Book: Building (or Quarrels are a Way of Saying I Love You)

The institutions with which I have the longest, most intense and most complex relationships revolve around the book and the building.

The book was an authority figure for me since young. From the earliest times, I was quite contented splitting it in two: the instructional type (e.g., textbooks, non-fiction) and the literary kind (e.g., storybooks, theoretical texts). The former was imposed by the main thrust of the science-oriented educational system, from which I benefited much and which I consciously need to unlearn. The latter, which required imagination and analysis, especially when embodied in ‘minor’ school subjects like literature and history, was much hated primarily because immensely feared by me. The lack of a reading culture at home (my parents were both hawkers) supported this forced (false) divide. On days when I deeply hated my incompetence in relaying messages and stories between my parents who had stopped talking to each other, my solace was in ploughing through piles of school textbooks, assessment books and study guides. Rote-learning was both an escape and a trap.

The building, on the other hand, was authoritative in another way – visually imposing yet unobtrusive, in fact, awesomely beautiful yet quietly confident. Far more easily grasped, objectified and represented, buildings were a subject of visual fascination. My earliest pastimes ranged from staring at construction sites, imagining and sketching the unseen foundations and basement levels, and creating hybrid buildings (thanks to science lessons on hybrid plants) on paper. This interest in the invisible, the impure and the inconsequential continues today, in my research on the ‘useless’ in architecture, particularly buildings that are unbuilt, unbuildable or no longer in use. Not having being trained in architecture is perhaps a misfortune and a blessing. I determine my time and space for engaging with it.

Victor Hugo once claimed, “This Will Kill That”, valorizing (“This”) book as a far more important and permanent record of (“That”) building than its physical, fragile realizations. It is the niches where one discipline wrestles, collides, connects with another (in my case, among the fields of writing and drawing, literature and publishing, art and architecture, urban planning and home-making) that I am particularly drawn to.

Perhaps I am restaging for my own visual pleasure, albeit in rather different forms, the tension-filled conflicts that I have failed to mediate or resolve between my parents. Hopefully, even if only temporarily or conceptually, the apparent distances between my parents, between my mum and me, between one kind of book and another, between books and buildings - start to vanish.

Michael Lee Hong Hwee
17 Jun 2008