2025.07.23
ON TIME AND HARVEST
Reflecting on previous work Ozhigimin Bima’ookiin.
One might hold out a hand to a sparrow, hoping he will perch on a finger—one might have a hand full of seeds, small and familiar, spilling out through the fingers. It is likely that the seeds dropped would not be picked up again; they may seem insignificant. But these are material bodies with memories and potential. Nestled into the crook of a palm, some seeds feel the heat of the skin against their dry shells. Through this touch is a minuscule transfer of energy, a sharing of space and spirit. This transfer continues with the touch of soil—hands, too, hold memory. Indeed, one uses tendons and muscles, signaled by an electric brain, to articulate the position in which the soil holds the seed—but this is not merely planting. It is an entrance into a process that does not belong to the individual, but to which one belongs.
It is only here that the breathing land beneath becomes perceptible—the energy ascending through the feet and settling in the hand. An individual drops seeds into a dip in the soil and waits for a response. Tentative at first, they explore and situate themselves in the damp black earth, before asking for light, water, space, and attention. Attention for the small shifts: the way a stem leans, the brittle edges of dead leaves, the bulbs and blooms, the reaching of arms grasping toward sunlight. Negotiation and attention bring about authorship of response—a response that does not fix or answer, but invites the conversation to continue. This is the magic uncertainty that comes with releasing control: where one may share authorship through presence alone, allowing the voices of these invisible magics to take part in sculpture.
That is the whole point. The individual has little say—no more than the chickadee who takes the seed from its mound. Releasing control means accepting and acknowledging the conversation that takes place, one in which the human participant should be a listener. The magic at stake—the invisible energies and spirited forces that constitute the growth of a bean—is of the singular, not the mass. The distinction presents itself when a person can no longer share dialogue with the growing thing. The miles of magic and spirited speaking in agricultural fields fall on deaf ears, silenced and cast aside from human perception. Therefore, one must speak of the singular magical being that grows.
These fruits may manifest as nourishment or material, or the presence of home and memory of loved ones. Yet these fruits are not separate from the mechanism by which they exist. They are not the final product of a human-plant relationship. If left to their own devices, they will spoil and fall, rotting and returning to the earth—at no detriment to the relationship. But one might choose to receive the fruit and eat it, allowing it to digest and become part of the self, as the self becomes part of it. There is no final point to this relationship—it only deepens. Touch, time, and attention: what is built together is not entirely one’s, and not entirely hers. It is the product of shared conditions—of weather, chance, patience, and proximity.
To call this a gift is not sentimental. It is accurate. And so there’s an obligation: to take it seriously. To receive it with care. To resist waste—not just of material, but of meaning.
The placement of the seed in soil—the depth at which it is pressed down, the space between plantings—is not a final gesture. Rather, it is an ongoing negotiation between the invisible forces that govern bodies and minds. One cannot picture the plant before it grows, nor the fruit before blossoms. A person has limitations that prevent them from claiming authorship of growth; one might only be its steward. Thus, it is folly to believe, as a designer, that one may determine what should be and how it should remain in the real world, disparate from these governing forces.
The limitation of the architect is dictated by the intention of control; in the straight horizontal line that represents the ground plane, the architect begins with greed. It is ignorant of the real, where footfall on loose soil creates chasms in the straight line, buckling under human weight. The ground shifts. The drawing shifts. The intentions of the architect—the human—shift too. Planting seeds teaches one to be responsive to conditions that cannot be predicted.
To consider architecture in this analogy, it must be said that it does not grow in this same way; it is neither a singular nor a mass. It shares as little with a single yarrow plant as it does with a field of corn, because architecture is a product of destructive forces. Arguments of environmental damage and embodied carbon may be deferred, only to speak of methodology. That is—despite its difference from flora—the process of architectural design can adopt the silent magics of growth and the natural release of authorship and control. The slow accumulation of gestures builds up an idea; the tending and pruning are equally part of it. Architecture, as it is now, has a short future. It must learn from the littler—from the willingness to stay with a project after its form has taken shape, where there is no single author or claim of finality. Treating making as maintenance means seeing each material, site, and growing body as an individual with the capacity to speak back. That is: to receive their speech and offer a response is the mechanism by which one may bloom and bear fruit, which, in turn, allows others to live on. The efforts are returned with evidence of life.
