Date: 10 June 04
Email this Article
| Click to Print
Born in Ipoh, Malaysia in 1964, CJ Lim is founder of leading edge London based architectural practice Studio 8, which celebrates its tenth anniversary this year. Since 1989 Lim has also taught widely in architectural schools, including the Architectural Association, London, University of East London and University of North London.
He is currently Director at the Bartlett Architecture Research Lab, University College London, and in 1997, was the first recipient of the Royal Institute of British Architects Award for Academic Contribution in Education. He is a Royal Institute of British Architects External Examiner and Visiting Professor at the Mackintosh School of Architecture, Glasgow School of Art.
CJ Lim's work challenges architectural traditions - he is as likely to be influenced by cinematography and storytelling as traditional architectural elements of space, form and light. The architect's extraordinary talent as a draftsman is also widely celebrated. This first became evident at the Architectural Association (1982-87) and he became one of a generation of students who demanded a reappraisal of the status of drawing within the architectural practice. Archilab described Lim's drawing as, 'a fantastic virtuoso performance of line and paint, deliberately and obstinately abstract'.
INTERVIEW
The publication and exhibition 'Museums (Work in Process)', which features at the Mackintosh Gallery at the Glasgow School of Art, is essentially 'the story so far' of CJ Lim / Studio 8. Can you describe how this story unfolds?
Essentially there are four different chapters and these are represented around the theme of museums. For some bizarre reason we have been extensively involved in designing museums, galleries and cultural buildings. The exhibition and publication doesn't merely show one project from beginning to completion, but looks at project to project over a range of time. It shows how an idea can mature - like getting the sauce right for the gravy!
The exhibition begins with our first set of competition projects, which we describe as 10/441, because we did ten projects in 441 days. In these projects, we explored public spaces - we are really keen on looking at all elements of public spaces, not just buildings, but the landscape and the spaces in between. We threw everything into the pot including the kitchen sink!
The first of our 10/441 projects was the Glass Centre project in Sunderland (1994). We also feature in the exhibition the Korean American Arts and Cultural Centre in Downtown Los Angeles (1995). This area of Los Angeles is a bit rough so we designed a courtyard where everything is inward looking. We played a lot with shadows and light with this project. The Newcastle Architecture Centre (1995) by Tyne Bridge started off as a competition for an architecture centre and has ended up as a pub!
A big international competition which we won was to design the University College of London Museum (1995). The building was to house five different disciplines, however because it's a cultural building, in the end the college couldn't get funding for it. This project really benefited from all the previous mistakes we made.
The site (near Euston Station) was an open void within the city, so we wanted to keep it as an inhabitable void. The idea was for an inhabitable 'jukebox' void. You can call up artefacts from the storage towers, like you can call up a disc, just like a jukebox. The facade is a liquid crystal glass facade, so depending who is on the balconies calling up which artefact, it would blink. It would animate itself, and you would never get the same facade twice.
The project incorporated technology with a big dollop of art. I'm not interested in architecture in a capital 'A' sense, but I'm interested in architecture that looks to various disciplines. Architecture is about life, it's not about putting up concrete walls and columns. That's really, really important. So in the case of UCLM the facade is like an electronic art piece, whereas the rest of the building is functional spaces.
So, that's how we first worked during those initial 441 days. We had ten people working on the UCL building, and as a project it's probably closest to my heart as it was my first big win. It's like my first love! It's always heartbreaking when a winning project doesn't get built, but this first 10/441 chapter was an optimistic one.
You seem to favour painting as a medium of architectural expression?
I do these paintings to explore and document our ideas. Architectural drawings are much more orthodox and don't really tell very much about the spirit of the building - they can be very limiting, and they don't say a lot about the ideas. These paintings are not just about self-satisfaction, they capture the character of the idea more.
For example if you look at the Mackintosh drawings of this building, they don't tell you about the wonderful light which you can experience throughout the building. I believe my paintings express a better distillation of my ideas. When projects are conceived I feel these paintings are a truer representation of my ideas. I don't confine myself to what organisers of competitions want to see.
We wanted to continue the momentum of doing public buildings such as the UCLM project. So, in this second chapter of our career we tried to pursue more public building projects, and the architecture of this period is very serious. In a competition organised by the Jvaskyala town council in Finland, we designed an extension to the Jvaskyla Music and Arts Centre (1997).
We divided the site into zones and extended it into the park - we wanted a dialogue between the internal and external landscape. In the external landscape we created water fountains and a forest of fibre optic lights. This place has snow for six months, so we liked the idea of breathing light underneath these piles of snow.
Competitions are good for small experimental practices like ourselves because it gives us a deadline! Competitions are good for discipline.
