Dimension

One of the first assignments in my early days as an architectural student was to take Chinese calligraphic characters, manipulate them and create shapes, forms and space from them. The instructions we got read something like:

"...explore the 2-D, 3-D and 4-D architectonic possibilities of the Chinese calligraphic characters ..."

The 2nd Dimension and 3rd Dimension, we could understand perfectly well. "But what the heck are we going to do for the fourth dimension?" Perhaps for the first time in our lives, "dimension" became a mind-boggling word that was too much for us to handle.

Shortly after, we pulled out yard after yard of tracing paper to work on the drawings, and later, buried ourselves in piles of foam boards, trying our best to carve/cut out some nice looking, pristine white models (to this day I still remember the horrid smell of melted polystyrene). For some of us, the 4-D models were just upgraded, fancier versions and variations of the 3-D ones. We had quite a hard time making sense of how to present space-time through the models.

Ironically, while working on something about dimensions, we got trapped - trapped in the plane of creating fancy graphics and physical form of the models, but failing to project ourselves one step up into another dimension - to experience (or imagine to experience) the kind of feelings we might get from entering into the space we had created. Walking through a structure is a space-time experience. Each step you take places you in a new perspective, giving you new sights, and possibly new insights as you move about.