The 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 LaiIf I were to arrive at a foreign country like Czech Republic, I don't have to speak Czech to understand the feeling of the local sensations through architecture. That is a kind of communication that no language can perform.
Jimenez LaiI'm thinking about the idea of poetic license. People say that about certain writers: "Oh, the grammar sucks, but it's just the poetic license." We accept it as being an art form of sorts: the incorrect rearrangement of meaningful things. Unlike sciences, literature as art relies on societal acceptance of a certain vocabulary. We're just making sounds out of our mouths if we don't both accept that what I'm saying has very significant meanings, and I'm accurately targeting what vocabulary I use and how I arrange each word.
Jimenez LaiI don't really know what's going to happen 10,000 years from now. We've been biologically modern for, what, almost 200,000 years? Let's go back to the cave paintings: I think the moment that someone landed a charcoal on a wall to describe reality, that's language already - that happened on a vertical surface, which, even though they didn't build it, somehow we could understand it as architecture because there's a cavity that separates the inside and outside. That's 40,000 years in the past.
Jimenez LaiIn 500 years, English has changed a lot, and right now we're undergoing an extremely rapid rate of accelerated advancement in terms of technology, but I still have a hard time believing that we're going to stop speaking to each other. The role of architecture, in terms of communication, is not going to drastically change either. It's going to continue to create a cultural affect where people will be able to understand something beyond function that may otherwise be foreign to them.
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 Lai