Interview
What is your full name? My full name is [Your Name]. It has profound personal and cultural significance for me and I honestly feel proud to be carrying it through my life.
May I see your ID? Of course, here it is. You are welcome to have a look.
Where are you from? I’m originally from [Your City/Country]. It is such a colourful and culturally diverse place, and having grown up there completely shaped my beliefs, worldview, and sense of self.
Do you work or study? I have been studying at university in [Your Field]. It is a challenging but truly rewarding course of study and I care about the theory behind it more and more as well as the use of that theory.
Have you noticed that some structures in the city seem like it had been there for years? Yes, in detail — and with genuine intrigue. My city has some very beautiful colonial and pre-colonial buildings that stand in sharp contrast to modern cities. These buildings interest me not just as aesthetic objects but rather as three-dimensional palimpsests indicating the various historical forces that have converged to create the urban landscape where I currently live — simply traversing a space between century-old constructions on my walk to a twenty-first-century campus creates such an interesting awareness of time for me, and is something which I find increasingly rare amidst the lumbering homogenizing visual language of present-day metropolitan development.
What do you think — should we save memory buildings in a city? I am resolute in the belief that significant historical and architectural surviving older buildings deserve our continued preservation both as an ethical matter, and as a smart investment to continue a vibrant public life. Once lost, old buildings are gone forever—they represent forms of craftsmanship and materials and spatial philosophies that no contemporary reconstruction can fully emulate; they hold, uniquely in the world, historical testimony value for the present and future generations. That being said, I think we ought to make preservation decisions based on real historical and architectural significance rather than just age — not every old building is a worthy preservation candidate and the resources necessary for faithful reproduction in kind are limited by dollars spent elsewhere smarter.
Would you rather live in an a building that is old or in a new house? I really think aesthetically I prefer older buildings — their proportions, materials and spatial generosity just feel friendlier and more visually appealing than most modern constructions. Still, I am pragmatic enough to recognize that the practical problems with living in historic buildings (maintenance obligations, thermal inefficiency, funky layouts, and sometimes an utter lack of structural integrity) are real-life concerns for which romantic attachment cannot be a cure. Something I think would be my nirvana — baited Olde Building combining original character with modern services and insulation (very possible but notoriously expensive).
What old buildings would you like to see more of, if the movies required some way to get there? Why? Many spring to mind with excitement and without a秒意. At the top of my list are the step-well complexes of ancient Rajasthan — architectural marvels of breathtaking ingenuity that tackle a serious water management problem whilst creating hauntingly geometric structures. I would also dearly love to see the ancient cities of Isfahan in Iran and Samarkand in Uzbekistan, whose monumental Islamic architecture embodies the height of geometric art and structural ingenuity. The same mythology has a less romantic dimension, seeing these as structures which symbolize the stark evidence of intellectual and artistic milestones hailed by civilisations who are under-whelmingly recognised throughout cultural history for their contributions to our collective knowledge and those larger historic narratives, lexicons.