Taylor’s University School of Architecture, Building & Design Bachelor of Science (Hons) Architecture Thinking I Architecture (ARC60603/ARC2323/ARC2312) Personal Value Statement Name: Tan Zi Jian
ID: 0318291
Instructor: Tony Liew
Date: 16/10/2015
For the first twelve years of my life, I was a naive and happy child who enjoyed the companionship of family and had no worries. Then one day in seventh grade, during math class, that all changed thanks to a conversation I had with the student who sat next to me, a guy who said something influential to me and I am truly sorry that it is not an easy job to recall his name. He told me that I was an anti-socialist. Let me make a statement first off, I was not at all the same person in seventh grade as I am today. However, I am still on my way of becoming a better man. For one thing, I was totally ignorant to any understanding of the middle school social system. For the reason of being free and comfortable, I tended to be alone and uncommunicative. Second, popularity is not something I worry about now, not because my social positioning has changed but simply because it is a subject I find immature and superficial. I am writing about this event for the sole reason that it is one of the most affective factors that changed the way I lived my life. Now that all of that is out of the way, I would like to start facing and improving myself through defining world view and personal value. Worldview is defined as a conceptual framework and a set of beliefs used to make sense out of complex, seemingly chaotic reality based on perceptions, experience and learning. It provides an outlook or expectation for the world exists or is perceived to exist. This is a general definition of “worldview”. In a more specific way to define it, or in another word, to me the worldview is a person’s philosophy of time, a mind-set shaped from years of habit and experience. Most of the time, the worldview of a person is derived from the circle of people around them such as family, friends and community. Values are basic faith (notions) to know right from wrong. Value system is a hierarchy based on a ranking of an individual’s values in terms of one’s intensity. Sources of our Value System are a significant portion which is genetically determined; and other factors include national culture, parents, teachers, friends and similar environmental influences. To record your value at certain point of your life, it would be like doing an onsite-sketching, recording what you see on the spot, you might left out some important parts but it has a general idea of your background and your current character, personality and experiences for you to discover your values implied therein. A personal value statement is a narrative description that is intended to raise consciousness of our own background, experiences, and abilities to promote experience in design that are consistent with our personal values. The Central Six survey in the book Spent: Sex, Evolution & Consumer Behaviour is a good guidance in indicating and determining our individual taste with our traits and qualities.
First on the list is general intelligence. My father told me that when he was a kid, his social network was called “outside”. I agree with this statement after I try to be communicative and outgoing. I start to see things from a different perspective and more importantly they are all firsthand experience, not only care for my own comfort of being free and unrestrained and define social interaction in my own way. Obviously, we're losing social skills, the human interaction skills, how to read a person's mood, to read their body language, how to be patient until the moment is right to make or press a point. Too much exclusive use of electronic information dehumanises what is a very, very important part of community life and living together. I try to interact with more people, face to face, maybe some of them would be my eye-opener, stimulate and broaden my views. It seems cruel and unreasonable to have interaction to the people around you that is knowledgeable and able to guide you and enlighten you but the kind of talented people who understand his or her strength and assist the community at the best, he or she could be positive. On the other hand, I try being helpful to the people who similar to the “previous” me. In order to do that, I have to be as knowledgeable as best and always looking forward to something inspiring and motivating. This become my intention to be open to experience all the things within reach and available to me, go crazy and go wild. Being an architecture student, this step is a giant leap for me. Openness includes the traits of curiosity, broad-mindedness, and interest in plenty of fields. It predicts emotional sensitivity, social tolerance and political liberalism. This is totally matching with my choice of group mates while doing a group work. I tend to find someone I have not worked with before to make sure I meet new faces, make more interaction with them and learn from their strength. To get interacting with different people from a variety of social strata, I would like to step out of my comfort zone and go out for a walk. I always like to took LRT for my “journey for soul” and get off at a random station. During the road trips, my conscientiousness is all time high, meaning to I am always get interested in and aware of anything happen around me and never let down my guard. The appearance of the fantastic electronic devices has cruelly and authentically lowered down the conscientiousness and highly reduced the interaction of most of the people. They walk without looking, stop without warning, even they know each other, and they seldom talk. I hate to say this but I really despise the people who have no conscientiousness to their surrounding as they stop interacting with others and indirectly slowing down in improving themselves and getting to know more. Other than openness and conscientiousness, the next Central Six trait will be agreeableness. It is a