Home—Territorialising Plural Identites

I have a passport from India, though I have never lived there. Most of my life has been spent in Singapore, though I need a visa to get in. I was born to parents who are tethered to their birthplace but raised in a household that I have only known to float. To an American, I sound English; to an Australian, I sound American. To a stranger, I might look Indian; to an Indian, I often don’t.

When I was 18, my graduating class had over 60 nationalities represented. I was likely in a minority with only one passport, one fluent language, and one high school; but still part of that territorially ambiguous group, united in our shared, anxious frustration at the question “Where’s home?”.

I do not have a single answer to it: I am of India, Singapore, Switzerland and the concoction of other nations and cultures that have influenced me. Home is different depending on where I am and who I am with, and that burden of an opportunity is something I am still striving to reconcile.

I suspect we all are.

We all live simultaneously on a stage where the world’s frenzied life and ideologies are presented to us in a cacophony of belief, and we are each tasked with finding our territory—some semblance of equilibrium—in that whirlpool of experience. But neither we, nor the places we have been and become in, have singular identities.

How do we find balance in that frenzy? Identity in such variety? Home in all those homes?

How do we territorialise our plural identities?

This was my undergraduate thesis in architecture.

NOTE—I should note that my thinking here is very much rooted in the time and space I did this work (2016 in Pittsburgh, PA). There are ideas on this page that I may not assert today. But, in the spirit of keeping my lessons close, I leave it here as a marker of where my thinking once was to reveal how it has changed since.
Nikhil, 2020, Singapore.

Subjective Realities

The Architectural Parallax

I am still editing this part of the story, but my thoughts on the architectural parallax and the sensory commons of humanity can be found here.

Cultural Space

In order to understand the significance of how culture and our perception of community affects us, I sketched out a model for cultural identity to ground this investigation.

I experience the world through seemingly discrete self-schemata, different faces of my identity. I appear a different person with family than I do with friends (from high school and even from college); my accent changes, my mind works in distinct ways, I say and do things differently.

While some might argue that these performances are discrete identities in themselves, I must believe that there is a core, some semblance of a true ‘me’ that connects all of them. That all of these performed identities are limited orthographic projections of a complex multi-dimensional whole, each giving a glimpse of who I am but none telling the full story. Witnessing a parallax effect - shifting your view of this cultural volume - allows its profile to change, offering a fuller understanding of who I am in cultural space.

Society-Space-Time Continuum

In Quantum City, Asdar Arida proposes the concept of the Society-Space-Time Continuum (SST), an acknowledgement of our subjective perception of the world. If Space-Time can be understood to be an ‘absolute’ reality, then this third field of Society is a projection of that reality, augmented by the subject’s emotional state and cultural filters. It is the acknowledgement of our plural, subjective realities.

Architecture is a discipline founded on the delineation between interiors and exteriors, and so it must do the same in this entirely intangible third field of Society. It creates homes, houses and memories - societal, spatial and temporal interiors - and in so doing allows us to read the world as a frenetic layering of simultaneous interiors.

Interiority and SST Typologies

Territorialising Plurality

Operations on the Existing

Devices within a Grid

Nihilarium (No-Place)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ARCHITECTURE

Aureli, Pier Vittorio. The Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture within and against Capitalism. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008.

Davies, Colin. Thinking About Architecture: An Introduction to Architectural Theory. London: Laurence King, 2011.

Di Palma, Vittoria, Diana Periton, and Marina Lathouri, ed. Intimate Metropolis. New York: Routledge, 2009.

Stoner, Jill. Toward a Minor Architecture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012.

Sudjic, Deyan. The Edifice Complex: How the rich and powerful shape the world. New York: Penguin, 2005.

Waldheim, Charles, ed. The Landscape Urbanism Reader. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006.

Žižek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times. New York: Verso, 2010.

CULTURE

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1996. Print.

Hobsbawn, Eric, and Terrence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: UP Cambridge, 2015.

Mathews, Gordon. Global Culture/Individual Identity. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Saile, David G, ed. Architecture in Cultural Change: Essays in Built Form & Cultural Research. Lawrence: University of Kansas Printing Service, 1986.

Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Sub-Altern Speak?”. 1988.

SINGAPORE

Barbara Leitch Lepoer, ed. Singapore: A Country Study. Washington: GPO for the Library of Congress, 1989.

Di Palma, Vittoria, Diana Periton, and Marina Lathouri, ed. Intimate Metropolis. New York: Routledge, 2009.

PERCEPTION

Arida, Ayssar. Quantum City. Oxford: Architectural Press, 2002.

Holmes, Lindsay. “People With Anxiety Perceive The World In A Fundamentally Different Way”, The Huffington Post, March 4, 2016. Accessed April 20, 2016. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/anxiety-perception-study_us_56d48e13e4b03260bf77a48e?te=Ozy

FORM

Lai, Jimenez. Citizens of No Place: An Architectural Graphic Novel. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012.

Ljungberg, Christina. “Cartographies of the Future: Julie Mehretu’s Dynamic Charting of Fluid Spaces”. The Cartographic Journal 46 (2009): 308-15.

Kempf, Petra. You Are The City: Observation, Organization, and Transformation of Urban Settings. Kösel: Lars Müller, 2009.

MVRDV, and The Why Factory. The Vertical Village: Individual, Informal, Intense. Rotterdam: NAi, 2012.