Chang's set up reminds me of the opening scene in "An American in Paris." In his undersized Parisian flat, Gene Kelly goes about his morning business, a choreographed routine revealing a hyper efficient system of hidden furniture, strategically placed around the apartment to enable optimal utilization of a supremely limited space. This consists primarily of raising a bed arranged on pulleys up into its position of disuse, in order to make room for a folded breakfast table and chair pulled out of the out of the closet. While operating the pulley mechanism, Kelly's character makes efficient use of his time by washing his face with a towel, which had been hanging from one of the bed's springs and became available when the bed was raised. A mundane routine, artfully elegant in it's execution.
Kelly's character, a by-the-book impecunious painter seeking inspiration in Paris, lives where he lives, and the way he lives, presumably as a result of fiscal destitution. Chang, on the other hand, is a well-established practicing architect, and chooses to live in his family's old residence. Drawing from his close-quarters upbringing, during which his entire family occupied the apartment he now inhabits alone, he learned to value the constraints of compact space. The architectural evolution of the apartment over the course of his life is traced in a book, "My 32m^2 Apartment," in which it's revealed that Chang's first architectural mock-up was a re-design of the apartment he drew as a teenager. (He gave himself his own room.) Functionality and flexibility are the rule.
The design of the apartment in its current configuration is impressive in and of itself, but what I find most interesting is that it's the result of an unusually long engagement the architect has had with this particular space. From both first and secondhand experience, I know that it is not unusual for an architect to turn his or her own house into a lifelong design experiment. In Chang's case, it seems pretty clear that his fascination with and devotion to this particular apartment declares him an architect whose house has become a veritable extension of its inhabitant.
