Liminal space
Growing up in Vietnam, I spent the first five years of my life living in the countryside, so the word “rural” evokes powerful memories for me—it is the liminal margin where nature and community overlap and interact. In the rural places of my youth, neighbors and relatives always surrounded me, and we, in turn, were surrounded by nature.
In the countryside where I grew up, movement from “outside” to “inside” does not occur abruptly. Houses are approached through a series of thresholds. In the village, people often go to a house from the main road, which is usually a dirt road lined with trees. Then they would go through the gate, then the pond, and the courtyard before seeing the house itself. The living room is usually placed in the middle of a house and open to the rest of the house, but before you enter the living room, you pass the last threshold: the “mai hien,” a small opened terrace covered by the roof, like the “engawa” in Japanese architecture.
Although series of thresholds represent many layers in space, these layers overlap each other and are permeated by nature. Almost every single space is open to other spaces, even the bedroom (which is actually a sleeping area next to the living space). There are no private rooms, but rather spaces for different activities. On a hot summer day, people have a hammock, or “phan” (a kind of bed) and sleep in the “mai hien.” In a rainy and colder day, the best spot to sleep is in the bed next to the living space, lying down next to the window to see rain drops fall through the leaves in the back garden, and most enjoyably, to listen to the rain touching the leaves and the soil.
Both the house and household activities are thus mediated and governed by nature. We eat according to seasons, and people pace and plan daily activities, even their work production, to align with the seasons. Even if nature temporarily limited our activities, we did not mind it because nature also gave us something to look forward to: I remember the feeling of longing for some of my favorite dishes that would only be available at a certain time of the year. Now that I can have almost any dish at any time of the year, I no longer feel like having them. It may be that everything tastes better when it is fresh and in-season, but the quality of the food itself is only part of what is missing—a bigger factor is that the dining environment is now disconnected from the seasons and from the rural world where nature privileges us with a presentation of what it will be arriving soon.
The liminal experience of passing through a series of thresholds transform the simple act of arriving home into a poetic act of moving through space and being in spaces with an awareness of the underlying meaning and purpose of those spaces. The articulations of space that I describe might seem to make it harder for people to interact with each other, but this was not the case: on the contrary, personal space is so porous that a person in the village road can easily call to others inside a house and be heard with little more than a gentle adjustment in volume.
It is this quality of porosity in space, the poetic layout of a house complex, the omnipresence of nature in every single physical element and human activities, that I would like to investigate and to conceptualize it into an architectural approach. What if a house is designed from a series of thresholds that are responsive to the ecological setting of the site and regulated by different lifestyles and users’ activities and behaviors? How would new ecological settings and new lifestyles reconfigure the form of the house itself? I hope to formally pursue answers to these questions by contemplating this subject and test it out in future projects.