A beautiful Saturday morning.
It's the long waited moment, to meet the unsung hero, underground architect.
Kevin Low was already standing at the entrance chatting to students when I just arrived. He was in simple attire that I almost mistook him as one of the students. He is tall and lean. Did he arrive earlier then the scheduled time? Apart from the simple attire, his punctuality is saying something about him.
To my shocked, he refused to put his signature on the small projects I shew to him. But after my insistence, he had to.
He preferred the talk to be casual, in an informal manner. But I guess this approach is quite foreign to some of us because of the way the school runs its lectures.
The venue was not appropriate though, the tall windows were emitting bright sunlight without controllable shading devices. The projected images on the screen were too faint to be informative. However this drawback was overcome by Kevin's eloquent verbal presentation.
There were only 3 collage of slides.
He was light and easy, with some sense of american humor.
A simple looking man in simple attire, was speaking about the problems of architecture education in Malaysia. He criticized the overrated starchitects, their negative impacts to the society and to the world in general, and acknowledged the overlooked underrated architects.
Not many in-depth questions were forwarded to him. I had non to ask either, because many answers are available in the small projects, and in many of his interviews published on the website. I was there mainly to feel his presence and to experience his vibration.
It was a brand new experience, it was not the same as reading his writings. There was a kind of energy which could only be sense through his verbal expression.
He made simple the multidimensional architecture considerations to just TWO things: FORM and CONTENT.
Architecture should be CONTENT concerned,
and FORM should be CONTENT driven.
CONTENT is CONTEXT determined.
forget about fancy iconic building without good CONTENT.
Example? FAMILY to be housed in a HOUSE. What is FAMILY needed most? INTERACTION!! The typology should be supporting this and not the FORM to be viewed from the outside. Typology should be inside out and not outside in.
Architects he looks up to? Frank Lloyd Wright, Geoffrey Bawa and Luis Barragan.
Why isn't he lecturing in our U? He is lecturing in UM because it is just 5 mins away from his house.
Phenomenology? Nothing fancy nothing new, it's just about some warm washes to the ass.
GBI rated? It's just another way of branding architecture. All buildings should be "green" from the dawn of civilization.
Which is the best project he had ever done? He broke his usual emphasis on originality, and borrowed a famous answer from Frank O. Gehry: it hasn't been built yet. What a billion dollar answer, which says so much about him, about architecture, seems a sad answer, yet it also implies hope lies ahead.
