Author's Statement

SHARE SYSTEMS. A Prototype for Making Family

Canada is rich with an ethnic, cultural and linguistic mix from more than 200 countries of origin. We are largely foreigners in this land, choosing to make it our own. Many have come in search of new opportunities, freedom and safety; each bringing a wealth of knowledge, memories, customs and histories. According to Charles Taylor, the building of a democratic Canadian society “requires a politics that leaves room for us to deliberate publicly about those aspects of our identities that we share, or potentially share with other citizens. A society that recognizes individual identity will be a deliberative , democratic society because individual identity is partly constituted by collective dialogues”. We are part of a young nation that enjoys both the particularities and the peculiarities, of each new culture. It is in the confrontation and clashing of cultural elements that new things can begin. The unfamiliar and uncomfortable moments --what we call “awkward”-- are often hastily avoided despite the fact that they could represent a new type of possibility, a different type of growth. What better place to begin understanding the potential of these times than in the fundamental unit of the house, the home, the family.

I am now Canadian, having spent one third of my life in India, one third in Oman and one third in Canada. I am not alone in what I bring to this country -- this is the norm. I have had many homes in Canada: one that I shared with my immigrant family of grandmother, parents and sister, another where I lived with seven students, once strangers now friends, with backgrounds from Trinidad, the Philippines, small town Ontario, Israel, Shanghai, and El-Salvador, and lastly my student apartment where I lived alone. The constant shift between living with family, friends and on my own has changed me; I make my own family.

This thesis examines, predictively as well as descriptively, emerging living systems that strengthen the growing demographic of culturally diverse “chosen” families. Dwelling units have been more commonly understood as housing provided for 1, 2, 4, or 100 people: the studio apartment for the bachelor, a semi-detached home for the couple, a single family suburban home for the young family or an apartment block for seniors. With a few variations, this has been the general theme. In the light of the emerging reality of the “chosen” family, there appears to be room for a prototype that encourages 7-12 people to live together in one unit. These are distressed times, both financially and socially, where seniors are lonely, young families struggle without household help and middle-aged couples still pay large mortgages in their “empty nest” homes. We cope. Seniors move into annexes of their children’s homes, two young families share responsibilities, and middle-aged couples wish they could sell their properties to move into a joint home with friends. This is happening all around us, and much could be done to provide the infrastructure to both accommodate and encourage the shift.The codependency of “chosen” families is crucial in strengthening individuality and community, thus maintaining self identity while reducing alienation.

This is an experiment.

Tentative Outline

SHARE SYSTEMS. A prototype for making family

Title

Author’s Statement

Abstract

Executive Summary

Outlining terms and the Phenomenological Method

The realities of the multicultural experience: Who we are and what we bring

Table of Contents / List of Illustrations

PART ONE: Think

Making Contemporary Families

“Yours and Mine” Cross-cultures: Japan, India, Europe

Learning from the joint family

Belonging and Alienation

Awkward Living Systems

Balancing Privacy and Exposure, Secret and Spectacle

Obsessing about Interiority

The Un-Private House

Surveillance and Responsibility

Shared Spaces: Benefits and Problems

PART TWO: Learn

Ontario

Single family home conversions and statistics: Financial and Social Implications

Typologies between the house and the apartment: Scale and Program

Emerging Living Systems

Architectural Elements and Forms

Section

Building for the : Individual+Stranger/ Individual+Family/ Family+Stranger

Interface : Identifying Thresholds, Barriers, Markers

Material, Distance, Orientation, Levels, Movement, Duration of stay

PART THREE: Experiment

Cambridge Case Study

The Midsize Town Condition

Students and Seniors: Housing Prototype

The 7-12 person unit

Design Proposal

Conclusions

Appendices

Bibliography

M1 Reviews

PART ONE: Awkward Living Systems

Tracing the new dialect of “yours and mine” in Canada’s multicultural society, the following report is a

culmination of literary ideas and design explorations that examine the shifting lines between private and

public space at the different scales of contemporary everyday life. Each is a further investigation into architecture’s delineation of those spaces that frame communal as well as individual identity in every culture and especially at the intersection of cultures.

The “awkward” need not be uncomfortable, but rather can be embraced, for it represents the interface of that which is alien to one culture but familiar to another. Perhaps it embraces a new series of moments in architecture that heighten the varying perceptions of privacy and exposure , that eventually creates a new medium to realize a sense of identity. By playing with the notion of isolation and belonging; seclusion and integration, each exercise will reconstruct a stimulating experience of space, place and meaning where there was none.