2025.05.30
BODIES OF “HUMAN” AND “ARCHITECTURE”
Standing between saskatoon-berry bushes on a granite patch, my feet do not move. I am able to remain upright. I am not thrown off this rockface. I am governed by the same forces as the stone beneath me. Yet, my human senses do not perceive any life rising from the earth—no felt movement or warmth detectable by my fleshy body and its run-down senses. Life, as my tactile senses might infer, is something that must be felt—and by this measure, the earth seems inert.
I may exclaim some empathetic sense of the animate, existing beyond my physicality. Even then, it is not my spirit that counts seconds and minutes, but my fleshy, ticking brain. It is this brain that allows me to register this one present… and the next… and the next again.
If the microscopic insects on my skin think, I cannot blame them for considering me eternal—some sustainer and giver of life and domain. Still, as primates we boast of our intellect and apex status, living in naïveté as we believe in our own significance. It is an insolent act to age the cosmos in terms of our cycles—to believe we may impart wisdom to the cosmos itself as an act of generosity: to give identity and age, done by telescopic lookers, cameras, and abstractions of what is—as if we are called to tell everything what it is.
This is to assume that all findings of science are truth, and that we exist in a time governed by space and the Big Boom. We say, “Before it was nothing,” despite our own bodies beating and beating. We name this instance—the ongoing span evolving from that beat—as if we can define it from within.
I am a mayfly’s mayfly—even less.
It is with humility that I see my own standing—where the moving parts of the cosmos are independent of me. Yet I am within them. I am within the presence of this granite on which I stand still, where one present moment consists of mine ad infinitum.
✤ ✤ ✤
While this may have started as a cynical, existential thought experiment, it holds relevance for architecture and design. If we think about all these temporalities—these present-moments—as accumulating materials, then the physical forms we construct in a building are amalgamations of instances.
If one could truly see a tree for who that tree is—a being composed of experiences and moments, like ourselves—then that tree might be seen as a gift, not a disposable object in some terra nullius fantasy.
In my comprehensive master’s project, I positioned time as a central driver of my design thinking. I made claims and poetics that sought to distinguish my project from architecture as usual:
Yet after eight or so months spent on this project—from initial mappings to construction details—I completely missed the plot.
The concept of this project is rooted in varying temporalities of human and more-than-human scales. Germane to this theme, the project explores the inhabitation of all things and their orientation within place and time by identifying presences. There are two streams of presence contemplated in this exploration: the materiality of the physical architecture and the introspective journeys of the inhabitants within. Time moves through both, where the present is a permanent state of reconstruction.
The physicality of this building is intended to exist within a larger scale of time and present—where material appears unchanging to the perception of the inhabitants, so they live within their own presence. Yet these materials will also change as they are exposed to the elements, dependent on their own temporal bodies: stone will lapse in geological time, wood to ecological cycling, and glass to fragility—each celebrating and responding to the natural present in which all things exist in time.
The weathering of material serves as a visual and tactile dialogue between body and environment, not unlike the introspection and transformation of the inhabitants within. The difference in scale between bodies in flux offers opportunities to the ephemeral; it is inside this monument that the inhabitants may stand still within their own presence, and the community with which they interact. It is the enabling of an individual to truly dwell—a grounding of spirit that spreads through the minds, hands, and mediums of makers. It is the act of making that proves existence—the existence of a single present, a temporal marker for a moment mid-transformation—a tactile version of memory’s reconstructions, where an individual continues to grow with time but can recognize this artefact as relational to their once-present.
The display of these artefacts will show the lapsing present of inhabitation—existing within stone walls. These stone blocks, an amalgam of glacial existence, are monuments to moments present and past. They offer their bodies in protection so we may exist within our own metamorphosis, until they too return home.
The nature of the within is never permanent—the mortal body will always return home. It is with this return that a metamorphosis occurs. There is creation in death, a oneness with the body of land—where one’s present becomes tangled with all that exists in this cosmos. Home does not exist if one never returns.
