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.
Jimenez LaiArchitectural drawing is a language with conventions where the rules can be deliberately misused; a well-composed architectural drawing can both contain correct and incorrect arrangements of meaningful things.
Jimenez LaiI recently wrote a piece on comics in architecture - I was talking about the three kinds of comics I pay attention to: the Franco-Belgian, the Japanese manga, and the American comics. I started thinking about the relationship between Japanese manga and Japanese architecture, or Franco-Belgian bande dessinรฉe versus Franco-Belgian architecture, it began to make sense; there are parallels to the modes of operations and the cultures they belong to. If I didn't force myself to write, I would have no forum to clarify these thoughts. Writing is really helpful.
Jimenez LaiThe role of architecture, in terms of communication, is not going to drastically change either.
Jimenez LaiThe idea of morphology of languages is something that I'm really interested in. How does German turn to Dutch, and how does Dutch turn to Anglo-Saxon and eventually English? Morphology is actually taking place through things like Twitter or GChat today, where we're changing how things are spelled, and those spellings are accepted as standard now. Morphology happens over time. It's not necessarily a bad thing.
Jimenez Lai