( Author's Statement)

(Panel 1)

INDIVIDUAL + FAMILY. Our families no longer consist of mother, father and son, instead we have grandmother, mother, and daughter. Three individuals that still cling to the nostalgia of the familial unit. We live together because it is convenient, affordable and comforting. Learning from the Mobius House, the form of this compact dwelling is manipulated to accommodate three distinct individuals, each with their own schedules, their own requirements and demands. The form of the compact house follows the intertwining trajectory relating to a 24-hour lifestyle of work, play and sleep with only a few moments to meet and greet each other. The section allows for a palpable awarness between private and public by the warping of party walls that create interlocking shared space. Circulation space in the house are flattened into a series of screens that become a negotiating medium between “yours and mine”. The importance of maintaining a visual connection through the rooms become the primary tool that allows individuals to retain their privacy and strengthen community.

The traditional living room is now the study - where talking has been replaced by typing and storey telling is referenced by gmail. The study and the kitchen are the places to gather. The single family house becomes a amalgamated form of two apartments. This isn’t a novel idea as housing typologies in other cultures usually include annexes for the joint family or separate living quarters for servants. Mother and daughter share the bottom floor while grandmother lives on the third floor. By establishing a sense of independence and privacy required by each individual , the house becomes a flexible system of units that maintain their own entrances but are joined at the core. Allowing for the choice of being alone, or being together.

(Panel 2)

FAMILY + STRANGER. The house is a perch; a temporary resting place for a family to grow. The design of this dwelling is particularly interested in inventing new hierarchies; other types of relationships rather than purely narrative spaces that have a beginning and an end. Attempting to design ‘situations’ rather than designating one room per person and making common rooms an after thought, the house imagines spaces to weave into each other, become private around a corner or public when open to the courtyard. Movement and Gesture play a crucial role in the form of the architecture; both filter sporadically rather than be designated as “circulation” space. Public and private become relational and contingent rather than absolute. Both can occur anywhere. Privacy is generated by withdrawing from company and th public is confronted by interaction. The home becomes a retreat and the family finds privacy in spaces like the library and not necessarily the bedroom.

The residents of the house (whom are treated in this experiment as one unit) interact with the ‘stranger’ who visits the site. Traditionally the ground floor of homes are the most public zones , and at each raised level the rooms are more exclusive and private. This house experiments with allowing the public to move fluidly through every level of occupation. Thus it adopts a double spiral form, one for private living the other for public platforms. The structure of the house becomes the tool which mediates between what is exposed and what is hidden. Walls render rooms independent or shared with crafted openings. Instantly they become both connected and independent of each other.

(Panel 3)

INDIVDUAL + STRANGER. This is the most abstract version of what the house is meant to be. It deals with raw confrontation and heightens extremely awkward moments between the occupants of the site. The site becomes one large piece of structure which makes the levels of privacy of the units within the house ambiguous. The lack of orientation allows each occupant or visitor of the site to deal directly with the wall beside them at each moment; by understanding the position they are standing in, who is watching them, who is beside them, then only can the individual understand the concept of the house.

In our egocentric society based on the discourse of “I”, we are still not afraid to show and tell. The project places programs such as bathrooms in very publicly viewed locations, however a physical distance remains which gives the illusion of privacy.

HOUSE 2

Author, Site, 2009

"House 2" is interested in inventing new hierarchies; other types of relationships rather than purely narrative spaces that have a beginning and an end. I am learning to design 'situations' rather than designating one room per person and making common rooms an after thought.

Author, Plans, 2009

1. Highly differentiated and intricately woven spaces
2. Movement filters rather than designating "circulation" space
3. Public+ Private are relational and contingent rather than absolute. Both can occur anywhere. Privacy is generated by withdrawing from company and Public is confronted by interaction.
4. Privacy. Becomes a "retreat", in this case, the library and not necessarily the bedroom.
5. Public. Family, Friend, and Stranger are addressed and movement is choreographed on every level.
6. Walls are rendered independent rooms together with crafted openings. Indecently they become both connected and independent of each other.

