los angeles CALIFORNIA / petaling jaya MALAYSIA
Team: Max KUO and Alex CHEW

Introduction
This meditation retreat is located in rural Latvia, two hours outside the capital where this new outpost marks the end of a journey and the beginning of new discoveries. The clients’ required the preservation of an unremarkable stone barn while providing new lodgings with additional collective and service spaces. Marking this threshold between journeys, the design embraces opposing qualities between inside and outside—an inward expansion of airy volumes enclosed by stodgy and compressive walls—and between Janus-like facades, each derived from the typological whole, but incommensurate with its neighbors.

Strategies of the Icon
Our transformation of the readymade generic, a stone box and its pitched tin roof, suggests a new strategy for the icon. Typically, iconic architecture conforms to either of two opposing models, the typological or metaphorical:
1. In the first instance, associative meaning arises from form’s close affiliation with typological profiles, whether it be the humble honesty of a church steeple or the manic largess of Bofill’s La Manzanera. Syntactic experimentation with traditional shapes may extend in either direction of the political spectrum, from conservative scenography all the way to radical post-modernism.
2. Then there are figural shapes which, intentional or not, invite popular metaphors. Yet, every so often, some of these icons achieve an abstraction which reach an escape velocity allowing form to extend beyond the gravitational pull of metaphors. Often, these icons deploy weak figuration and integrated parts so that neither local profile nor its global silhouette easily correspond with the world of references.
3. Our proposal for the meditation retreat seeks a third strategy where abstraction of type is rendered in radically different methods. Rudolf Arnheim argues that the perception of shape is always of a kind of shape and tells us the nature of its contents by its external appearance. In this case, shape and type become MacGuffins in reverse—by evading rather than pursuing the object, they trigger a game of dissonance and obfuscation.

Incommensurate Facades
Beginning with the stone shell, this perimeter wall is extruded upward along the slope of the previous roof and into a precarious cock-eyed roof-vitrine capped in glass and open to the sky. Inside this extended volume, all modular dormitories are given more room to maneuver so that all private cellular poché carefully avoids blocking off existing exterior windows. The stone box and its fenestrations portray a stoic poker face, suppressing all expressions of the joyous community within. A new exterior skirt provides a continuous porch for outside activities while the roof extends and folds down flush along its eastern edge. These basic operations make four incommensurate facades, abstractions which originate from the whole but are fundamentally estranged from one another.

In concert, they produce a new icon from compositing parts of vastly different paradigms: S) Approaching the southern façade, new arrivals will discover an unexceptional building, perhaps a bit exaggerated in length and slightly discolored in places, but ultimately placid and timeless in its quotidian familiarity. E) However, the eastern entrance announces itself with the centrifugal force of an architecture meant to be seen in the round. The dynamism of the folded roof and covered porch both references and distracts from the suggestions of a pitched roof.
N) The northern façade parleys with the interior, where an unexpected long-span glass roof contradicts the expected symmetry implicated by the southern facade. The glass reveals an unexpected hollowness not typically found in stone structures of this sort. W) And finally, the western façade is of another world entirely. As a residue of a previous solid/void diagram, the western fenestrations project beyond the wall and become thickened sills and frames accentuating the cartoonish unreality of the short section completely unmoored from the typical gable. This elevation is Gumby-like both in its gratuitous asymmetry and claylike thickening of its facial features.

All four dissimilar facades are indexical, functional, and relatable. However, each arises from a different episteme: typological, typological, abstract, and cartoonish. Accordingly, they project different communicative and affective tones. Ultimately, this project argues that contemporary authenticity can only resonate through the overtones produced by difference and no longer can a single techne be expected to sustain our critical engagement.