Bigelow Design Concepts

Also check out my new website, www.bigelowdesignconcepts.com. I am still working on it, but
it should be up and running soon. My number is 617.491.2868. My email addresses are chiong.lin@yahoo.com and bigelow.design@yahoo.com. Sorry about the the disorganization. I should have all of my contact information and portfolio up and ready to be viewed shortly.

Going_Swedish

I'm published in 3 papers. Just google " Chiong Lin kitchen, Cambridge,MA or go to
www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/articles/2009/10/25/Going_Swedish/. I would post some pictures but I haven't gotten them from the photographer yet. I immediately got a call for another
kitchen design in Newton. Things are moving pretty quickly. If you have a project and need and architect, just email chiong.lin@yahoo.com.

Pedagogy

I am applying for architectural teaching positions at undergraduate liberal arts colleges. In order to do that I had to really think through what my pedagogical philosophy had become. It really was a great journey of discovery much like life itself and so I thought that I would share this journey with you. It ended up being so long that I am going to have to share it in several parts.







MIT
The Boston Architectural Center (BAC)
Travel and Professional Experience
Sensory Overload
What is Essential?
The Pursuit of Enlightenment
Journey's End


MIT

When I was at MIT in the 1980’s, the school was literally grounded in a movement called “Built Form” rooted in the 1960’s. It was considered the “Truth” and the school was almost totalitarian in its instruction. Nevertheless, I was a sponge and soaked up its contents which added to my lifelong base for learning, architectural and otherwise, and I am a better person for the education.

The best of this education arose from the philosophical theme that nothing of value is understood without its opposite. That in fact the built form that we see is a setting for the experience of the space between. As in black and white photography and drawing, the white space is derived from the dark space. In architecture, light cannot exist without the structure which defines its forms. However, the habitable and immaterial space which is the essence of buildings is nothing without the forms which accompanies the space. Space is a derivative of form.

Central to my learning was research involving the urban architectural forms of Cordoba, Spain. Under the guidance of a strong mentor, we explored the tangible and intangible contextual forces in conjunction with site, material, structure, light, gravity, movement, water, walls, distance, magnitude and their interrelationships. This undertaking along with the study and analysis of great architectural works of the past and the present formed the crux of my education, culminating in the transformation of a triangular urban site into the design of a building complex at the center of my master’s thesis.

But MIT had difficulty entering the approaching new millennium and addressing the needs of modernity. That is, until the advent of a new movement centered on the imaging of architecture with computers, which found a footing in the liberating graphic medium and gained momentum. By that time, I had graduated, but was relieved to find the school trying out new ideas. But for me, computers in themselves could not fulfill a more intuitive need for metaphor, poetry and meaning. This need found an outlet in my teachings at the BAC and in some of my professional endeavors.

Colors as Metaphors for the Landscape

One of my friends, John McConnell who is an architect and a wonderful landscape painter painted the walls of his office an Mediterranean orange that was based on a color that I believe is prevalent in Italy. I thought the color was so beautiful that I tried to duplicate it in my hallway but it wasn't quite the same. Too dark. I think it is because I have never been to the Mediterranean before and that I am rooted in the dark palette of New England. But I have seen the orange sliffs of the south of Taiwan and the orange hills of Arizona and they were really breathtaking with their vivid blue skies that so much resembled each other though these two places were half way around the world from each other.

I think that some of my favorite painters like Diebenkorn and O'Keefe, whose work straddle that of being abstract and representational, are people who are very much in tuned with their environment. Georgia O'Keefe loved the colors of her New Mexico Ghost town and Richard Diebenkorn carefully documented the pastel colors of his California landscape.

I painted for one year when I was between jobs and taking care of my then three-year-old son, Nathaniel. I am not a landscape painter. When I paint, I simply go with the flow to see where the canvas, the paint and the paintbrush takes me. I don't know if my paintings will turn out to
be abstract or representational and half the time there are six paintings underneath the final picture. To my surprise, most of the paintings ended up in shades of red, oranges, and greens which to me are the colors of New England: the red brick, the orange-brown cherry wood and the hunter green window frames and the grass green landscapes. Most of the time, the paintings did not start out in those tones. I have completed maybe one landscape painting in browns and oranges and I have yet to carry my easel outdoors. I always thought that I was more of a psychological painter. Above, is one of my first paintings of a peach.