Author, Remembering Scenes, 2009

Third Order of Simulacra

"The point of view of modern architecture is never fixed, as in baroque architecture, or as in the model of vision of the camera obscura, but always in motion, as in film or in the city. Crowds, shoppers in a department store, railroad travelers, and the inhabitants of Le Corbusier’s houses have in common with movie viewers that they cannot fix (arrest) the image. Like the movie viewer that Benjamin describes (“no sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed”), they inhabit a space that is neither inside nor outside, public nor private (in the traditional understanding of these terms). It is a space that is not made of walls but of images. Images as walls..."

- Beatrice Colomina, Privacy and Publicity

"...Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle, no more stage, no more theatre, no more illusions, when everything becomes immediately transparent, visible exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication. We no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication." - - Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstacy of Communication

The overlap

FRIEDLANDER, Lee, “Newark, New Jersey, 1962”,

Photographs, New York, Haywire, 1978

FRIEDLANDER, Lee, “Hillcrest, New York, 1970”,

Like a One-Eyed Cat, Photographs by Lee Friedlander 1956-1987,

New York, Abrams, 1989.

FRIEDLANDER, Lee, “Texas, 1965”,

Like a One-Eyed Cat, Photographs by Lee Friedlander 1956-1987,

New York, Abrams, 1989.

FRIEDLANDER, Lee, “New York City, 1963”,

Photographs, New York, Haywire, 1978

Lee Friedlander’s unique vision underscores the two-dimensionality of the picture plane and the potential for photographs to contain varying levels of reflection, opacity, and transparency. Friedlander’s images of shop windows evoke a certain ambiguity, an oscillation between reflected and actual reality, that invite inspection of the space and the meaning of the image. Similar responses are encouraged by Friedlander’s street photographs, in which shadows of figures (usually Friedlander himself) and other subjects overlap in the photographic image. The projected outline of Friedlander’s body as within the picture frame implies the notion that the photographer can be both behind the camera and in front of it. Interpreted further, Friedlander’s shadow can be taken to represent the imposition of the photographer upon his world and his subject.

Reference: Museum of Contemporary Photography , Chicago

Seeking new horizons

We yearn for uncertainty in our environment; the uncanny balance between yours and mine, alien and home. While protected and intimate enclosures at the end of a familiar path offer security, opportunity rises from ambiguous territories that allow for exploration. We seek out suspense in space.

"Though the house is an area of security and peace for man, he would pine away if he locked himself in his house to escape the dangers of the world outside; the house would soon become a prison. He must go out into the world to transact his business and to fulfill his role in life. Both security and danger belong to man, and consequently both areas of lived-space, as life develops in the tension between outer and inner space. " (O.F. Bollnow)

There is a growing obsession in contemporary culture with the awkward systems prevalent in both our homes and the city. At each scale there is a personal investment made by the inhabitant to understand and move through space. The impulse of the traveler is to pursue; either for sheer enjoyment or personal pleasure, but always for satisfaction. As early as ancient Greece, Aristotle contended that strange things with complicated aesthetics brought pleasure to the viewer. The process of trying to understand how and why things are the way they are has followed us ever since. Edmund Husserl and M. Merleau-Ponty indicate that our perception of the world is not a series of unrelated shots but rather hinges from one phase to the next, forming a continuous; we constantly imagine what lies behind closed doors.

The following is a study on design guidelines that will be investigated as a template to understanding how to craft the identity of spaces that offer both security and opportunity.

The Basic Structure of a suspenseful situation consists of seven components: a barrier; realms created by the barrier; a target hidden in the unknown realm; human interest associated with the target; hints disclosing the target; various expectations aroused by the hints; and the feeling of suspense proper generated during this process.

Diagram Credit : Miao, Pu

Prescribing Four Patterns of Uncertainty to specific forms of suspenseful places.

Diagram Credit : Miao, Pu

Reduplication

Spiritual Barrier and Hint

Guiding Element

Movement

Unusual View

Incompleteness

Association of Human Being

Infinity

Light from Unseen Sources

Relevance in

Intimate Space. The House

Sacred Space. The Temple

Public Space. The Piazza

Circumstantial Factors in Spatial Suspense

Cultural Factors

Viewer's Previous Knowledge: frequency of users in the space

Reference: Pu Miao, Suspense of Space: Theory and Design.