In those months of deep reading, contemplation, and writing about time, I somehow neglected a basic truth: that this hypothetical architecture—and its real counterpart—are no different from anything else that exists. They participate in the same conditions of being as the urban fabric, the surrounding landscape, the ocean’s depths, the atmosphere, the clouds, the vacuum of space, and the cosmos.
And maybe it isn’t even limited to the physical. My memories, too, are products of experiences and sensorial transmissions—virtual instances relayed to my brain, shifting and reshaping as I age. Each moment accumulates, some to become memory and some to become part of my condition of being within all future moments.
2025.02.14
ON SUBJECT-OBJECT
This text is an exploration of an ongoing project and its place in architectural meaning, as part of Sotirios Kotoulas‘s theory course Deep Space, at the University of Manitoba.
This project mines architecture as a hyper-object, where the distinction between subject and object is expelled to illustrate the object’s presence and memory (or the relation to all events leading up to a single instance of perception, a present-memory). This exploration considers the human subject as transient being and places significance on the non-human.
The site of this project is the Elim Chapel on 546 Portage Avenue in Winnipeg. The chapel’s acclaimed tyndall stone walls are gutted by fire in 1974, the date at which this project shall take place. It is these charred walls that are fitted with a new monastery of carpenters—an astelier1—where the so-called monk inhabitants devote themselves to false idols: subject-object and present-memory.
Tyndall Stone and Kitchen Tables
The genesis of our cosmos saw fit the collision of ancient-ylem planets. One such impact caused her core to writhe and tear apart landscapes. She is a master worldbuilder of glacial freeze and thaw, nurturing life to only return home, and hardening her skin to support footfalls of a new epoch, where biped warred and broke her body to build a chapel. This chapel keeps ephemeral bipeds under the shadow of God, so they may devote their souls to the deception of eternity, ignorant of their own presence within this fortress of those that came before them.
A germinating seed turned mighty elm is felled by the hands of this same biped. With shut eyes she is dismembered and transformed into a kitchen table. It is when her eyes open that she sees her own afterlife, where wildness dies into domesticity. The warm bodies of these bipeds eat their fill in the presence of her grotesque body. It is by her identity—table, tree, and tekton—that she will remember nesting birds, raging storms, shining suns, felling axes, shaving shaves, clinking plates, and dwelling humans. This is the program.
These subject-objects differ only by their makers, one who rejects mortality and lives in shadow and one who dwells in being and transforms in building, to one day return home so that he may transform once more. The latter defines the members of a new monastery, of which I am a member.
It is this transformation of perception that allows all subjects to be seen, and space is activated. Within this space of new perception that the psychic vision of present-memory transcends the reception of light, so that monks shall no longer fear the shadow of God.
1. "Atelier," Online Etymology Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/word/atelier. The reference is to the earlier sense of the word from Old French astelier, meaning "carpenter’s workshop," derived from astele, "splinter" or "chip of wood."
ON THE FRAGILITY OF TIME
A freeze-frame. A high-speed photo. A single instance caught in time by some medium—whether a camera taking a photograph, a drawing depicting a scene, or a memory held in your mind. These moments are representations of the present, but only as it slips away.
The moment just before a balloon pops exists only until the skin ruptures—air escaping, sound erupting, rags of rubber flailing in the wind. The impact of the pin, the pressure against the surface, the final puncture: all are presences that vanish as soon as they occur.
There is a fragility in time, in presence, that cannot be captured or held. Time flows through us, indifferent to our attempts to preserve or possess it. This is why there is absurdity in the idea of permanence.
As time flows through us—us being not only individual humans, but the entire universe, the atmosphere, and the worlds beyond our stars—we as humans hold a particular kind of freedom. It is delicate, but distinct. We can choose to orient ourselves to time, to exist in relation to it as individuals, rather than be entirely shaped by it.
Consider the difference between the human experience of time and that of stone. Though stone moves on scales far beyond our perception, it does move. We observe stone weathering from rain and wind, its surface slowly shifting. Its temporality is slow, almost imperceptible—but not static.