Another competition we entered in 1997 was to design the Museum Constantini in Buenos Aires. The site is based in an area with drug pushing and prostitution, and the brief was for a museum and park. We tucked the main museum building away and our main strategy was to create a whole series of water zones.
We had a series of fountains and water jets, and underneath these were a series of basketball pitches - so we created a dual purpose area. Basically, we used water to control the whole landscape - we liked the idea of creating a cool oasis there, as this area could get burning hot. I see it a bit like the fountain scene in the film La Dolce Vita, where Anita Ekberg cools off in the Italian heat. The landscape was probably more successful than the building.
In these two 'Chapter 2' projects we got bogged down with pandering to the brief, and there were a lot of compromises. We got locked into this 'serious architect' mode of thinking. This pattern we broke in Chapter 3.
The practice is much more experimental, and at this point we were interested in architectural narratives. The inspiration in our 'Sins' series was David Fincher's film 'Seven'.
'Seven' looked at the seven deadly sins that are in us all, and that became an inspiration for a series of projects dealing with these sins. The projected we highlighted in the exhibition definitely challenges the notion of a museum.
It's called the Jerry Springer Museum, and is a satire based on what we all like to do, which is namely to watch people's misery through their confessions. We are all voyeurs.
The project takes as its starting point the fact that mobile phones have made the old phone booths redundant. So, I looked at what we could do with them. I always think that the public telephone booth is the smallest building in the world, and what we have done is to convert the telephone booth into a confession box, where you can go and have a good moan about anything that you want, and it will record it and broadcast it on a public plaza.
I see them like little private oases within a city. After a hard day's work or shopping you can go in and have a moan, and then the tape is broadcast, in this case in London's South Bank, where there is a public walkway and where people could then go and listen. Speakers are set into the concrete pavement which is broadcast like a radio.
It wouldn't be the same person in the same spot, so the architecture is changing with the users, like the constellation in the sky.
Depending on the season the texture of the architecture would be different, for example with the clothes that we wear in each season. The people make the building in the way that they occupy it. Architects tend to forget that buildings are for people. Architecture should explore how people use space, how you can make pleasant spaces for family outings etc.
I enjoyed the 'Sins' project as it involved analysing how we think and how we behave, analysing the whole culture - at the time 1999-2000 - in terms of new technology, the mobile phone and our love for voyeurism. It embodies the 'Hello' magazine mentality. Imagine if you were in there confessing that your mother-in-law is an alien or whatever!
Basically, it's a different kind of museum, and about not seeing architecture as a series of walls. How can people influence the architecture, how can people make the architecture as well? This will be something we will continue to explore.
As well as the 'Sins' series, Chapter 3 of the CJ Lim / Studio 8 story also features your entry for the 14th Membrane competition: Urban Metazoo (1999)?
What we are trying to say with this project is that we are serious architects but we can provide a very different angle on what buildings can be. It doesn't have to be about walls, it could be about human observations. With the 'Urban Metazoo' project we are looking at ethics again - this time we are looking at zoos.
These days they are seen as being politically incorrect, yet I think they are important, say for kids living in cities. Urban farms are very important, otherwise many kids might think that chickens only come in plastic bags!
This is a Japanese competition - an architectural Shinkenchiku competition - which looks at exploring different concepts of building membranes. We looked at the brief differently and investigated how we could create a membrane with a flock of birds. That's the most animated membrane in the world because it keeps changing all the time - it's beautiful.
If you put something on the surface of the water it will attract the attention of fish so we have applied a layer of liquid that covers the fish (in this case, anchovies) but which has light to attract them - so this in turn attracts the birds to circle round.
The fish are protected against being eaten by the gulls because the surface of the water is covered, but every so often little squirts of water create a clearing and give a little window to the anchovies and keeps the attention of the birds.
Although this is a museum, it is another way of displaying things, as here are no cages or glass cases involved. And you are keeping the attention of the artefacts (the birds) which become exhibits themselves. This is just a way of choreographing rather than controlling nature. We were very excited about this project which is very experimental, and the book where this project featured sold incredibly well.
There seems to be a strong narrative thread through your work?
Narratives are my main thing now - I love the idea of stories structuring architecture. Which is why we went from the 'Sins' series to the Urban Metazoo to Alice in Wonderland - this is a project which included a scheme for a library, museum and community building in Sittingbourne, Kent.
We took the theme literally but it was interesting to build structures around the Alice in Wonderland narrative. I think my next project is going to be around the theme of Noah's Ark.
We were really happy with this period (Chapter 3). We looked at how we could challenge the idea of making buildings without walls, buildings which are made by their inhabitants, whether birds or humans. We were challenging the system. In our next and final chapter we decided we would go back to building again, but still playing with narratives.
Our last project was for a competition to design a museum in Korea dedicated to the artist Nam June Paik. In terms of the concept we took two of his pieces - a candle piece which is set in an enclosed space in a museum in Frankfurt, and which captures and re-projects red, green and blue light (the flames flicker and it's amazing).
