Blog to come soon.
Past Presence takes on the duality of memory broken by war and its resulting voids, blanketing the present voids while tracing the memory of the past.
In a hybrid landscape built by the architectural and cultural development of thousands of years, we recognize three moments of historical progression. The first moment, developing at the birth of the city, is the arch. An architectural and historical symbol of the city, the arch is the literal foundation of the construction of the city while projecting ourselves into the past. What one builds off of this monument is not only its structural stability, but its ability to hold time as well. This threshold is a void of passage, a designed void of memory. These arches frame instances of recollection, through materiality and emotional geographes built around fragments of time.
Along this lineage of time, the architectural system is implemented in the harsh reality of our world today. War and disaster take a toll on memory and its architectural instances that hold those memories in place. The arch becomes nothing more than a pile of rubble, a scar on the landscape. This once structural symbol has been stripped of its rigidity and now blankets a new, undesigned (or unplanned) void, the crater.
Although the crater holds no physical form besides the vast span of the hole, we understand that the space the crater takes was filled with meaning before. The new void space is teeming with past and present information that mingle together at the same site.
Looking at these two instances within time and space, there is an vitality to each phase of development, a historical tie to each moment in relation to the other that cannot be ignored. Architecture crumbles and is processed back into the landscape through this destructive process. But the past information of this site cannot be faked or ignored but must be revitalized once again. The arch can be used as a system of construction for this means, and the ruins of the city are once more processed and used in the construction of this archway. The present void becomes inspiration to the arches redevelopment, but not without implementing its crumbling effects on the architecture itself. The arch meets its final phase, the rubble archway.
In this we find our Past Presence, the ecology of nostalgia, the existence of these moments of time in one uniform system of embedded information. Within the site of Aleppo, Syria, we saw opportunity through its destruction for a new means of reconstruction. The hybrid of architecture and landscape shrouds and mends the shattered pieces of the city by tracing its present undesign voids. This void is then amplified by the historical program of the site that was once there through a new system of archways, once that cater to past information and present destruction. In this form we see the stability and instability of memory and void itself, and allow for a competing temporality of past information.
Critics: Cathryn Dwyre, Richard Sarrach, Jeff T.Johnson
