Two months have passed since my journey to Korea. Life gets the better of us. In that time, not much has changed. Though we experience time linearly, in a lot of ways things have stayed more or less the same. There are no more snowy days, and daylight savings have given us more time in the sun – but in practice, things have remained routine.

I have decided that thematically concluding the series of writings is not personally satisfying. I began writing these vignettes of my journey in hopes of reaching a conclusion, which felt tangible at the time I started writing them. In the first blog post, I had said:

“And through the journey that is a thesis project in Architecture, I discovered that a sense of belonging is a set of emotional being/relationship within space(s) defined by one’s subjecthood and its orientation towards a spatiosocial feature(s).”

This is a broad statement. I think, now that thesis is over a year behind me, that a critical breakdown and reassessment of the premise is necessary. Funnily enough, I’ve had to informally present my thesis to a number of my colleagues who viewed it with curiosity – akin to seeing an alien – and had to field responses ad hoc. I believe that, before I can confidently talk about the processes governing our formation of belonging as I had discussed in my thesis project, I need to input the experience of being home with the hypothesis more closely. I imagine that could be its own series of writings. So, I suppose, more on that later.

In the second post, I had said:

“But out of the conversations that took place, broad swatches of what I understood to be my family’s history slowly gain definition.”

I think I intended this to mean that I discovered all of my family’s juicy secrets that are more or less open. I’m just late to the party. It deals with money and grievances and a lot of she-said, he-said; while endlessly entertaining and enlightening to myself as vital pieces of context for my family’s dynamics, I find it’s too particular and irrelevant to those outside of my family unit.

I suppose what I really wanted to get at was to break through the surface of experience and reach a point where I had understood how it is that we form a sense of identity within family, within arbitrary designations of citizen-hood et al. We certainly own our histories (or historicities – we validate our own lived experiences through tales and ‘renditions’ – our interpretations of time passing and their meaning to us), but perhaps I was too naive (or privileged) in thinking that a singular, universal process is enough to explain everybody’s relationship to a nuanced, complex feeling.

I guess the cheap cop-out of any author when faced with questions about the substance of their work is to question the audience back. In essence, that was the position I took during my own thesis – with a lack of a final, tangible project, I framed my thesis as a series of questions anyway. There are twelve questions and prompts for action. Perhaps, though, they might get you thinking, and once answered, we may compare notes like we were back in school.

I. Begin by remembering a room you are most familiar with. Think with the body. How do the arms know distances? How do the hands know what to turn? How does your skin know the touch of the floor, and the hardness of the surfaces? How do your fingers know which of the three switches to turn for which light? How many paces to a door? Which swing of the leg will glide through air, and not onto a corner of the bed? A finger touches a pencil on a table, and the rest of the room appears to you. You know to pull the window in tighter before turning the latch to open it.

II. Question what makes this room ‘yours’; what you have imposed, and what is fixed, Identify what activities take place within. How much of that space have you changed to your image, and how much have you had to melt into it? Has it changed over the years, or has it calcified by routine? In that space, have you shared a bed with others? Have you prayed? What seems profane to do within, and what seems the most mundane? How has the structure of your environment, and then things you do within – nurtured and provided for you? What allows you to feel satisfied?

III. Allowing the fixed elements to remain, reimagine how all that you own can be rearranged. How has your room given you a stage for you to act in? How has this space sustained the quality of it being able to satisfy your needs? Can you dictate the terms of your needs and how they are met? Who and what defines the spaces where these activities happen? Is the current condition the only way all your needs can be satisfied? Is it possible to change the arrangement at all? What would motivate you to change the space, and what needs to remain for what reason?

IV. Find a way of communicating the imagination of the previous iteration through a medium; reimagine the space through invention. How does the memory of your room live inside you? Do you have the words to describe it? Do you read it as prose, or haptic like braille? Is it organizational? Does it appear to you as symbols, or in coded language? How do you communicate your memory or understanding of a space? Is it faithful, or an abstraction?

