Physical Mobility, Virtual Mobility versus Local Context (Social & Political)

Chan Min Kang

The first thing that come to my mind on physical mobility is the invention of wheel and aerodynamic. On the virtual side, technology such as mobile phone and the internet are the things that come to my mind. These inventions have change how the human interact with each other, and had already brought major effects to both natural and the built environment.

For particular instance I would make myself as an example. I’m a Malaysian, living for 20 years in a hot and humid climate country, 6500 miles away or just around 13 hours of straight flight from London. Travel distance between 2 places is being measured by hours of minutes, and not kilometers or miles anymore. Anytime of the day, I can just pick up my mobile phone, and just call back home to my family back Malaysia, and feels that I’m actually not that far away. Compare to the age before invention of technology to communicate and travel, we would only read of London, learn about the different culture, and some places might not even know London. But now, some may even be working in another country, but still building and caring their own family back another country.

These changes brought up an important issue in architecture, which is also a problem I’m currently facing. After living for 20 years since I was born in Malaysia, I understand everything that happened there, from the local culture and country history, to political issues or local community system. And being involved in architecture, we will always need to connect our architecture to the local context. To fulfill the needs of the occupations and the function of the building is easy as long as you can research and complete the list. But to bring the proper architecture and style to the local site context will required more than just research. There’s too much little things that affect the concept, which won’t just be found easily just by researching. We will need to blend into the culture, understanding how things works around, from the big picture till the little details of people’s daily actions. To do that, it would require experience that needed to be collected through time; appropriate time that not just a week or a month, it maybe few months or years.

Yes, the invention of technology bring us much closer to each other, that we now could have the chance to interact with people from around the world. But does that means that we got the ability to do what we do best in that place that we going. Architecture is the second oldest profession since the beginning of time, and being evolve and transform to suit the local context. Each place got individual architecture style and that style provides the best performance, which wouldn’t be able to be implementing to somewhere else. With the cultural, social and political difference, each place got different individual local context. And for me to come to the United Kingdom, and practice architecture here, I will have to learn all the different style and construction method. But to actually design a perfect or near perfect building design, do I have the experience and knowledge about the little things that actually make architecture? Do I even understand the little things, the way the local socialize, and the political and history issues that been affecting the place and the local communities.

A problem will always need to be overcome, we architect always provide the solution. So does the digital age provide the solution? Or do eventually only INTERNATIONAL architecture thinking that will save the day? Mobility does provide the ease of mobile and shorten the distance of human interaction, but are we using it the right way?