We also took from him the idea of what the artist calls a TV garden, which is basically nature embracing technology. In our design, the contour of the building and the pine trees is defined in terms of green light; the ground conditions are red; and the blue defines the pavilions. The building's moss covered edge contains pipettes with sugar water, and these attract butterflies.
We're choreographing nature again, as we did with the previous 'Urban Metazoo' project. The butterflies flicker and because of their different colours they create a pixellation effect. The whole thing is like digital electronic art, yet going back to nature, which is unusual. This is a recent project dating from Autumn 2003.
In 'Museums (Work in Process)' we've shown the Nam June Paik project from the earliest sketches, and from working out the square metereage to the final models. We are quite traditional in our methods - designing is almost like a recipe, like making pancakes.
We often get it wrong before we get it right and in this project we got it very very wrong, so we changed the orientation of the building by 90 degrees.
'Museums (Work in Process)' is a series of projects culminating into one. Four stages that feed into each other, with ideas that cross over. The Nam June Paik Museum project is maybe more of a compromise than the Sins Series but we are coming close to bridging the two.
We're looking at buildings that are not predominantly about being inside but about public spaces, open spaces, ambiguous spaces. This project is about realising our vision in a more realistic way.
Your projects are represented by many hand drawn and painted works, in addition to the more traditional architectural drawings. Most architects tend to rely heavily on Computer Aided Design these days?
We tend to do little computer generated work as it tends to become homogenised with other peoples. Everybody uses the same thing so all the computer generated designs all tend to look the same. I want to work in a way that is unique to us and gives us a clearer identity, although, I'm not knocking people who use computers.
When I was training at the Architectural Association we did things traditionally. Have you seen the documentary on the making of The Lord of the Rings? Basically, the director Peter Jackson originally envisaged the character of Gollum as completely computer generated. But when he saw the result he said it was too stiff.
So he got that actor that played Gollum to provide all the nuances of human movement, rather than just a computer generated thing. We tend to work like that. We use the computer to set things up and then we re-work it all by hands - so we work in all the mistakes! I think the more we use computers, the greater the danger that buildings lose their human touch and tactility. Hand drawings and traditional 3D models are important to us.
The important thing is we want to work with nature and people. We often find that you need to take five steps, three steps backwards. But we are still interested in making non conventional architectural elements.
You have been the visiting professor at the Glasgow School of Art for four years now - in fact you are known as much for your teaching as for your architectural output?
I love communicating with young energetic people. It affects my ideas. It's an important part of my work. I need that conversation to stimulate me. What little I have done I do owe it to the people I talk to, I don't call it teaching.
I learn from them as much as they learn from me. I love coming to the Mackintosh School as it's a unique place that has an important history of fine art and architecture. Its approach is not so technical, it's a more ephemeral, tactile architectural education, and I think that's very special. The students are also very bright and willing to try things. I have taught at schools where they just sit and have seances!
Trying things is super important.
CJ Lim / Studio 8 is representing the United Kingdom at the forthcoming Venice Biennale, can you describe what this means to you and your practice?
The Venice Biennale project is a completely new project. One of the conditions is that our submission is a brand new project, so this is very very exciting. Hopefully the project will embody some of the qualities of the Nam June Paik Museum and the 'Sins' series. I like this idea of having a free rein to my ideas. I also want to make the project as low tech as possible. I'm sure most people will be exhibiting huge computer generated images, so we're going to go back to painting, linking ideas from different periods.
What's Next?
Although we've been operating for nearly ten years, we haven't built a lot. Our ambition is to build. We want to look at architectural possibilities - how you can challenge programmes that have existed since the Dark Ages especially in the UK, where competition briefs tend to be very conservative.
Our realised projects are restaurants, shops and interiors, although I'd have to say that they are not things that I am that proud of. My ambition is to put up big buildings, or at least medium sized buildings rather than little projects that will exist only for a short number of years, and then when the bling bling factor goes from the shop or restaurant then it goes out the window - that's what happens!
I do admit that these small projects are interesting testing grounds though, and we have thought 'how much of these projects can we bring to the bigger designs?' I want to build in the UK as the office is based in London. And this country has been very good to me. We are always going without in this country - not like in America where they have plenty. But I think the idea of making do is very good, it's very creative and I like it a lot - it's very energetic.
The Architect James Stirling said you have to be quite stupid to do good architecture - we rely on our mistakes as well as our strategy. We learn a lot from our mistakes. I feel very confident now - we can do it! We can bring a different level of building and space making to a project. I'm a very optimistic person and I believe that if I keep trying maybe it will happen!
For more information visit
www.cjlim-studio8.com and www.gsa.ac.uk