It is through dwelling—a mode of being attuned to our environment and existence—that we find a kind of freedom from time’s dominion. In building dwelling thinking, we do not merely exist within time or react to it; we reflect, question, and become aware of our thrownness—our condition of being placed in a world not of our choosing.
This is the paradox of presence: to live within time while also stepping outside its flow through thought, memory, and awareness.
ON REMEMBERING HOME
2024.09.08 Contd.
I find comfort in knowing that home is wherever I am. Here, now, my home is here—now. Home is in my abstracted, scattered ability to form memories of times long past—a fleeting yet eternal, palimpsest-like record of the now—continually lengthening with my time thrown on Earth.
Home is my grandma, my family, and the knowledge that I am them. It is a story shared, silence filled, and rituals repeated.
Yet, it is also a product of distance. It is a product of being still—where silence is not filled, where our threads of connection can be contemplated. It is on this scale of now that I see “now” as an amorphous and animate land: a glacial lake draining, a bountiful ecology, the human Stone Age, the agricultural revolution, the colonizing of this land, and a shared meal between loved ones. Home and now both twist and morph, scaling ad infinitum.
It is for this reason that I find comfort in presence—more than in any goldenrod memory, translated into something it never truly was. Home is being able to stand still, where all moments—forgotten or never remembered—are part of me. They are layers of strata, settling with my presence at the surface.
The long now reminds me that home is not bound to a place or time, but to the continuity of being. It is the weathering of stone and the permanence of impermanence—the recognition that each moment is both infinitesimal and eternal. Whether I remember it or not, it is mine, and I am part of it.
ON WHAT HOME IS TO ME
The act of remembering my life is like walking down a pothole-ridden path with gnarled roots emerging from the soil—dead and sun-fried grasses lining the trail as I walk in the dead of night.
My footfalls are uneven, expecting the firmness of earth only to plummet into washboards. In the absence of light, I should be wary of traversing this landscape. Yet I continue on, step by step, anticipating the fall and welcoming the finding. It is in falling that one feels the ground with the most impact. So, rather than stand still, I shall take steps to find where I stand now. On this solid mass of writhing ground, there is the firmness and security of knowing—knowing that I stand safely, and knowing that I have one memory I will not lose.
This memory is of my grandparents’ Southdale home. My Afi must be running errands, because it is only my brother, sister, grandma, and me at the kitchen table.
The kitchen is dim—shutters drawn to keep out the summer sun—and there is a breeze coming from the living room behind me, where the patio door must be cracked open. The summer heat has made the room humid—the table and chair are slightly sticky to the touch.
The moment continues without a word spoken—the only noises I hear are my two siblings shuffling around in the pencil-crayon bin: a retired plastic ice cream pail.
I watch my grandmother coloring a page—carefully and quietly, she moves in small, circular strokes. It is a meditation I cannot recreate—a hypnotizing moment that must have lasted only seconds. I know not how old I was during this blip in time, nor do I recall the faces of my family members. It is not their faces I see, but their presence. The house itself is not grand, but it is well-kept and cared for. This is not my earliest memory of life, but it is the first. This embodiment of comfort, of safety, and of mundanity is the first and most formative memory of me—of who I am today.
This is what home means to me.
ON OLD TOILETS
This entry refers to my partner and I’s visit to Le Kiosque K in Carré Saint-Louis (a public park in the Montreal borough of Plateau-Mont-Royal), during a school trip to Quebec.
Early on Friday morning, we walked to the park to see it in the daylight. We had come here a few nights earlier, in the dark, and found it to be a wonderful space. Set back from the main street, the park revealed its towering maples, their leaves turned rich autumn hues. Fallen leaves were scattered along the path we walked, which was lined with benches, many already occupied by strangers. We reached the park’s fountain—a grand basin with a central spout, though no water flowed from it.
At the south end of the park stood a small building. Made of stone, it featured oddly small Corinthian columns at each corner of its octagonal form. The doors were open, and a quick look inside revealed it was a café. Though the space was cramped, customers were tucked in around the room at small folding tables and chairs. I stepped inside and ordered a coffee.
