A Certain Impure and Surplus Need: The Pillar Suit | Flora and Fauna

SPACE February 2025 (No. 687) 

This project involved refurbishing an old table tennis room in a middle school. The space, remembered vaguely as a former dormitory for the school’s soccer team, had become a table tennis room at some undefined point in the past. It remained untouched—a room with faded wallpaper, half-torn linoleum flooring, and mismatched, rickety household furniture awkwardly arranged. Amidst this disarray, the pingpong tables stood proud and dignified, ready to welcome students. Opening a side door revealed a vast white-tiled shower area, where a cleaning worker’s modest bed and belongings brought a sense of warmth to the cold space. 

The task was straightforward: to clean and refresh the space, adding modern finishes. For a modernist, this might seem easy, but for me, it felt like grappling with an incomplete answer to a fundamental question. Over six months, I revised the design repeatedly, avoiding busy principals and ever-changing administrative staff. Looking back, the most significant moment in this process was the school’s decision to keep the room as a pingpong room—nothing more, nothing less. Initially, they contemplated adding a billiard table, a small shower and changing area, or even a teachers’ lounge. However, they finally resolved to leave the room to its original purpose. Stripping it of anything beyond the appropriate spacing between the tables, the room embraced its role as the seemingly least necessary yet quintessentially necessary space—a pure table tennis room.

Of course, new needs were met as well. A new entrance facing the sports field was added, and the cleaning worker’s rest area was properly reconstructed. The expanded area included seating with benches and flooring, extending the room’s role as a relaxation space for students adjacent to the cafeteria. Yet these additions failed to replace the room’s accidental density and charm. Before the refurbishment, it was already a fascinating space—aged, dim, and slightly unsettling, with insufficient seating but rich in uncanny qualities. Its unintended eccentricities gave the building a sense of life, as if the corners of the room could conjure the school’s secrets, adolescent laughter, or moody whispers. This was not a functional issue. The absence of necessity itself became a need̵...