Unlike sciences, literature as art relies on societal acceptance of a certain vocabulary.
Jimenez LaiIt is possible to construct small realities that contain political or philosophical responses, not necessarily just practical or economical responses.
Jimenez LaiI think architecture could be understood as the construction of realities, or the construction of worlds. One of the reasons why architects are often attracted to philosophers, partially, has to do with making sense of the world around us as well as the making of worlds, and in our case, the realities we create can be as real as concrete. These kinds of ideas, of wild imagination, go into the question of how you make a world.
Jimenez LaiWhat's interesting in archaeology is that we always understand other cultures by digging up their cities; architecture is almost always a way for us to formulate a diagram of how people used to live.
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