The man behind the counter turned out to be one of the owners of Le K Café. I asked how long he’d been running it. He told me he’d owned it for about a year. Before that, the café had been operated by someone else for fifteen years. Before that, it was a flower shop for a few years. And before that, it had been public toilets.
He spoke about how important the space becomes in the summer. Mornings bring hundreds of customers on their commute. There are often musicians playing, and people singing. “It is a lovely place. You must come next summer,” he said.
I paid, took my coffee outside, and sat at a table. I sketched the small structure and listened to nearby conversations, watched as dog-walkers passed by, and observed all the other people who, like me, appreciated this moment of pause within a busy city.
ON ENCOUNTER
The following reflection responds to a photograph I took earlier this month. It is not a formal analysis, but a personal observation—an attempt to articulate how the world appears to me.
In looking at the image of a withering stump, I began to wonder what it might mean to live as a creature of the forest—a smaller being, one without the capacity to build shelter, fell trees, or haul timber. For such a being, this rotting cavity might appear not as ruin, but as refuge. It’s easy to imagine where such creatures might burrow, nest, or spin webs. Yet in imagining their lives, I neglect to question my own role. I stop at the site of decay not out of necessity, but from curiosity.
Value often appears in overlooked places. Not all treasures are material or measurable. I didn’t pause because the stump shimmered with value, or because it could be extracted, sold, or displayed. I paused because I could witness a moment in its ongoing transformation.
I do not know how tall the tree once stood, how green its leaves were, or even what species it was. I do not know when it sprouted, nor how or when it fell.
Did its body collapse from disease? Was it damaged by human hands, by fire, by drought? Did it fall alone, or strike another as it came down? Was anyone there to hear it? What did its final moment sound like?
These are unknowable details—and that is precisely what makes the encounter meaningful. There is something compelling in this lack of certainty. Discovery is not always about acquiring knowledge, but about the experience of paying attention. One does not need to name or own something in order to value it.
This leads me to think that the most powerful architectures are not necessarily those that dominate the skyline. Not the glass towers, the stadiums, or the grand palaces—but perhaps instead, the overlooked forms: the stump in the woods, the forgotten shed, the spaces that do not declare themselves as architecture.
Still, questions of beauty remain. Who else might see beauty in rot? How do we determine what is beautiful, and to whom? If beauty is relational, then it cannot be universal. In designing what I find beautiful, I may inadvertently design something others find unappealing. No architecture can be universally admired.
What if aesthetics are not bound to trends, but to experience? Can a dirt-covered, lopsided structure be beautiful? Does it need to appeal to many, or is it enough that it matters to one? Can beauty be something that is only ever partially understood—only available through encounter?
Imagine...
It is your favourite season. The temperature is comfortable. You decide to take a long walk, alone. You bring music or a book, though neither feels especially necessary. You walk without urgency. After a while, you arrive at a fork—one path familiar, the other long known but never taken. Today, you choose the unfamiliar. You notice a weathered wooden sign, but its lettering has worn away. The trail is unnamed.
You continue walking. There are houses here—quiet, orderly, with trimmed lawns and shaded porches. You pass many, all alike. Then, emerging from the tree canopy, you reach a wide field. You’ve seen this field from a different perspective, but never from here. It feels both familiar and new.
You consider turning back. But then you notice a small structure behind the last house—something you missed before. You walk toward it. It is a white-plastered shed with cracked wood revealing red brick beneath. The door is missing. You lean into its shifted frame and step inside.
There is a workbench. A single hammer lies on its surface. The room is unlit, save for a dim glow from a window without glass. There are no tools, no visible purpose. The shed is unkempt and unused. And yet, it feels significant. You imagine someone once working here, their body occupying the space in a way you can now only guess.
Eventually, you check the time. Light has changed. You walk home.
Later, you find yourself thinking about this shed. You imagine its past—its function, its maker. You don’t know its story, but the experience stays with you. The architecture offered nothing definitive. It invited questions and gave no answers. And for that, you are grateful.
The most meaningful spaces may be those we stumble upon—spaces with which we feel a connection, despite knowing nothing about them. Like the moss-covered stump: quiet, decaying, unremarkable in form—yet profound in its presence.