I’ve spent the past few days trying to find a way to accumulate my interests and findings on this project into a simple explanation.
During last semester’s seminar, I was interested in the different manifestations one building can have based on the person addressing it. The person’s perception of the building depends on their level of interaction with it, and this very same thing happened to me not long ago.
Close to my home there is a small strip of restaurants, a supermarket, pharmacy, etc. I was accompanying my mother to buy some groceries when I looked up and realized that this strip of little shops and restaurants was actually the base of a fifteen story apartment complex that I had never registered in my mind. Of course, I had seen the apartments, I drive past them almost every day and they are difficult to avoid (since they are a relatively high tower), but I had mentally (and visually) removed them from existence.
It’s such a strange sensation to realize that you have been experiencing (and have only been aware of) a very small part of a much larger object, and I think that this interest has led me to start investigating large, multiple program buildings such as the Golden Mile Complex and People’s Park Complex in which, for the size of the building, the people around it rarely grasp the enormity of the object and the fact that it is as much a city as any other horizontal set of buildings is.
In the following week I have a set of projects I hope to accomplish. First, I will do a quick chart identifying the different buildings and topics that I am researching, where they connect and where they stand alone in this project. This chart will probably (and hopefully) change as my project progresses. I am also going to set ahead doing a project that attempts to demonstrate the varying perspectives a person (or various people) can have on one building when approaching it.
Currently reading: Fumihiko Maki Investigations in Collective Form
Two men eating ice cream bars in front of the supermarket, they are always there. The woman sitting down at the table is selling lotto tickets, and just a few establishments down is a restaurant called El Tropical which I have gone since a child with my grandparents. Just above this strip are the residences that I had never noticed.
