A Space and The Place

Space and Place has a very similar meaning that is quite confusing so, what exactly is the different between a Space and a Place? I would like to start with this conversation with a quote that I’ve heard, “Home is where you make it”. The quote came from a movie called Joe Dirt (2001), the film is about a homeless boy that has been travel around the world trying to find his long lost parents for years. The story shows that even he manage to find his house and parents but for him it is not where he belongs, It is not his place to be. For him, home is a place where he has his friends alongside him. So, now we should talk about House and Home, both of them has basically the same functions but we choose to define them according to the emotions, feelings, experiences and meanings that we have for each of them.

Space and Place are used differently by different users, in order to describe a location. We use the word space to describe the location which mostly likely has no other relationship for us except as a location. Then when we use the word Place, it is quite different because the place always has some special relationship to us, it has something that makes this location special and has a story behind it, as I have said earlier. The best example would be when we talk about a location such as our class room, for those who are not study in this particular room, the class room is just only an ordinary space for them. But for us, this classroom is a place where it has a meaning to us, because we shared many meaningful things to this place.

We can see that every time that we use a space, we also add some values to it and simply transform that space to a place. Our experiences create new boundaries which defines the location differently. So, just like the quote “Home is where you make it”. I would say the same thing that a place is also where you make it. Or I would say that a place is literally where we shared our meaningful story with.

The Erotics

                 Erotic, this simple word has a very important impact towards our lives, maybe even more than what we might think. The concept of Erotic is about adding and creating unique feelings into a spaces. Those essences  of erotic is like a phenomenology that not just only caught the viewer’s attentions but it also stimulate additional experiences for them as well through emotion, which comes in varies media. There are plenty of The Erotic in architecture that we might have seen before, no matter it was colors, shapes, voices or any other things, the main point of this is to create something special towards the space. This is a very complex theory that eventually results in most likely surprise and excitement, due to the ability to change even the most simple box room into the most memorable space by itself. This is why the Erotic is such a very powerful element in our lives.

                The concept of the Erotic does not just exist in only architecture as I had stated before. One of a very effective example would be when the concept of erotic has been show in film industry, the movie called Fight Club is the perfect example of this. The movie itself represents the Erotic by showing the perspective of a world where most people act like all of them are in IKEA catalogue, no unique tastes or feelings. In the film, the main character sick of this kind of tasteless people and then seek for a different aesthetic that are unique from the world he bored of. He chooses to be in a small group of fighters that he created in order to be separate from the old world and be unique from others in that world. He fights not to fulfilled his sadism but actually because it creates what he think is true feelings for him, unlike those programmed feelings that people automatically felt for example: like all the people who went all the way to Louvre Museum in order to see the great painting of Mona Lisa, then just keep taking pictures and pretends that the painting is the greatest thing to see like all the others there. We can see that in fight club, he just trying to avoid this kind of pre-scripted actions and keeps on finding the best way for him successfully stays in the true feelings that fighting creates, even in the end it just went too far, from normal to chaotic beyond control, but yet the movie did a pretty good job expressing the concept of the erotic in a simple way.

                For me, the erotic as we can see is a theory that really has many effects on people. It might not be one of the easiest concept of all and also can create problems if people went too far with it, but I would say that we cannot avoid the fact that it helps a lot in creating what I would called, Values, towards our feelings on that spaces or even ourselves. It will be even better when combined with other theories just to support each concept and improves the outcome in the same time. 

Aesthetic

                Have you even wondered why do we have so many types of buildings? Why do we need different kinds of clothes? Why do we have so many unique styles of cars? We can see that in our world today, there are so many things that are different in appearance but exactly the same function and use. So the main question should be, why do people always choose different things? It is because that fact that we have different tastes, that’s why.

                The word Aesthetic can be refer to taste, actually it is the same thing. Aesthetic means the ability to decide and judge everything around us. We tended to choose what we think it best for us and sometimes for people around us as well. The society that we lived in today has so many kinds of things that we can choose, for example in fashion, we have over hundreds types of a t-shirt that we can choose. We can see that aesthetic make people choose the ones that they liked and related to their personal tastes. The same principals can be seen in other things as well .Basically the rules can be applied automatically to everything that has more than one option for us to choose.

