Home
Geoffrey Cheung
Diploma 9
In this relentless world, we are all prisoners in the city. We seldom realize it ourselves until one day we are so deeply imprisoned that we can no longer look back. Like the experience of this man, on his way to prison. He begins to realize the life he was living before was already a prison of his own making. – constantly rejecting a break in routine; busying himself under the assumption that hard work now would bring free time and escape later. Now this hope for a better future is gone as the car enters the prison. Prison life consists of routine. And in fact, the life outside is not so different – there is also the same restriction on access, the mundane daily experience, the similar form of confinement in space, the similar personal interaction and pace of life – that loops back again and again. The prisoner notices, as he walks past the security desk, that the spatial continuity he perceives differs from the continuity seen through the frames of the screen. One defines the spatial continuity through movement, and the other one defines the passing of time in a single space. In the visiting room, he realizes as he goes in and out through the same door, the room he re-enters is completely different. This spatial discontinuity has unsettled him. That night he has a nightmare, in which his door and room disappear, leaving nothing for him to locate and orient himself. He wonders briefly if he is free, but realizes instead that he is drifting and lost.The unexplainable spatial discontinuity also disrupts his daily sequence. Taking the route he usually did to the chapel to retrieve his stock of cigarettes, on this particular occasion, after the power failure, he was unable to find the chapel, and so his cigarette stock is missing. He gets into trouble. He wakes from his dream to discover a Prison Operating Manual tucked under his mattress. He thinks his dream might be a reality… And begins to study the manual in detail, he studies the structure, the tracks, the connections, and the moments of separation, where the in-between might be. He studies it late into the night. He then notices his pillow is sticking out of the wall – he steps out of the wall of his cell. Then situated in a larger frame, he understands that he was in fact imprisoned in a comic world…made up of frames…larger frames…larger frames… He is now above the gridded prison. He climbs up, and discovers a whole new world …From right to left. Where the screens from behind the security desk change from temporal to physical – they no longer show 1 room in 9 consecutive moments, but 9 identical rooms existing together. The painted balls are remnants of his repeated attempt to escape. His experience of spatial discontinuity is actually perceived through entering a set of framed images on a moving film. The gridded structure that organizes the prison world is just a small element within a frame. He now understands the abrupt and non-sequitur jump from the prison to his childhood home, as well as the water dripping into his cell. He enters a collapse of planes and is intrigued by the realization that his experience is never as linear as he thought. He starts to understand the illusion of the window frame of the infirmary, which enables him to enter changeable scene of the external world. And as he enters the city, As an operative construct, the frame is a productive design tool that incorporates in anything, such as our immediate environment (the Final Table Presentation], my own daily routine, and even the production process of the project. It also challenges the incapability of conventional architectural representation by providing not only geographical, physical and spatial information, but also enabling the freedom of non-sequitur connections. The frame fundamentally changes the way a context can be built. It is no longer about the totality of an architectural plan, but moments when various possibilities of connections happen within architecture that we are trying to construct.