Doing Almost Nothing

W.I.P. by J.Y.Ooi


part i

  1. Preface
  2. Kurfürstendamm
  3. Prehistory
  4. Dichotomy of Ku’damm

part ii

  1. Aggregate and Adler
  2. Crisis
  3. Brief

part iii

  1. Precarity
  2. Emancipation
  3. Plans
  4. Trajectory
  5. Outcome(?)

PART IV

  1. References
  2. Credit

Emancipation




“When there is nothing, everything is possible. When there is architecture, nothing (else) is possible.”

- Rem Koolhaas

WuMo by Wulff & Morgenthaler.

Big capitalism and powerful developers favor homogeneity: determined, predictable, and balanced in form. The role of a radical architect, therefore, is to champion dissonance. It is safe to assume that a building's program will undergo constant change and adjustment over its lifetime. The more the building works, the more it will be in a state of revision. Its design should thus propose a “method” that combines architectural specificity with programmatic indeterminacy.

Hence, my proposal has been reimagined as two phases. The first phase consists of spatial interventions, while the second phase is conceived as a strategic plan.

In the first phase, I decided to explore design interventions that could enable the kinds of disorder allowing for unplanned activities and provide an open-ended configuration that can change according to people's actions. By using unconventional elements such as hoarding and safety bollards, which are typically tools for regulating passage, they disrupt the overly ordered surrounding urban environments, encourage the unplanned use of public space, and provoke social interaction.


A deliberate 2.5-meter recession of the construction hoarding carves out a liminal threshold—an interstitial zone that dissolves the binary between exclusion and access. This spatial incision transforms the site’s periphery into a social condenser, inviting pedestrians to linger, gather, or observe. The gesture critiques traditional site boundaries, reimagining barriers as invitations .

Starting at a certain scale, it is crucial for the building to maintain its integrity, limpidity, and sculptural and architectural qualities. Within its envelope, the different programs can develop almost like caves or autonomous projects, playing a role in the life of the city. This attempts to dematerialize architecture—a building carcass that avoids the creation of a formal façade. The flowing curves of the dunes are echoed in the depressions and rises of the base, replicated on the upper roof.



We must take advantage of the necessity to transport new soil to the site, as the vegetal strategy requires fertile soil. To this end, I aim at two objectives: to differentiate the nature of the varied soil strata required (healthy soil, peat, etc.) by juxtaposing vegetal sets that would not be possible in a homogeneously fertile ground; and by raising and creating undulating layers of soil, to clearly show these diverse strata in elevation and accentuate the third dimension of the landscape. The ultimate effect, created by the undulating layers of landscape and earth, the “forest of pillars,” and the voids that act as light shafts, resembles that of a natural and organic process over architecture.
The plants are meticulously curated not for visual spectacle, but as a multisensory intervention: their scent, seasonal fruit, and tactile presence dissolve the building’s monolithic dominance. Here, architecture recedes, foregrounding the intangible—whispers of jasmine, the unassumingly picked fig, the ephemeral act of gathering.

The boundary is an edge where things end; the border is an edge where different groups interact. The recessed hoardings act as porous borders, creating liminal space that allows one to flow into the site, merging the street into its core. The strategy of doing nothing and an incomplete form is a kind of creative credo. In the plastic arts, it is conveyed in purposely unfinished sculpture; in poetry, it is conveyed in, to use Wallace Steven’s phrase, the ‘engineering of the fragment.’ Incompleteness, with empty spaces perceived as potential for adaptability, flexibility, or even reversibility, constitutes a powerful tool for architects.
Luxury boutiques wield gilded interiors and monolithic mirrors to stage exclusivity—spaces designed to dazzle the select few who cross their thresholds. Yet what if we weaponized their antithesis? Imagine hoarding boards, those raw, provisional skins of urban transition, repurposed as radical invitations.
Photo of Chanel luxury store, taken by Marek Śliwecki .
The LV store, credit to Marek Śliwecki .



Rather than a lockstep march toward achieving a single end, we should look at the different and conflicting possibilities each stage of the design process might entail. If a novelist were to announce at the beginning of a story ‘here’s what will happen’ – what the characters will become and what the story means – we would immediately close the book. All good narratives explore the unforeseen and the process of discovery; the novelist’s art is to shape that exploration.

When the building operates as an open system – incorporating the principles of porosity of territory, incomplete form, and nonlinear development – it becomes democratic, not in the legal sense, but as a tactile experience. Berlin, a city filled with migrants and people of diverse ethnic backgrounds who belong to many different communities through their work, families, consumption habits, and leisure pursuits, becomes a place where the unfinished building creates a forum for strangers to interact and feel physically and socially connected to others they cannot know.

To connect with others who differ racially or religiously, whose ways of loving are alien, who come from distant cultures, people must loosen up inside themselves, treating their own identities as less absolute and definable. People must engage in a kind of self-disordering. In "The Phenomenology of Spirit", the famous chapter ‘Lordship and Bondage’ declares that human beings are fulfilled ‘only in being acknowledged’ by others—a process of mutual recognition. In this building, everything is stripped away, and every user is on equal terms.