A walk through an urban landscape is one that involved an individual’s mental recognizing and re-structuring the urban fragments into a coherent ‘legible patterns.’ The visual sensation of color, shape, motion, the polarization of light, the tradition senses of smell, sound, touch, kinesthesia, the sense of gravity, or even the sense of the electrical field are the cues that feed an image, nourishing a memory of a place. Obviously it is important to be recognized and patterned our surrounding in which a memory of a place is the past information that helps guide actions and moves one easily and quickly though an environment. Even in an unexplored modern urban landscape, for many to completely ‘lost’ is a rare urban experience. The existence of other people, the present of symbols and signs, street numbers, advertisements, route signs, bus placards are devices that support our navigation through an alien landscape.1

In the synesthetic experience of seeing colors in various forms, color then is the primary cue. In the process of experiencing the landscape of forms, color is the indicating factor that these forms have been recognized and meanings are understood. In other words, the understanding of individual alphabetical letters, their subsequent organization in words, sentences, then paragraphs etc, is first evoked or ‘expressed’ through the emergence of colors on their forms, then meanings follow. The generalized metal picture of the exterior physical world that is held by an individual is an important link in process of navigation. The internally generated color is the important link in the sequence of binding itself to external form and meanings. Therefore while color can be defined as a part of a spectrum of infinite monochromes, color can also be considered as a canvas of forms, the context of the landscape.

If hypothetically, a synesthete loses the ability to see color would it stir in him/her a sense of confusion or ‘lost’ in recognizing the landscape of forms and meanings? The equivalence of the confusion or lost arises in a navigator, not only in the geographical displacement sense but even more dramatic in not recognizing a familiar landscape in which a familiar element is disappeared or changed in character.

One of the familiar landscape alterations we have seen is the white-silencing intrusion overnight of falling snow. As it comes, it wipes out all the recognizable paths and merges all the elements of the landscape onto a canvas of white. In this regard rather than adding elements to stimulate a certain architectural experience, what if we take away elements, altering the landscape so that as one moves though a familiar landscape, there is a need to re-evaluate, questioning the whereabouts existence of the old fabrics, the seemed un-altering memory of this familiar place. The evolution of the urban landscape is an undeniable and natural process, the sudden, subtle yet dramatic alteration of a very familiar landscape is what I’m interest in. The frame of time therefore is an essential element in this alteration process. As Paul Virilio puts it “the lost of material space leads to the government of nothing but time.”2

The alteration to the physical project is achieved through the evaporation of the external skin through light. This transformative nature of the material not only dissolves in light but through light emerges from within a new identity, a new color. Whether that can be the skins of the sky, the surrounding contexts and profiles which adhere and replace the walls and ceiling or simply this new screen is distinguishable membrane from the surrounding.


1 Kevin Lynch’s “Image of the City”
2 Paul Virilio’s “The Overexposed City”