V. Look beyond the room. Question what is possible in another space you have access to, by reinventing the space to be appropriate for a familiar activity. Liberate a ‘house’ from predefined spatial organizations by imagining beyond the designated – or intended – purpose of that space. Can novel memories be written? Can that new space satisfy a need? What new feelings do you gain from that space? What new understanding do you gain about the spatial requirements of an activity? Can your desires be imposed freely? What allows and limits it?

VI. Look beyond the building. Bring a domestic activity outside by transforming it to become something else. Make it visible. Liberate an ‘activity’ from expectations of privacy and comfort. What can be done, and can it be sustained? What fears and uncertainties do you have? What are the unspoken laws that prohibit certain behaviors? Can any place you have access to in and around the house support any domestic activity? How do you articulate the differences between the interior and the exterior?

VII. Look into other buildings. Discover and appropriate a publicly accessible space for a domestic activity. What is the domestic interior? Peel away the layers and we realize the term ‘domestic’ is just a qualifier of any experience. If, for this and the previous two prompts, the ‘activity’ that was chose was to bathe – the fact that one bathes does not change, but the feeling of that activity changes gradually, from perhaps comfort to lewd exhibitionism or desperation or to absence. What has changed may be the ‘type’ of agency and control of the subject.

VIII. Lend your day to the public. Spend as much time as you can in a day in publicly accessible spaces. Transpose as much of the day’s activities to new spaces as you can. Within the framework of forming conditions of vulnerability, intimacy, attachment, and belonging, we need agency to somehow ensure the environment satisfies our needs. If the first four prompts were all sited in a space where agency was granted by the resources and ability to transform the environment according to need, the last four prompts are sited in territories where those two conditions are absent or ambiguous. A different agency is necessary.

IX. Spend a day to walk outside without plan or a map. Every once in a while, remember the place of origin. Infer through references and identify what they are. Rely on instinct. After wandering, how do you make sense of the landscape? Look at the sun and the last directions you walked, and the time you took. Listen to traffic. Notice the terrain. Smell freshwater and vegetation. Decay. Growth. How faithful is your imagining of something greater than the readily perceptible? What do you rely on? How have you developed a set of references – places valuable enough to be remembered – of a city?

X. Test the instinct from the previous prompt. Become lost through whatever means. Return to the point of origin without guidance. How far do you need to go to feel lost? How deep is your knowledge of a city? What are the boundaries, beyond which lies a mystery? How far do you need to go to feel stripped from every point of reference? What then do you rely on to make sense of something at first so alien? What abstract knowledge guides you back? How have you developed a spatial and bodily knowledge – points and distances – of a landscape?

XI. Become intimate with the worlds outside. Spend as much time as you can away from your place of residence for an extended period of time. Develop a way to note where you need to go to feel safe, and where you choose to stay. Spatio-temporal knowledge accumulates over time. How do we expand upon this by confronting new situations? How do we choose to use it? What influences our choices? By notating where we linger or pause we begin to understand locations that are an intrinsic part of our daily experiences over time.

XII. Find a medium to spatially represent the experience in the previous prompt; reimagine your daily life in the city through drawing. At any scale, a plan or a goal generates a spatio-temporal structure. Towards and uncertain future, we perceive changes in the body and transformation within environments, subsumed by the time it may take to accomplish. How do you visualize paths? How do you make sense of time – at a scale beyond the temporary and ephemeral – as a duration of human desire and effort?

Studying and practicing architecture makes one hyper-sensitive to spatial structures – that is, the physical and social form and relationships – and a subjective ‘orientation’ – that is, how people choose interpret the environment at a given moment. The above prompts and questions are not design tools but perhaps better understood as a framework to more specifically break down our preconceived notions and apply deeper critical thinking to our lived experiences, such as revisiting our extended families and wrestling with the myriad of consequences of globalization.