Above that, courtesy of Michael Kim Architecture, is an example of a kitchen which uses color in a very disciplined manner. This house I believe is located near a body of water. The symbols of this are the upside-down rowboat shape of the wood ceiling and the seagreen glass tile of the backsplash. The gridded white space formed between the ceiling and the cherry cabinets give the kitchen an Asian feel. Michael of course is Korean-American. The colors are that of New England.

My friend and her husband are in the process of refacing and refinishing their kitchen wrote to me that they were leaning towards a black/green granite countertop and a light cherry cabinets.
I was initially perplexed because she seem to like the unassuming feel of a classic modernist white kitchen and said that her favorite sensibility for a kitchen was a warm, sunny, and open. When she finally told me that, though she was predisposed to certain color schemes, that she felt that a Mediterranean color scheme (She and her husband have travelled to France many times) may not fit in with the New England traditions, I understood. I knew of course that nothing was yet set in stone and I knew that there was excitement and some nervousness about wanting everything to be perfect in one's home and I applauded her openness and flexibility for that is the way I would approach my own kitchen. One has to have the samples in one's own home to touch and feel and hold up to the light to be able to understand what is intuitive right for the space. And I looked forward to seeing which side of her many personalities would eventually show up in the final scheme of things or would all of them show up as in Michael's kitchen (which was actually designed for a client). And I curbed my desire to send her even more web photos of kitchens.

I used to work for Jeremiah Eck, a famous New England architect and his favorite materials for a kitchen were light cherry cabinets and a dark green granite countertop.

My son Nathaniel is now thirteen and although he produced three paintings in daycare that I gloriously framed and hung, he went dry for ten years. I used to gazed enviously at my friends' kids' artwork that they hung on their brick walls or their refrigerators. Then this year for two straight semesters, his art teacher wrote on his report card glowingly, "Nathaniel's artwork is inspirational to his class. He is producing some wonderful watercolors." I can't wait to see them, pick them up and frame them for my walls are bare. More curiously, I wanted to find out what his color pallette is because, shockingly, Nathaniel is orange/green color-blind. How does an orange/green color-blind kid in New England paint. I used to plan to take him to visit St. Martin's, an island in the Caribbean which was previously occupied by the Dutch and which is famous for its pastel colored pointy-roofed buildings. I pondered moving us to San Francisco. I thought with regret that he could never have a career in the visual arts with his handicap. Or maybe the landscape influences us in unconcious ways that we beingmere mortals can never be aware.

I am taking a painting class next month. I wanted to explore a lighter palette of colors than what I had previously used about nine years ago. But I wonder how much truth can there be in trying to general color palettes that you are not bombarded with day after day, trying to generate light conditions that say sunny, warm and open when the light in New England is in fact, dark and gray. How do you discover a true blue of the South an the West here in Northeast?

I will leave you with that and go ponder my dilemma.

Kitchens: Part One

Enough about metaphors. I promised that this blog would be fun and what is more fun that a series of painterly kitchens, the hearth of every home. The two photographs above are courtesy of oldhouseweb.com. The left one is renovation of an old Eichler kitchen by Timeline Construction in California and the one on the right is a condo renovation by XTC Design, Inc. in Ontario, Canada. The black and white check flooring pattern is actually a very classic combination in conjunction with bold colors. It serves as a bit of a visual break to the colors, but are strong colors pattens in themselves that holds up to vivid color selections. I love tile backsplashes because I am an artist as well. I love their design flexibility and the fact that they are easy to clean. Above you can see how the individual designers were able to push the tile patterns to the limit by making very individualized artistic statements.

The lower three images are my own humble IKEA kitchen in my 2-bedroom rental. I used to live in this unit with dilapidated kitchen cabinets from a century ago which had been moved from room to room looking for a home. The only beings who were happy with the arrangement were the spiders who chose to make their nests there, so they had to go. This design was an exercise in how you could push the cheapest of all cabinets and add paint and a floating countertop to achieve a not so inexpensive look. The design was actually a collaboration between my contractor, my tenants and myself. Most of the time I acted as the mediator putting arguments to rest as opposed to being head designer.

