at the edge of a cliff from where I could savor the view much treasured by most urbanites who have been away too long from nature.

While indulging my eyes among the greens, I heard footsteps coming over – they belonged to my colleagues and a young boy. He was amongst the group that surrounded me, I noticed, as he brought with him odds and ends that one would be tempted to buy as souvenirs, but then would shove it somewhere and forget about it the next moment. He commented to my Indonesian colleague in Bahasa (thinking that I was not Indonesian for some reason) about how fast I walked. And then he asked my friend where I came from.

After finding out that I am Indonesian, he started talking to me, trying to sell things off – all for merely ten thousand Rupiah. He pleaded that he had followed me a long way, and so I should buy things from him (I wonder how effective is it to sell things off by evoking one’s sense of pity and/or guilt?).

Trying to overcome my own temptation, thinking that these souvenirs would be of no use once I am back in Jakarta, I started asking him questions about himself: does he go to school, how long he has to work everyday, where does he live, what does his parents do.

This boy, who is a junior high school student, caught up quickly. He told me that both his parents owned a souvenir stall down the road, and he and his brother both had to help out. Therefore, I should buy things off from him so he could pay for his tuition. Witty boy. He was weighing down my heart (and why should I feel this?).

I started to like him, but I was adamant not to buy anything from him. So I sat next to him and we chatted. He noticed that I and my colleagues wore similar silver warthog pins that we got from our visit to a jewelry workshop. He started asking questions about the pins and where we got them. He told me that the pin was really nice, and noted that although it was suppose to look like a warthog, it looked more like a bull (which was true). I told him that he was a good observer, and I asked him questions about the future and what he wanted to be. A guide, he said with twinkle in his eyes. My heart sank.

I realize that Bali is a tourist-driven island, and most jobs relate to tourist-driven industries. But does this boy want to be a guide because he really wants to, or because he has no exposure to other jobs he could do? Does one’s dream of possibilities and opportunities open up as one’s own knowledge and experiences widen?

So I told him about the jewelry workshop. I told him about various things people do there, hoping that it would open up his horizon. But unfortunately we had to leave. What I realized after the car moved away from the site on towards our next destination was that I should have given him my pin. It would have meant a lot more to him than to me. This post is my dedication to him instead, although he had no way of knowing or accessing this information.

Boxes: 1.1.

Three dimensional forms can be created out of flat planes. Packaging boxes are examples of such attempts. Other than creating the boxes they are intended for, what other forms can they create? These sets of explorations will fall under the simple heading 'boxes'.

A bus shelter.
A girl with ponytails, sitting on the floor, playing.
A dog running, waggling its tail.

A life guard post.
A child jumping.
His hands going up and down. His legs curling behind.

A specialized drawer.
An open box of chocolate. Tempting.

A new Atom trigonal clips No. 303 box.
Attempt #1.

The Value of Lives in a Flat World

A child in Morocco, his life ended by gunshots.
A Japanese teenage girl, drowned by her own sorrowful thoughts.

Babel. Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu's.

The American couple was saved by a U.S. helicopter from a remote Moroccan village.
Their Mexican nanny was soon deported from the U.S.

What is the value of a life?
Is it depend on we the living?
Or on them who govern nations and decide upon how much lives should be valued?

Bono in his introduction to Jeffrey Sachs' “The End of Poverty”:

“… the idea of equality. What is happening in Africa mocks our pieties, doubts our concern, and questions our commitment to that whole concept. … Deep down, if we really accept that their lives – African lives – are equal to ours, we would all be doing more to put the fire out. It’s an uncomfortable truth.”

A shooting incident that linked them all.
Inarritu’s way of interpreting and representing the world that to Thomas Friedman is flat?

And Jeffrey Sachs’ own words:

“Am I an optimist? Optimism and pessimism are beside the point. The key is not to predict what will happen, but to help shape the future.”

Rate of Change

We all know that the world is changing. But have you ever thought about how fast is the rate of change? A presentation at “Creativity or Conformity? Creativity in Higher Education” Conference at University of Wales Institute Cardiff, by Rodney Hill, professor in Teaching Excellence at Texas A & M University, got me thinking:

By 2014, your iPod will hold the contents of the Library of Harvard University.
By 2017, your iPod will contain the US Library of Congress.
The twentieth century alone features more turning points in the history of mankind than the previous five centuries put together.
At the 2007 rate of change, the entire 20th Century would take place in 25 years.

Half of what students learn in their freshman year about the cutting edge of science and technology is obsolete, revised, or taken for granted by their senior year.
A third of the jobs that will be available in 2015 have essentially not been invented yet.
Two thirds of the jobs that will be available in the world by 2020 haven’t been invented yet!
In less than 20 years, the majority of college graduates will be working at jobs that
don’t even exist today!

“In just the space of a few years, we went from competing with firms down the street to competing with firms across the globe. Our core competence and focus is now on all those things that cannot be digitized.” (The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman)
Knowledge Creators are the only people whose jobs cannot be outsourced.

