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

Precarity



“ There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places — places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society — which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias.”

— Michel Foucault


“Asgard is not a place, it’s a people”

— Odin Borson

The text above originates from a preliminary exercise commissioned during the project’s second week—a speculative analysis of the site’s exterior conditions, conducted under the constraint of denied physical access to the building. Tasked with distilling first impressions, this exercise demanded a hermeneutic engagement with the site’s liminal state: its material decay, urban context, and symbolic dissonance within Berlin’s neoliberal landscape.



Ryuichi Sakamoto performs in an austere earthquake evacuation site, the audience captivated on the cold floor.


Architecture is not defined by place, but by people. A beautifully designed building remains inert until animated by human presence—its worth measured in use, not form.

The video of Ryuichi Sakamoto performing in a stark earthquake evacuation site crystallizes this truth: the audience, seated on cold concrete, is transfixed not by the space’s austerity but by the warmth of shared sound. Here, a utilitarian school hall becomes heterotopia — a site of radical reimagining, where music overwrites trauma.

This could happen anywhere. Architecture’s highest purpose lies not in perfection, but in its capacity to hold life’s unscripted moments. What if every derelict shell waited, not for completion, but for its first chord?