給畢業班的一封信 BAS DIPLOMA CATALOG 2010

2010 廣州美院建築系畢業設計作品

挪威學校這屆畢業班找我在他們的畢業專刊上寫一篇文章，內容是希望針對世界上種種的變遷，給他們一些建議。我打算將之前演講的內容整理一下，談談《葬書》視為建築學著作和未來學校教學內容的關係，給所有中外畢業班的同學們參考。以下是正在進行中的英文草稿：

Kalamaja, Tallinn

Sunday morning, July 18, 2010

Dear Folks, ‘When situation and form are congenial, it is considered of good luck. When situation and form are oppositional, it is considered of bad luck. When situation is bad and form is good, maybe lucky. When situation is good and form is bad, disaster soon coming.’ Good Luck, Chi window.googletag = window.googletag || {cmd: []}; googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.defineSlot('/22590772197/pc_textbottom', [1, 1], 'div-gpt-ad-1639353180888-0').addService(googletag.pubads()); googletag.pubads().enableSingleRequest(); googletag.enableServices(); }); googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1639353180888-0'); });

I feel like talking about how things were begun. To start with, let’s turn our attention to this paragraph quoted from The Book of B urial :

'When the air is riding on the wind, it comes loose. When the air is facing the edge of the water, it seizes up. Thus, we name these phenomena as feng-shui (wind-water).’

The term feng-shui , literally meaning wind-water, was first found here and given an explanation of why it is about wind and water . Hitherto, The Book of Burial is considered the bearer of the original ideas which directed the development of feng-shui theories and practices later. Yet, the author and time period of the book were not cl arified . It is believed that the content was formulated around 2000 years ago when the social political settings were in shape and a pre-scientific reading of the universe was under way in China .

In my view, to highlight the recycling of life and death and how to make a tomb showed this seemingly rambling text by no means ethnic rubbish, but a book on the beginning of architecture. If we take Vitruvius’ The Ten Books on Architecture as comprehensive notes on the formal aesthetics and engineering for buildings, The Book of Burial is a concise guide for landscape reading and environmental planning with social ethical concerns regarding the connection to the ancestry. These two books indicate two distinct approaches in architecture, which reflect the differentiation between trajectories of the East and the West.

Below, I picked another paragraph from The Book of Burial , which was translated from ancient writing style, to compare with a description put by Svein Hatløy on visual structure . The correlation between these two texts written in different space and time is unexpectedly illuminating.

‘ The o uter air flow is keeping the inner energy getting together. The passing water current is stopping the coming dragon . A s ituation is of thousands of feet . A form is of hundreds of feet . If the situation coming forward while the form concluding to its end, and, reaching out to the front while leaning back , it is considered a good burial ground of luck.’

-The Book of B urial , 200 AD

‘Already after some months experiencing real sites, and the hardship of finding proper visual expressions, you are ready for understanding how to structure your visual language. We have to start with the ABC, how you visually can show phenomena you know from physical practice, naming, and thoughts; light, heavy, dynamic, static, etc. You get to know such phenomena visually only by making them. Instead of only knowing what things are, you have to find how they look. Instead of defining an object by meters, centimeters, and kilos, you can make us seeing that an object is heavy, e.g., by its form, color and spatial relationships.’

-Svein Hatløy on Visual Structure, 2010 AD

It is clear that both are depicting what they see on the ‘real sites’. The ‘dragon’ is the classic notion to describe continuous mountain structure in feng-shui , which, in analytical terms, is a re-presentation of certain ‘form, color and spatial relationships’. They simply demonstrate how things were begun. We humans were looking and seeing in order to understand our ‘being in the world,’ a s Martin Heidegger persistently reiterated:

‘O n the earth already means under the sky. B oth of those also mean remaining before the divinities and include a belonging to men’s being with one another. ’ (‘Building Dwelling Thinking’)

In the phenomenological discussion, we usually referred this primal gesture as ‘ natural attitude ’ which is being erased and forgotten in modern society. As a consequence, this simple beginning was disconnected and becoming very obscure to many people nowadays. In light of this missing link, I see BAS have served as a gateway for young architects given an alternative of learning to re-enter this world . What you have learned should have been manifested in your projects which may reveal h ow architecture was inaugurated in the first place.

In recent years, dark scenarios came in lingering due to the earth we reside on is rapidly changing and getting exhausted. The fear of catastrophic occurrence of unprecedented magnitude either from hostile nature or from our technological failure is vivid. However, the development area and the intensity of u rbanization continue to expand for the sake of economic growth in most part of the world. At the moment, the stagnation in the West is like a warning of the limit of wealth accumulation. On the other hand, there is a significant re-distribution of the wealth undergoing towards the East, which accelerated the urbanization process in less developed regions. B y and large, we architects appreciate the green solutions and have sympathy on radical option s to be an agrarian exerciser, a scavenger or a squatter in searching for more responsible responses to the changes. It was not a coincidence that around 500BC The Reference Manual for the Book of Change gave us an account of the invention of eight trigrams:

‘ Look up to observe the sky. Look down to learn from the earth. Study the situation of the birds and animals and how they accommodate on the earth. Decipher the phenomena according to senses when it’s near or by appropriating various things when it’s afar. Then, the eight trigrams were made to reveal the divinity of gods and to describe the love of everything on the earth.’

The keen observations made by ancient sage eventually led to a prediction system derived from the combinations of a positive sign and a negative sign in trios known as eight trigrams. To stack up two trigrams together provides an exemplary sequence of changes, which portrays the interrelated good or bad happenings in a particular process. In principle, the system assumed and concluded that everything must have a cycle of growing and dying. Either the Nature or the human society is in fact in an inevitable process of vicissitude .

To be in line with the reality rendered with constant changes, the concept of sustainability is not about how to re tain the continuation of prosperity, but how to stay closer to the side of well-beings, good luck, and to keep a distance from the side of austerities, bad luck. So we see, instead of focusing on functionality and facade, how The Book of Burial distinguish the good burial ground as the result of careful balancing acts inherent in the overall form making according to the natural law of the environment and the societal interpretations.

The tactical move is to hold on firmly to a holistic understanding of the surroundings in order to choose a resting site as well as to re-shape by making formal expressions, all of which is aimed to enliven the ‘good luck’ for the demised, the living and the next generations:

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