Breaking Territorial Structure

"Everyday personal experience of small scale settlement is usually limited to places in which we or our relatives, close friends and colleagues live, work or shop. When we exit into the public realm, the world seems to comprise giant infrastructures and ubiquitous institutions. While traveling, we do not easily venture beyond familiar networks. Visiting distance cities and countries, we seldom penetrate into small scale domestic worlds where we do not know anyone. We may not even notice their vast extent as we fly over them. We experience the modern world as increasingly public and large scale, while in the actual occupation of the earth's surface, the small scale and the local is growing at a tremendous rate." N.J. Habraken, Structure of the Ordinary

What if we could reverse ordinary patterns.

Rethinking the apartment

a narrow sunroom ("engawa"), which constitutes an intermediate space or buffer zone between interior and exterior.

The Gifu Kitagata project proposes a shared urban community of closely knit apartments that create an urban allegory of the village. The circulation routes, storage space and laundry areas are used as the physical and communal connections. These are zones that are given the least attention in contemporary residential design.

Sejima allows the daily chores of laundry and basic house maintenance , usually completed by the women of the household, to become more prominent.

"These free zones of undefined ownership become "baits" for the inhabitants to gain extra space, more light and better ventilation. By enhancing the idea of sharing resources, this colonization of spaces tends to break the isolation of social housing and creates various types and sizes of communal space for the inhabitants to meet one another, hang out, team up and exchange conversation: a modem envision of the traditional neighbourhood.

Such communal space ultimately leads to the genuine public space of the housing scheme, blurring the boundary between the private garden and the public space. As a result, the design as a whole attempt to rethink how housing units and shared spaces function spatially, and on a macro perspective, how the identity of a locale is defined. "

Resource : http://www.irbdirekt.de/daten/iconda/CIB12250.pdf

Unraveling

Sou Fujimato, HOUSE N, Oita Japan, 2008

infinte nesting

We build walls. Single walls and double walls, thick and thin, concrete and brick. We call them thresholds, barriers, surfaces, boundaries; each undulating, rotating, solid or permeable. I am learning now to merely look at , but rather, look in between walls, understanding the 'wall' not merely as a surface but a flexible place to inhabit. Streets and houses are not separated by a single wall, but by a gradation of rich domain with a variety of possibilities; each established by the varying distances.

"Three nested shells eventually mean infinite nesting because the whole world is made up of infinite nesting. And here are only three of them that are given barely visible shape. I imagined that the city and the house are no different from one another in the essence, but are just different approaches to a continuum of a single subject, or different expressions of the same thing- an undulation of a primordial space where humans dwell. This is a presentation of an ultimate house in which everything from the origins of the world to a specific house is conceived together under a single method."

House N brings structure to the natural environment. A distinct boundary is abandonned. Outdoor spaces are given interior placement and interior spaces are invariably the outside. The architecture does not stress form or space or material, but simply expresses the riches of what is between the street and the bed.

Wall Games

Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion. SANAA Architects. Ohio 2006.

The spatial organization comes from the "idea of the wall and its relationship with space". "Normally one wall has two sides , so if you define the shape of the wall, this will affect two adjacent spaces... We decided to make a wall with two thin membranes not necessarily linked together, and we found that this created a kind of double wall with two thin membranes not necessarily linked together, and we found that this created a kind of double wall between these two spaces and marked the independence of each room. Both are close and you can perceive one from the other, but they keep their Independence". The double wall thus creates a third space between the glazed volumes of the room that is purely 'relational'. It connects the volumes visually but not physically. Its purpose is to articulate the architecture, not to facilitate circulation through it.

Sejima's description is telling: " All ( the) glass is transparent but there are so many curved layers that the building has an opaque feeling to it. You cannot grasp if the reflection is from one layer of glass or another, or whether you are just seeing the other side of the museum. The building produces a completely different feeling of transparency. You can see through it, it is opaque." Transparency works in this building as a tool to layer spaces, rather than images and planes. In other words, transparency operates here in terms of projection, generating space beyond the object itself, which is experienced optically but which is immaterial.

Reference: TENSIONS IN TRANSPARENCY by EVE BLAU

Speculating Interface

Comfortable Systems. Constructing identity based on the structure of a tree root system with the home as a central source of strength and support. Away from the other. The city becomes a place of passage and social interaction.

Awkward Systems. An emerging system brought upon by mobility and multicultural interaction. Constructing identity based on the structure of an anthill where the individual is realised through exposure. The city becomes a place to eat, sleep, play and work.

Locating Markers. Understanding boundaries and thresholds at different degrees of privacy with varying levels of control.

Overexposed.

