Aaron Tan is the Director of RAD, Hong Kong. He founded OMA Asia in Hong Kong in 1994. The office was renamed as RAD in 2002, and sets to redefine new architecture and urbanism of the emerging cities of East Asia. Recognizing the socio-cultural matrix in which it operates, the office incorporates the global nature of its urban architectural experiences to develop new contemporary Asian urban planning and architectural approaches. Tan leads a team of architects, urban planners, interior designers and media researchers of multinational origin. Projects included office towers in Hong Kong, new economy planning in Singapore, urban design in China and the SK Telecommunications Tower and Nabi Art Centre in Korea. As an active participant in the urban development of Asian cities, Tan has delivered public lectures on the subject throughout Asia and Europe.
Day 2: Saturday 4th October, Keynote Address
'Beyond Praxis'
The reduction of architecture to praxis has paralysed architects in the face of the new urbanism- a landscape rhizomatically connected by communication infrastructure and invisible technological channels, a firmament of information speeding through the very air that one breathes. The information society has transformed the urban experience from diachronic to synchronic, compressing and collapsing the time-space configuration. The traditional architectural paradigm of considering forms as instruments of codification and representation of values has lost meaning in the face of contemporary urban culture, a culture of commodificaion, branding, and constant change.
It is for this reason that Aaron Tan set up RAD in Hong Kong in the 1990's, when it was considered an indeterminate city set in an indeterminate future. The Hong Kong aesthetic is predicated on the glorification of media billboards, the ruthless shock of Neon-Capitalist imagery, and the denial of all historical or temporal specificity in favour of immediacy and novelty.
Aaron & his team are not here to test new theories. It takes a certain arrogance to develop a theory. Here, RAD is humbled by the power and relentlessness of Neon-Capitalism. Rather, the office applies different approaches and methodologies as required in the act of solving project-specific problems, and the team begins to understand the conditions of the city through the results of these methods.
Take the high-rise 'skin' projects for example, which operate at the level of insinuation, as presences which appear and disappear like holograms. This is an architecture of the surface. RAD therefore willingly contributes to the evolution of a type of architecture endemic to Neon-Capitalism.
Aaron will present several projects at the conference. These have been designed by RAD and others, and all of them demonstrate the evolution of architectural strategies in this age of media and information.