IKEA cabinets have come a long way since I put up my first IKEA kitchen, a wonderful orange beech concoction with pinkish and beige tile backsplash and a black laminate countertop shaped like an automotive dashboard. That is still one of my favorite kitchens, but back them, the cabinet boxes came only in white and they fell apart as I tried to pull them out of their packaging. Now IKEA also offers birch boxes which is ideal but only if you wish to use birch fronts for a more uniform look. So I used birch in my 2-bedroom kitchen which immediately brightens up a dark space.

As my contractor and I pored through the IKEA catalog, we discovered that the company manufactured 4'x8' panels finished in wood, aluminum, and colorful laminates. So immediately we took to a strategy that used all of these materials. We covered a whole brick wall with butt-jointed birch panels which gave the kitchen a continuous feel. We added red cabninets and a red side panel. Other innovations include a turned-around upper shelf that we placed below the floating laminate countertop to give the apartment unit storage space which it lacked. We backed it with an aluminum panel. The backsplash was originally intended to be a red subway tile, but I ran out of money. My tenants saw the remnant piece of red laminate backsplash and suggested that we use that. It was great cost-saving idea both because I didn't have to buy any more material and also because installing a panel is much less time consuming and labor-intensive than a tile backsplash. Plus the lacquered laminate is very easy to clean.

My tenants chose an apple green paint to complement the red and birch. I used a subtly patterned black laminate for the countertop because a stone countertop was out of the question. Too expensive. And also, stone may have been too hard and harsh a material for what had emerged as a very plastic-looking design. I couldn't afford to put in French doors leading to the exterior deck. That would have been ideal because it would have allow light into a dark space. But when it came time to choose the color for the door, I of course said "RED."

All in all, it was a great exercise in pushing a new, more collaborative way of working, cheap kitchen cabinets and paint to its limit. It was rewarding in that when I did acquire an old Woolworth's building turned apartment complex in the Berkshires, the community developer offered me funds to implement the same design ideas in order to attract a more sophisticated crowd to the area. It was a gratifying gesture that didn't pan out because of the economy and other things, but hey, that is another story.

Metaphors

The images on the previous blog were by the way courtesy of Eck MacNeeley Architects at www.Eckmacneeley.com. Jeremiah Eck had previously published a couple of books which also strived to bring architecture to a more humanistic scale as did Susan Saranka of the "Not so Big House" series. And there are several great architectural sites which don't speak up nor down to the typical person trying to understand design such as www.Oldhouseweb.com. Erin Gates' Elements of Style is cute and fanciful and great for shop-o-holics.

But I am a metaphor-a-holic and that is how I see things differently. The image to the right shows a bay window emulating a tree. Do you see the point. I don't know that I can design without trying to inflict some sort of meaning onto the project. So be forewarned if I am ever invited to work on your home, just put up with me.

At my previous firm, I worked on a Fire Fighting Academy so of course I had to bring to the experience, the imagery of fire and water. But if anyone had ever been to a fire fighting academy, he would realize that the true experience of the institution is the theater. There is nothing more dramatic fire academy students struggling to put out a staged fire.

In many instances, architecture serves as the stage for the drama of life's activities. I will be showing you examples of how a sushi bar is designed to show off the chef's skills and showmanship or how a roof shaped like a rowhouse can contain the life within a living space.

That is all for now. I had meant to show you some really great kitchen spaces. But I got caught up with all the copyright issues. I don't want to do anything illegal. Publishing a design blog is more complicated than I had thought. More later.

The Beginning

I think that this project may have been the beginning and possibly the end of my career as an architect. The project itself is a lot of fun and many people have stamped it which their own imagery. It was my ex-husband who gave it the name "Origami Architecture" which stuck in my head. My colleague at work though it looked a lot like an organism with a head and a tail like a "Dragon." I, myself always thought of architecture as a phenomenon that is caught between heaven and earth. I left my firm after I designed this dormitory project which is sited at Middlebury College. I became a mother for a year and now I am a single working mother. I have been a landlord, an artist, an entrepreneur, but I hesitate to call myself an architect. That is because I am not yet licensed. I used the excuse that I am a mother first. But I think the real reason that I have never focused on becoming licensed is that I didn't find the typical professional architect to be a fun person. Usually they are so wrapped up in their work that they forget how to make themselves and their work accessible to the public.

So that is why I started this blog. I am not sure that I will always stick to the subject of architecture since I am interested in a lot of things and find it hard to make one subject matter the center of all my attention. But at the center of it all, I love art and design and I wish to bring to a level of the everyday where all people can enjoy it, not just the intellectuals.