tendency to be compassionate and cooperative rather than suspicious and antagonistic towards others. It is also a measure of one's trusting and helpful nature, and whether a person is generally welltempered or not. High agreeableness is often seen as naive or submissive. Low agreeableness personalities are often competitive or challenging people, which can be seen as argumentative or untrustworthy. I like and I am the kind of people who has low agreeableness trait. Uni-life teach me a lot of things. Sometimes we seek peace and quiet and shirk taking any trouble, we just follow any order or instruction given without thinking how to make it better. I strongly dim low agreeableness personality encourage more interaction between us to happen. However, my attitude towards agreeableness is to solve the problem by looking it at different perspective but not having conflict with others. Sometimes, there is more important to know what the problem than a solution is. The answers always come along with the understanding of the roots of the problem. I see this as an interaction as well. How I interact with the problems. I seldom talk about the stability of myself, especially emotional stability. I think my stability is quite relevant to my high conscientiousness and low agreeableness. I tend to experience unpleasant emotion easily, such as anger, anxiety, depression, and vulnerability. Although I am unstable in
term of emotion, I rarely expose myself and show my real emotion most of the time. Even with the closet friend of mine, I can still pretend to be fine with everything. I would like to keep this very personal thing to myself and let it out merely when I am alone. I think this is a progress of knowing myself, inside of me is just so unstable that I have to pretend to be and persuade others that I am so emotionally stable. I like to be surrounded my friends, confide in and speaking honestly to each other, but I prefer to be alone as that will be the only moment I truly become myself and have a clear mind to think about myself. Lastly, I would like to talk about extraversion. Actually I am not sure about myself of being high or low in this trait. The trait of me has two contrasting sides, I can be either active and sociable or extremely emotional and anti-social. I display each side of this trait sporadically but in this grey area, I categorise my extraversion into low. I try not to be an anti-social person but I am still on the way of changing. I have my reserved personalities. Yet, two points are confirmed, I prefer working alone and do not like to be leader. So frankly speaking, I am considered low on Extraversion.
I was born and raised in Johor Bahru, a liveable, affordable and comfortable city. It seems nothing different between the lifestyle in Johor Bahru and Kuala Lumpur. People who live there strive to get a better life but without inconsideration of others. In a competitive situation, most of the people are still having the touching qualities of people. It is not a countryside or rural area but the simple lifestyle mentioned make me feel like being home. Both of my parent are sincere but not the avid kind of worshipper of Taoism Buddhist. The action of lighting the incense sticks by my parent every morning make me question myself about the existence of God. It conforms to the proven fact that life cannot come into existence by itself. No evidence exists to support the idea that life could spontaneously come from nonliving matter. There is always someone says: “Only uneducated people believe in God.” However, to me, belief in God is entirely reasonable. Human have a “spiritual need”. I think we all have a moment that stop pretending to be strong and need someone to rely on. Perhaps God is the right one to play this role. The God I believe in doesn’t need to be a higher power like Jesus or Buddha or in a deity form, it is somehow like a thought which is able to mentally support me to keep on living. One of my life turning point was meeting Mr.Kuang who taught me physic in my high school years. Mr.Kuang, with his outsize laugh and booming voice, was one of my favourite teachers. He demonstrated to us how important we were to him by making what were obviously personal sacrifices on our behalf. When the lab needed equipment, we knew he had purchased some of it on his own; when we couldn’t get a bus for a field trip, he took a few of us in his own car (something which could have gotten him into quite a bit of trouble); and when a big science fair deadline loomed large, he opened the lab every weekend to help us with our experiments. At a point in my life when I didn’t have a lot of guidance or positive role models, he taught me a lot more than science; he taught me the power of sacrifice, discipline and self-respect. I couldn’t even realize I was learning so much in such a short time. His teaching has helped me to get through my high school years feeling contented, at the end of the day I realized I was just helping myself all the way. That pretty much sums up my educational journey of my adolescent years, I have some sketching albums full of my thoughts and discoveries kept in the shelf. I still can’t find a reason why my mum didn’t like me to draw that much and extremely opposed in allowing me to attend the drawing class. The best moment to me is looking at my drawing and appreciate every single line which make me recall what I have been through those years. I always have a wild dream of going every country to taste their famous food or the secret recipe. I think travelling gives different meaning to every
single one of us. The delicious spare is the main reason for me to step out of my house. As an architecture student, it is not an easy job to get enough sleep, to say nothing of having fun. At least the authentic schweinshaxe or the fresh sashimi can be the source of happiness to me. I am always looking forward to my next vacation or expedition of food, there is so much I wish to see and enjoy in this world and I am not taking a break even for a second.
