Small Projects: Kevin Low

Small Projects is the name of an architectural practice located in the monsoon tropics. More importantly, it also refers to a process of thinking about context; one focused on the poetry of its products only in as far as their production is poetic. Where books on specific architectural practices might be by way of monographs, being books about work; this particular book has been written from the perspective of a process based on phenomena, placing less emphasis on picturesque documentation than it does on critical explanation of its contents: it is less a book about work than one which attempts to be a work in itself. With descriptions of the thinking behind its philosophical theory and the documentation of built architectural work, it provides a substantial record of the production of its architecture; a serious and occasionally humorous, information-filled narrative and struggle of how a particular process of architecture has evolved from its earliest projects designed in architecture school, through the formative years in actual practice and on to its current state of being; one of constant experiment in search of invention. Small Projects is neither a book about high technology nor one about esoteric materials and processes. It is a book about forms that have been made, but more critically, it is about how making results in form. Viewed contextually, it is a work of design and thought as much as it is a book about the products that is created from its design thinking.

About the Author :
Kevin Mark Low is an architect by training and lives in the monsoon tropics. Raised in Southeast Asia, he spent nine years in the United States before returning to Malaysia with a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in Architecture with minors in Art History. Kevin has, over various periods in his life, been professionally involved in writing, environmental sculpture, illustrating, teaching and copyrighting. He has presented papers on building technology at Harvard University and lectured in the architectural department at MIT. While in the United States, Kevin worked in architectural practices both on the East and West coasts and studied closely with the Aga Khan Foundation, earning awards of research grants and fellowships to Italy, North Yemen, Spain and Bangladesh. He joined GDP Architects upon his return to Kuala Lumpur where he stayed for the next eleven years, running the r + d and special projects division. His work while at GDP architects included project branding, budget hotels and high end condominiums, a refurbished warehouse for a corporate office, various housing types, guardhouses, garden memorials, mailboxes and master plans; the last one being the master plan for Sentul in Kuala Lumpur. His work concerns the design of architecture and the space in between, teaching, and writing, when time permits. He works by way of a process rooted in the phenomena of experience.