In an era of expanding digital technologies, I wonder whether the culture of self-exposure is a function of the subject's willing abdication to the watchful eye or rather the symptom of the need, distorted or deformed as it may be, to be related to others. Has the possibility of digital exposure constrained or broadened one's self of self? "Does exposure, as we tend to think, render the self more vulnerable, posing a threat to individual autonomy, or does it provide grounds for a new kind of relatedness?"(Ewa Lajer-Burcharth. Interiors at Risk). Are we witnessing the end of interiority as we know it, or simply a change in how it is conceived-- a shift from the notion of spatial depth to the idea of surface or interface? How are we to imagine subjective autonomy in the era of cultural mobility? Should inner space be protected or shared? Do we even need depth?

The bar

Brasserie, Diller Scofidio+ Renfro

Restaurant in the Seagram Building, NY 2000

"The restaurant is without glass, view or connection with the street. This irony prompted a series of alternate responses to the relation between glass and vision. A plasma monitor at the entry, back-to-back with a video camera to the street, produces a virtual transparency...The ritual of making an entrance is split into two events. A sensor above the revolving door triggers a video snapshot with the entry of every new patron and his or her image is added to a continuously changing video display over the bar. The most recent video portaits assumes the first position and racks the previous 15 across, dropping away the oldest".

WithDrawing Room

All Images © Diller+Scofidio

The property line: Codes of Privacy and Publicness, the skin

Shaping Etiquette: Social Order, dining room

Crafting Intimacy: Private Order, body in bed

The WithDrawing Room is a means to "address the issue of domesticity and the complicity of architecture in sustaining its conventions". The installation, put up within an existing house emphasizes --

"how building design serves to construct our social and personal experiences. Moving through " the WithDrawing Room", the audience experienced an eerie sensation of disequilibrium, which heightened appreciation for the power of architecture, and the particular kind of order it imposes on our lives. By cutting a two-inch slit in the floor and exposing the homes' archaeological and legal histories, Diller + Scofidio forced the viewer to contemplate the meanings of "private property" and the home's relationship to the larger world. Moving next to the social circle of the dining table, the artists upset the notion of etiquette by suspending furniture fro the ceiling...once the viewer left...he or she was likely to think twice about how and perhaps why, architecture maintains a not-so- neutral relationship to conformity"

(

Intimate creativity: partners in love and art

By Suzanne Sarnoff, pg 244)

Living Room

Diller Scofidio+Renfro, Living Room,London 2003

Images that bleed through walls

"Life: a user's manual is a series of public performances and online mappings by Michelle Teran that examine the hidden stories captured by private wireless CCTV streams and how they intersect with the visible world around us."

"Puzzlement, amusement, disorientation, surprise" are normal reactions...People are feeling insecure, but their security equipment gives only an illusion of protection," Teran said. "It's just something that comes in a box and they pick it up but they don't really understand how their contribution is affecting the city. I like the idea of people transmitting their personal narratives that are overlays of the city, these invisible stories. The camera starts to create a story about the person who has it and where they're placed within the city. I see the same scenes over and over again; the camera is watching daily banalities, maybe something that is a private moment that maybe I shouldn't be watching. For example, a son had set up a camera for his elderly mother just to make sure that she doesn't fall, and I was able to see her sitting up and calling to him. Am I invading somebody's private space or are they coming into mine?"

All Images: MICHELLE TERAN

MONTRÉAL WALK

May 19, 2005

http://www.ubermatic.org/life/walk.html:

"During Agnès Varda's 1986 film 'Vagabond, the viewer is first introduced to Mona, a drifter, as a frozen corpse. For the rest of the film, through interviews and flashbacks, Varda uses other people's memories to construct an image of the drifter, as she moves from village to village, in the deadness of a French winter. In Montréal a small group is led through China Town and into the parking lot of theHaunted House dinner theatre where a female vagabond wearing a leather jacket and backpack and carrying a portable cd player stands waiting. They are led on a nomadic journey through a dead/non dead area of Montréal by this transient woman who acts as a (silent) medium to the unseen. The walk takes them past construction sites with billboards depicting futuristic scenes of condominium dwellers, into the dead spaces of alleyways, across Boulevard René Lévesque(famous for his fight for Quebec separatism), and finally ending in front of theHudson's Bay Company."

Related Articles:

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2005/11/69445

http://www.ubermatic.org/life/walk.html

Transparent

Image © Milton Gan

How do I see the awkward things?