The person that cannot understand and accept the possibility that their discipline or domain might come to a sudden end will not fare well in the 21st century.

Maybe my questioning of architectural practice is justifiable after all :) For Rodney Hill’s full paper, click here.

Fresh Angles (from a Sick Bed)

I had been pretty much bedridden with fever for three days since Tuesday – which I used as yet another excuse to read non-work related books. The first one is a continuation of Junichiro Tanizaki saga: “The Secret History of the Lord of Musashi” [1], and the second one is a science book my friend dropped for another friend, but which I confiscated out of necessity at least for the time being: Richard Dawkins’ “The Selfish Gene”.

By the title and the cover, their difference couldn’t be starker. Yet, upon finishing Tanizaki and starting Dawkins, it is their similarity that is most striking: it is how each author deliberately set up their work by looking at an old issue from a “fresh” angle (the books are written in 1931 and in 1976 respectively, thus the quotation marks capturing the word fresh).

Tanizaki experimented on how most Japanese history books were traditionally written: very matter of fact, focusing on the male figures, leaving out the role of females and the private lives of the heroes. In “The Secret History”, Tanizaki created a novel precisely where these history books left off: by looking into the private lives of the heroes, and focusing specifically on the role of females in making ‘history’. He even went as far as fabricating two historical sources he quoted over and over throughout the novel. The result is a bizarre yet comical, ahistorical yet wildly imaginative, piece of literature [2].

Dawkins in “The Selfish Gene”, on the other hand, presented Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and the famous ‘survival of the fittest’ with a new light by asking a question: survival of what? Is it the species, the group, the individual, or the gene? The title obviously gave out Dawkins’ version: it’s the survival of the gene. So that takes care of the third word of the title. The second title word, selfish, represented his other unorthodox argument: that human beings are innately selfish, not, as many would like to believe, altruistic [3].

Not completely convinced how significant a fresh angle can be?

In the preface to 1989 edition of the book, Dawkins, an etymologist and a professor of zoology at Oxford University, illustrated his intent to present a new angle in presenting the theory of evolution by using the metaphor of the Necker cube. In his own rather long words:

“This is a two-dimensional pattern of ink on paper [and now pattern of dots on your computer screen], but it is perceived as a transparent, three-dimensional cube. Stare at it for a few seconds and it will change to face in a different direction. Carry on staring and it will flip back to the original cube. Both cubes are equally compatible with the two-dimensional data on the retina, so the brain happily alternates between them. Neither is more correct than the other. …

I now think that this metaphor was too cautious. Rather than propose a new theory or unearth a new fact, often the most important contribution a scientist can make is to discover a new way of seeing old theories or facts. The Necker cube is misleading because it suggests that the two ways of seeing are equally good. To be sure, the metaphors gets it partly right: ‘angles’, unlike theories, cannot be judged by experiment; we cannot resort to our familiar criteria of verification and falsification. But a change of vision can, at its best, achieve something loftier than a theory. It can usher in a whole climate of thinking, in which many exciting and testable theories are born, and unimagined facts laid bare. The Necker cube metaphor misses this completely. It captures the idea of a flip in vision, but fails to do justice in its value. What we are talking about is not a flip to an equivalent view but, in extreme cases, a transfiguration.”

Richard Dawkins, “The Selfish Gene”, Oxford University Press, New Edition, 1989: xviii-ix.

Note:
[1] If you’re wondering where is the best place in Jakarta to get Japanese novels, you definitely should go to Periplus in Sudirman Place. They sell Japanese novels from Rp. 15.000,- to Rp.40.000,- per book! Not sure if this is applicable in other Periplus outlets, though.
[2] His other essay within the same book that I haven’t read, “Arrowroot”, is apparently based on actual historical accounts.
[3] I’ve only read about a quarter of the book, so can’t quite elaborate yet on the specifics of the book.

On Dreams and Imaginations

Here’s a quotation from a bookmark my brother brought from his recent business trip to Singapore, courtesy of The Mandarin Oriental Hotel:

If you can imagine it, you can create it.
If you can dream it, you can become it.
William Arthur Ward

On Calvino and Tanizaki

Two literary works that are often referred to by architects are Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” and Junichiro Tanizaki’s “In Praise of Shadows”. These past few weeks, out of procrastination, I read other works by these authors, namely Calvino’s “Marcovaldo, or The seasons in the city”, and Tanizaki’s “Naomi”, and “The Key”.

After reading Tanizaki’s novels, followed by Calvino’s, the contrast between the two is indeed striking. Tanizaki is definitely a master (along with Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata) in capturing beauty in tranquility, perversity, and sadness, revealing the darker side, psychologically repressed life. Meanwhile, Calvino (like Umberto Eco) is a master in finding humor, irony, wittiness, quirkiness in an otherwise mundane and even death-threatened life (think of the movie “Life is Beautiful”). Could these reflect the particularity of Japanese and Italian societies?

