I AM BATMAN!

BATMAN ISSUE 001 - Image via Daily News

Architects should act as detective, observing from within the landscape they hope to affect. Sometimes this may involve using the methods and mindsets of the characters with whom they hope to interact.

In order to act effectively against crime, Batman places his actions from within the mental worlds of the criminal. Equally the architect, in the mental worlds of the bereaved, of the homeless, or of the pleasure seeker.

If inhabitants of an observed world carry out their activies under shadow and behind masks of some kind, the architect should enter that world, put on the mask or dark cape. An architect should find a way to see through the eyes of the people who occupy the spaces upon which one hopes to act.

Much of what we are doing is changing the style of thinking - Wittgenstein

Perhaps I have blurred my point by centring it around a comic book character. Maybe the idea of architect as brooding anti-hero that sleeplessly solves urbanity as part of some obsessed solo mission is a step too far (or perhaps just too close to the plot of the Fountainhead). I'll save the aspects of Batman as representational of architectural mindscapes for another Bat-time, same Bat-channel.

For me to attempt a project in Korea about bereavement successfully, rather than just talking, or writing, or walking or seeing, as myself, I should retain the worlds that Koreans create for themselves within mine - Korean coloured bat-spectacles if you will.

KOREAN COLOURED BAT-PHONE? - image via Daily News

An analogue of Batman is not something to emulate in its entirety. Architects should be like Batman, but sometimes it is more effective to be like Bruce Wayne. Though part of the common places, and fully active within them, he still maintains the inner world of detective, periodicly re-entering the uncommon places costumed appropriately