Malaysian architect Kevin Low is no stranger to the practice of subverting tradition. A sole practitioner, the Small Projects director is something of a renegade, designing what he calls “ugly buildings” that defer to their contexts and celebrate detail. Low’s work does not discriminate on grounds of scale, and he would just as readily pore over a doorknob as he would grand civic gestures.
Low completed his education in the USA before returning to Kuala Lumpur to establish his practice Small Projects in 2002. He has also authored a book of the same name as an exploration of context and the poetry of its products. But according to Low, his real impact has been in his teaching. “I do my work as research for my teaching, and I teach a lot more I think that I do architecture,” said Low.
Low’s teaching work relates to “reassessing dominant paradigms,” as he describes it. Low refers to precedent studies in architectural curricula, where students are encouraged to study successful instances of architecture that establish the conventions architects work by today.
“We take on precedent studies on order to understand what made them work and to apply those same rules for successes into our projects,” said Low. “Now that’s not design; that’s cut-and-paste. That’s appropriation. When I get students to study precedents, I get them to study them for their failures, because you can’t learn from success,” he said.
“You learn from failure by understanding problems and asking relevant questions in order to produce your own original answers or solutions. That is design: the identification of a problem or a question before the search for any answer or solution begins.” Low theorises that revolutionary design is not then the search for radical answers, “but the discovery of radical questions”.
Memorial of the Revival, Small Projects.
Image: Courtesy of Small Projects
“We are taught about iconic buildings – icon, icon, icon,” he said. “Unless you really prioritise questioning and inculcate the deepest sense of inquiry in students, you’re going to get something that’s not education – it’s indoctrination posturing as academia and critical thinking falls by the wayside.”
He says one of the greatest problems facing architecture in Malaysia today is the quality of education. “We’ve adopted the worst practices of first-world nations, not realising you can’t take something out of the garbage can, dust it off and reuse it because it worked 50 years ago.
“One of the biggest problems with architecture is we don’t look at the city when we’re designing in it; we don’t look at the countryside as we’re designing it. We only look at those contexts as stages to showcase our creativity. But the context is everything. It should be about the amplification of the context, rather than the amplification of the objects we put in it.”
Low is fascinated by details. He finds meaning in the micro, regularly designing fixtures and furniture from taps to shoe racks, even locks and latches. “I enjoy hinges and ways of opening windows and doors – the junctions where all these big ideas come together,” he said.
“In the profession, when architects talk about the ‘detail’, they wax lyrical about detail as an object, as something isolated from everything else. The way I look at it is, nothing else can exist without the detail: it is the meaning for everything rather than an object in itself. It’s what creates and informs relationships.
“Design isn’t about the creation of beautiful, stylish objects and sculpture – design and architecture are about the creation of new and appropriate relationships that details resolve,” he said.
Kevin Low will be presenting at The Architecture Symposium: Ideas from the Fringe on Saturday 4 March 2023.
The Architecture Symposium is a Design Speaks program organized by Architecture Media, publisher of ArchitectureAU.com, and supported by Brickworks and the University of Tasmania. Click here to buy tickets.