Here’s how Tanizaki pictures the built environment:

“I found the house easily. For a few minutes I walked up and down the street in front, studying the layout. There was a fine stone gate, beyond which the grounds were densely wooded. A gravel path weaved through the trees and shrubs to a secluded entrance. The faded writing on the nameplate, “Okubo Villa,” and the mossy stone wall surrounding a spacious garden gave the place the look of a venerable estate, rather than of a summer residence.”

From Tanizaki, J., “Naomi”, 1924. Translation by Chamber, A.H., Tuttle Publishing, 1985: 138.

Here’s how Calvino depicts the city:

“The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city. … in this vertical city, in this compressed city where all voids tend to fill up and every block of cement tends to mingle with other blocks of cement, a kind of counter-city opens, a negative city, that consists of empty slices between wall and wall, of the minimal distances ordained by the building regulations between two constructions, between the rear of one construction and the rear of the next; it is a city of cavities, wells, air conduits, driveways, inner yards, accesses to basements, like a network of dry canals on a planet of stucco and tar, and it is through this network, grazing the walls, that the ancient cat population still scurries.”

From Calvino, I., “The garden of stubborn cats”, in “Marcovaldo, or The seasons in the city” 1963. Translation by Weaver, W., Harvest Book, 1983: 101-102.

Values and Sensibility

From an interview with Eko Prawoto:

“Manusia itu adaptif, bisa tinggal di lingkungan ekstrem panas dingin, luas sempit, tapi juga nanti ada satu saat dimana dia rindu pada hal-hal yang tertanam kuat dalam diri. Semacam nilai-nilai rasa.”

See here for full article in today’s Kompas.

May this bring light to this and this?

From the same interview, Prawoto revealed that from the late Mangunwijaya he learnt:

“Yang didapat dari Romo Mangun adalah aspek tektonika, kepekaan bagaimana teknik menyambung, mempertemukan bahan dan mengartikan sambungan, bagaimana memahami kodrat dan bakat dari bahan, kreativitasnya, juga pada keberanian untuk berbeda, dan mencari dari dalam. Melihat persoalan dari persoalan itu sendiri, tidak risau dengan sekitar. Tidak tentang kulit tapi dari spirit. (Pada akhirnya arsitektur harus) memerdekakan manusia …” [my emphasis].

I stumble over the parts in italics with my students. And I wonder how did Mangunwijaya convey these through his teaching?

Learning from Everything

I finally got my own copy of the classic “Learning from Las Vegas” and finished reading it over the break. Here’s an excerpt from the book:

There is a perversity in the learning process: We look backward at history and tradition to go forward; we can also look downward to go upward. And withholding judgment may be used as a tool to make later judgment more sensitive. This is a way of learning from everything.
Venturi, Brown & Izenour, “Learning from Las Vegas”, revised edition, The MIT Press, 1977: 3.

Why is Anything Important?

About two weeks ago, I stopped by a gas station. I noticed that it was a lady that helped me pump the gas into my tank. I started talking to her, because I never saw her there before. She said that she was usually there in the afternoon to late evening hours. She told me that in the morning hours, she teaches in a middle school somewhere in Pancoran (the gas station is in Kebun Jeruk area), goes home around 1pm to fresh herself up, and leaves for the gas station to work there until 10 o’clock at night. And I thought to myself: why is she teaching? Obviously the pay is not good enough for her. So what makes her work two jobs when she probably could have earned more money by working at the gas station double shifts?

During Q & A in a panel discussion mentioned in this posting, one of my ex students Amy, asked a question of “why is architecture important?” I responded that she was the only person who could answer that question for herself, because what one thinks as important may not be as important to other people.

This afternoon, she asked me a more specific question about why architecture is important to me. I told her that because when I went to school, I was fortunate enough to be able to sample different courses in the art and design field. So when I took a 3d design course taught by an architect, I fell in love with architecture. Designing architecture gave me a very different kind of satisfaction I didn’t find in any other fields. There’s something intriguing about architecture that I find mind boggling to date (I still have goose bumps when I come across something I find amazing about architecture), but I’m still trying to define how is architecture important to me, and in which area(s) I can best contribute to.

She asked again whether other than personal reasons, there were more objective reasons why architecture is important. And I said no. Architecture is the same with any other fields of knowledge: it’s how human try to make sense of the world. Some do it through the field of medicine, computer, anthropology, astrophysics, biology, economics, sociology, and so on and so forth. But of course if you happen to ask a person who is already established within the field, he or she would argue vehemently (as some architects would) that their field is the one most important discipline in the world of knowledge. Can’t blame it, we mortals want to leave a mark of our existence in this ephemeral world – and of course that mark is important.

Anyway, after that conversation with Amy, I stopped by the same gas station and saw the lady again. Obviously, earning money is not the only thing important in her life. Like many underpaid teachers in Indonesia, she sticks to her job, because it is important for her.

And does design matter? I guess it only matters for those who consider it important. And for them, design gives meaning to an otherwise indistinguishable being.