January 21st, 2008
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A_1: My Koh Tao Cabana “honeymoon” bungalow. One of the most comfortable and stylish places one can find available for rent on the “Turtle” island. For some 6,000 Batts a night one gets a free (invaluable) sunset as a bonus.
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A_2: A view on the Sairee Beach, the main and most populous locale on the island.
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What is the connection between these two places? This is not an IQ test and there is no implied connection, really - no link that would not disrupt the continuity of one’s thematized experience. There is a number of generic possibilities that make some sense, such as taking a commercial speed-boat that transports anonymous bodies from point A to point B twice a day. For sure, sensible people would opt for that option: it’s quick this way - provided that time is their money. Extra-sensible people would do something else, however. They would simply cancel the disruptive distance altogether - by force of their imagination. They would collapse it virtually to zero by rendering the problematic gap in their itinerary with a unique design concept, by thematically inflating the emptiness of disjuncture. For extra-sensible people (like ourselves for that matter) no time is ever wasted; it always translates into immediate symbolic dividends. We move on to design an individualized connective exterior between these two disconnected interior designs and to effectively merge the isolated design sites into one design complex. Let us waste not a fraction of our precious time on non-events. Let us make every second of our travel in space an exiting moment with every next mile a destination in its own right. This is why we are boarding the Freedom Fargo. Captain Alf would sail us from Koh Tao to Koh Samui island - from Koh Tao Cabana bungalow camp to The Library, a new design hotel. Now there is a link! Paraphrasing the main character in THE BEACH, a movie about what would be our context for the next 3 days in the Gulf of Thailand: our particular form of transfer from A to B is designed for those who generally hate transfers.
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B_1: The Library, a design hotel on Koh Samui. One problem: Staying in the Library one has very little motivation to leave the campus.
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B_2: The villas of the Library are properly enumerated as Page 1, Page 2 and so on. I stayed on Page 7.
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Here are some more pictures from our design trip.
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