The Sum of All Parts
Reminiscing on her writing of The House on Mango Street, almost three decades after its making, Sandra Cisneros wrote:
The people I wrote about were…from here and there, now and then, but sometimes three real people would be braided together into one made-up person. Usually when I thought I was creating someone from my imagination, it turned out I was remembering someone I’d forgotten or someone standing so close I couldn’t see her at all….
I cut apart and stitched together events to tailor the story, gave it shape…
the sum of all parts
Akin to its making, the novel itself is a collective of seemingly incoherent vignettes strung into a complete story. Looking retroactively, in a similar fashion we stitch fragments from here and there–physical, cultural, imaginative, symbolic–into a piece of architecture and a collection of architecture, respectively. Each piece is a compilation of fragments unitized by a singular thematic mechanism.
A house may comprise separate individual quarters bound by a plinth, an elevated platform, or an overarching parasol of a roof; incongruent components of a shophouse, a hut and a sala may cluster under one temple-like roof to form a home; an exhibition pavilion of twin cubicle structures sits amidst other miniature cubes in an abstract field of QRs; a set of experimental occupiable objects–micro-architecture, that is– share one underlying conceptual framework; even custom cubbyholes occupy spaces in a gridded web of steel, forming an interior architectural component. Such is the recurring subliminal theme.