Hsingming Fung characterizes Michel Rojkind’s explorations in architecture and music as evocations of emotion and images.
Rojkind describes his interest in the concept of contagion in architecture, which he relates to a comfort with the discomfort of unusual frictions in his work. He presents a museum proposal in which a platonic cube is unfolded onto a treacherous mountainous site.
Rojkind discusses his collaboration with auto-body technicians to execute elements that contractors were reticent to attempt. He presents a project which added a pixelated skin around an existing building, creating protected garden spaces where this skin and original house misaligned. He presents his proposal for the Ordos 100 project in Mongolia, describing the difficulty of designing separate habitations in a vacuum, without the coordination of adjacencies between the architects involved.
Rojkind presents a proposal for a hotel comprised of aggregated horizontal elements organized to establish different venues and atmospheres in a larger complex. He describes his entry in a competition to create park space and public housing for Mexico City. His entry was highly critical of the project brief and of city policies.
Rojkind concludes with the Nestlé Chocolate Museum, in Mexico City. He designed and built the entire project in two and a half months; a process he describes as working on a 1:1 scale model. There were many construction problems, especially dealing with the multiple teams of builders who worked round-the-clock. Rojkind notes that one benefit of this rapid pace was in securing an agreement from the client that they could not make any changes to the project.