The significant event that I want to state is the Syrian Civil War which is an ongoing
international armed conflict taking place in Syria. The unrest began in the early spring of 2011 within the context of Arab Spring protests, with nationwide protests against President Bashar al-Assad's government, whose forces responded with violent crackdowns. The conflict gradually morphed from prominent protests to an armed rebellion after months of military sieges. More than 7.6 million Syrians have been displaced, more than 5 million have fled the country to nearby countries such as Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, and Kuwait, and a few hundred thousand have fled to more distant countries like Germany, Sweden and Greece and have become refugees. Millions more have been left in poor living conditions with shortages of food and drinking water. The refugees are not the uneducated or broken people, there were engineers and professors among them, and they were similar to us. Thousands of Syrians flee their country every day. They often decide to finally escape after seeing their neighbourhoods bombed or family members killed.The risks on the journey to the border can be as high as staying: Families walk for miles through the night to avoid being shot at by snipers or being caught by soldiers who will kidnap young men to fight for the regime. What happened in Syria is profound, provoking and challenging insights. What I think is we should try to look ahead at what might happen and be ready to handle it. It is necessary that a person should provide against a rainy day. Never relax your vigilance while you live in peace. It is also very questionable that why are the people around us not appreciating of what they have now no matter in term of love ones, friends or property? Do we have to lose something first before we start to appreciate them later when it is too late? Why are we not protecting and preserving what we take for granted and what we used to have? It is definitely worth enough to consider.
My worldview is I believe that humans are not separate from nature and the supernatural. Living creatures and non-living objects in nature as well as supernatural beings are thought to be human-like in their motivations, feelings, and interactions. They all are perceived as "those" rather than "its." Animals, trees, rocks, spirits, and gods all possess human characteristics and can be involved with humans and their everyday concerns much the same way as other people. Even "inanimate" things in nature, such as rocks, are thought to potentially have human-like personalities. In other words, there is not a separation of people, nature, and the spirit world. Rather, there is an emotional involvement between them. Things in all three of these realms of existence can interact together just as humans do with each other. I get to this stage after I try to interact with others, step out of my anti-social’s narrow “world”. You can find out a lot of “how” and “why” once you have interaction between you or any other things.
Le Corbusier is one of my favourite architect. I started to know about him because of a quote from him: “I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies.”
This quote is giving a clue of how straightforward Le Corbusier is and this might be the reason of why he was the pioneer of bringing machine into architecture. Le Corbusier’s theories had a strong social concern: “The machine that we live in is an old coach full of tuberculosis. There is no real link between our daily activities at the factory, the office or the bank, which are healthy and useful and productive, and our activities in the bosom the family which are handicapped at every turn.” Thus, architecture is an instrument of restructuring the whole society, the rational alternative to revolution. In his villas, Le Corbusier put art before social reform. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is another architect that I would like to learn from. There are two quotes from him I bear in mind which are “Less is more” and “God is in detail”. This two quotes are actually much relevant. To keep a building simple but functional, “less” will be better than “more”. But what is the main factor that causes “less” is more outstanding? It will be details. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe architecture expressed through the use of materials and their details. His vision for education is concerned not only with practical goals in life but also with personal values. He believes that our aims is to assure us of our material life, but our personal value make possible to our spiritual life.
During semester one, the culture and history required us to study on the modern architects, my architectural values has been much influenced by this two architects. To me, each design has its own dialogue, language and communication. Instead of creating spaces that the poetic feeling might be discovered of felt, I dim that it is better to create a spaced that must be felt. Be straightforward, control the atmosphere and make sure your messages can be conveyed to the users. Straightforwardness is a great solution to doubtful communications. And again, to create a straightforward space, every details inside of the building must be considered. It might take a long time but it worth to produce a good design. It need to be well considered and design to give an emotion connection between the user and the building or otherwise the existence of architecture will not be necessary since there are a lot of templates you can get from the engineers. There is a saying of Walter Gropius that goes “architecture begins where engineering ends.” That’s why I think architecture without essence of poetic beauty is just an empty shell which accommodates empty soul.
I think that there will not be an end of finding my personal values as long as I am alive. Since I have decided not to be the anti-social anymore and I am more confident about this decision is absolutely right after completing this PVS. I should keep refining and finding my own architectural values that allow me to create a communicative building. I strongly dim that if a building can be built without any poetic feeling to convey a message, it is not called a design but a product from template. Last but not least, I believes in practices do make perfection. It is still a long way to go and I need a lot of practices in my life. Hope I can get closer and closer to the ideal state of myself.