The transparent building which was to permit unlimited vision out, in fact , exposed itself to observation from without. "The curtain wall has created an overexposed world which leaves only a few shadow zones of privacy. Today, glass is neither the euphoric arterial that promises to seamlessly connect private and public space, nor the menacing surface defining controller and controlled. The pathologies have inverted: the dear of being watched has transformed into the fear that no one may be watching.The glass has assumed the role of a representational surface, a performance screen."(diller scofidio+renfro)

Overexposed is a 24-minute performance: http://66.135.59.206/projects/overexposed/Overexposed.mov

A contact or non-contact species

The Hidden Dimension, Edward Hall

Intimate distance for embracing, touching or whispering

Close phase – less than 6 inches (15 cm)

Far phase – 6 to 18 inches (15 to 46 cm)

Personal distance for interactions among good friends or family members

Close phase – 1.5 to 2.5 feet (46 to 76 cm)

Far phase – 2.5 to 4 feet (76 to 120 cm)

Social distance for interactions among acquaintances

Close phase – 4 to 7 feet (1.2 to 2.1 m)

Far phase – 7 to 12 feet (2.1 to 3.7 m)

Public distance used for public speaking

Close phase – 12 to 25 feet (3.7 to 7.6 m)

Far phase – 25 feet (7.6 m) or more

Flight Distance and Critical Distance. Hediger's term for the inter-species spacing mechanism which measures the distance an observer approaches before the animals start to flee. As a general rule, the larger the animal the greater distance it must keep between itself and the "other". A "critical distance" occurs when a boundary is crossed and the animal turns around to retaliate. Aggression is regulated by developing a hierarchy and establishing spacing. These invisible boundaries are valued very differently from one culture to another. I was born in India, moved to Oman as a teenager, and am now living in Canada as an adult;three very different worlds each with their own ideas of personal space. I hope to explore the ways to expose each culture's response to "appropriate" proximity by experimenting with manipulations of architectural space.

The following is a story.

"There are 1.1 Billion people in India and they are all used to not having personal space. This is a country where families suffering from economic hardship (the government uses the terms: Economically Weak Sections) live in apartments with one room and often have 6-9 people living in it: the parents, the children, the parents of the father and if the eldest child is recently married--his wife would be there, too. If you come to India you will have no personal space. I have regularly used the urinal with someone standing close enough behind me that he could help me aim if he reached around. If he's chatty he might even start up a conversation. This is just how things are; too much space and someone might cut in front of you. Next, try riding the subway or the bus. The subway in Delhi is a study in contradictions. They are immaculately clean while everything street level is that of a developing country: gritty, haphazard and trampled upon by humanity's heaviest footprint. Subways in most cities are intended to be part of a rapid transit system. In Delhi, you have to go through a metal detector. First form a line to buy your token (they have smart cards, too, which save time and money) then form a line 100 people deep (if it's a popular train station) and wait 10 minutes to get through the line during rush hour. The line is the very image of diversity with young and old, the prosperous rotund, and the famished skinny. Women bedecked in the latest western trends standing behind women in traditional garb that could have been plucked from the 50s. While you are in line you have plenty of time to be observant ... unless of course you're distracted by the corpulent short guy behind you who persists on aligning his bellybutton with the apex of your butt-crack. Every time you move forward he moves forward the same distance and then adds a margin of 2cm just in case he gauged your distance from his orifice incorrectly. Okay, so maybe the pot belly was the exceptional character, right? That was the bag check line. Before that was the metal detector line where some waifish teenager was so close he seemed to be testing to see if my sneakers were properly inflated by kicking my heel as if I were equipped with tires. To ensure that no one cut between us and interrupted his courtship, he absentmindedly placed the back of his hand on my lower back as he casually jabbered to his younger family members behind him. Suddenly the tire inspection turned into a rodeo with him practically riding my back AND holding on. If I moved up he would move up and add the same 2 cm margin as Shri Potbelly-ji I don't scowl; I don't suck my teeth or sniff angrily at people. I just cope and will take my revenge by dry humping the guy in front the next time I have to queue up."- Jason Tapia, Miami-ite, friend and brave soul.

Investigating Cross-Cultural Receptors:

Visual and Auditory Space through materials in Japanese and German architecture

Olfactory Space of streets in Paris and Suburbia

Skin/Muscle memory in Japanese gardens and Wright's Old Imperial Hotel in Tokyo

Thermal Space through intimate perceptual contact