                Now come to the aesthetic and architecture, aesthetic has a lot of impact directly to buildings than we might think of. In class, we are had a chance to choose between two buildings that almost all of us never seen or heard of, we had to choose one of them based on our taste only. The result was a little bit of surprise, yes, all of us have different tastes but the thing that are amazing about it is the fact that we had different reasons as well on the same answer. We can see that in architecture, it is quite a great challenge to create a building that can serve all the people tastes, actually I think it is impossible, and that is how thing works. In fact, we should say thank you to our nature to judge and to hate things, because this is the reason why we always develop and changing, we never stop at some point, and we will always want something new and unique all the time.

                As I said earlier that aesthetic is not only about personal taste, in fact society is another main factor that determine our aesthetic. If you have a trouble imagine what I am trying to say, just imagine those female Korean singers and models. You might probably noticed in just a few seconds that they all look very much alike each other. Actually so many of them look alike each other that you cannot tell which one is the one who has been copied. The main point is not about copy rights but it is about how media manipulates people, this shows us the fact that sometimes our ability to judge what is best for us were made from others people not ourselves. This is also why many people choose to follow celebrities on the television and in the end becomes a trend for certain groups. It is because aesthetic nowadays are not only about personal acceptations anymore, getting acceptation from the society is almost as important as well.

                So, I would say that aesthetic, are mainly a good thing that helps our society to move on from old things. Its helps the society to keep creating newer and better things to replace the previous ones that has been overused or over bored. Even that it can be manipulated by many factors but it is still better than not changing at all. It is one of the most useful emotions in our lives and society and will always be useful for all the developing society. 

Profane and Play

               Since we all are living in Thailand, a country of long lived history and many different cultures, it is quite common of us to see sacred places in our daily life. There are many religious in Thailand and almost every one of them has their own sacred version of structure such as temples and churches, each type has their own characteristic that is almost impossible to see the same look on different function. People elevate these places into a higher position among others types of structure so that, redefine the function would be some kind of an orthodox or what we call Profane.

                The concept of Profanity is when we try to redefine the concept of those untouchable sacred structures, we are challenging all believes and knowledge that we were born with. Profanity is like one of the unique perception that is not focused on creating a completely new thing, actually it is about using the existing space or form and then adds a new meaning into it. So far in my understanding, profanity is one way to adapt and evolve for a building, also a very brave action choice because playing with sacred places is not a common thing. There are so many possibilities both good and bad ways on the results, and to be able to succeed one good profanity building is risky and very challenging.

                Profanity in Thailand has many things to do with religions and cultures, and as I said earlier that Thailand has a very long history so, it is quite hard to play with these respective ancient architectures such as temples. There is one hotel in Chiang Mai that actually plays with the traditional form of temple, duplicated and redefined as a new luxury hotel. The hotel, in my opinion was a success in term of creates new function and space while still able to preserve the unique characteristic of the traditional temple. But there are always different believes and opinion, some would say that the sacred temple should not be used as anything rather than traditional use. Not just only in Buddhism but in Christianity as well, there is a similar situation in a painting of angry Jesus Christ. In the painting the god is getting angry because people have turned the church into something else by selling things inside of it. He was mad by the profanity of people that challenging this sacred house of god, it is considered as disrespectful and ruined the real value of the architecture.

                Profanity also happens to other designs rather than religious places as well. One of a very big example is from Rem Koolhaas. He is a well-known architect in terms of playful and a little bit of a badass, in my opinion. His works has a very unique style of getting people mad. The best example would be when he tries to create new architecture using Mies Van de Rohe, a well-known and widely accepted among architects as his inspiration. In the end, Rem managed to create a building with a façade that totally blown people away, he chooses Mies Van de Rohe’s face as a façade which is very unique way of inspiration. This is by far, has been consider as a playful profanity, even he did not play with religious believes but still Mies Van de Rohe is consider as one of the sacred and respectful among architects.

                So, I would say that Profanity is not something that we can judge, it is in between good and not good depends on different perspectives. It is just a way to of redefining process that is very challenging and risky in order to obtain a very successful one.