Small Projects: Kevin Low - Tapa blanda

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.

Born in 2002, small projects involves house, building, and utility design. The company is run by Kevin Low who returned to Malaysia after nine years in the west, with a bachelor's and master's degree in architecture and a minor in art and architectural history. small projects began as a realization that there were old dreams to reclaim. Its work has been published in architectural and design journals in the United States, Europe, Japan, and South Asia. In solo practice since 2002, Kevin has lectured and conducted seminars at universities in Malaysia, the United States, Singapore, and Pakistan and has spoken at architectural events in Asia and Europe. He currently divides his time between writing, teaching, designing cheap tapware, office buildings, garden houses, animal farms, cemeteries, brick warehouses and tables, with a developing focus on low-cost housing and smaller houses.