me
I am Charon Hu, a student of architecture, and a recent graduate with a Master of Arts degree from the Architectural Association School of Architecture.
In the realm of disciplines, I stand at the threshold, holding onto the methods and philosophies of all those who are adjacent.
As I sift through my bags containing these marbles of ideas, I embrace the macabre, the grotesque, and the cynical, wearing them around my neck.
Collapsing Towers
An absurdist memoir of a cynical creative evolution, “Collapsing Towers” takes the structure of a series of short stories. The stories goes back and forth between fiction, nonfiction and analytical. It follows the collapse of the author’s own creative structure, as the memoir’s own narrative structure collapses with it.
Excerpt from Collapsing Towers
In We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour challenged the framework on which modernity was built: the distinct separation between human and nonhuman entities. The former were seen as the only beings capable of agency, while the latter existed solely to serve. As we wholeheartedly embraced modernity and praised its merits, this disconnect only widened.
One of the first signs of humanism emerged in architecture. Compare the floor plan of the Gothic cathedral Notre Dame, which places reverence on the altar — the place of the divine — to Palladio’s Renaissance villa La Rotonda, which places its focal point at the center, where humans stand. The spirit of the divine, which once served as an avatar for all human and nonhuman entities, transitioned into the worship of the human spirit. Thus, the dichotomy between human and nonhuman became distinct in architecture(…)