THEORETICAL ENGAGEMENT
Chinese Landscape Painting 山水畫
Shadow Puppetry 皮影戲
C R A F T I N G - How does crafting skill affect a design process? Craft is an outcome-based form of art while art is crucial during it's process of making. Shadows Puppetry is one of the ancient form of crafting to tell the story of a place and their settings. It's about place-making and the fluidity of certain movement. Simultaneously in architectural context, the transition of spaces are not just defined by solid partition, but also through various elements. Shadow's opacity and sharpness determines the activity of a place. The more sharper a shadow is, the more concentrated an activity is while they sparse out and create an unintentional space boundary. The human movement and activities trail along with time and shadow throughout the day.
Transition
Both public and private space are controlled by a certain authority or certain individual by establishing a set of rules and conditions for other users. By clearly defining both spaces, thresholds are created through architecture context in various ways. Most of the transitions are intentionally create by architects by bridging a person in between two different worlds. Even so, unintentional transitions are sometimes established unconsciously. But how can we determine or experience the transition of space? More so, how such expression can be experience in Chinatown Kuala Terengganu? Immersed in our everyday architecture, it is very common to observe the changes of materials in spatial classification. The changes in between two spaces are visually and tactility clear. Even so, such changes were not thorough and definite. Every touching experience of architecture is multi-sensory; qualities of space, matter and scale are measured equally by the eye, ear, nose, skin, tongue, skeleton and muscle (Pallasmaa p.41). Another foremost example to express the transition of spaces is through the quality of all our senses. It can be experience without solely rely on a conspicuous architecture element. In Kuala Terengganu Chinatown, the relationships of private and public space are utterly vague hence creating an uncertainty of territory ruling. To relate, the volume of the sound and the smell of joss stick are categorized as subconscious transition. They create a “threshold” in a different way and expose it in a sensible way without marking an obvious boundary. The concentration of human activities is also commoned as one of the approach to identifying the transition of Chinatown, Kuala Terengganu. The southern part of Chinatown is more prevailing as the concentration of activities descends throughout the northern part. The threshold are rather dim and “slow”.
Reference :- 1. Pallasmaa.J (2005) The Eyes of The Skin : Architecture and the Senses. Great Britain : Wiley-Academy.
