“The Anti-Museum: An Abstracted Monumental Landscape”
This thesis is a critique on preservation, challenging the glorification of buildings to the point that they become isolated monuments—abstracted from the temporal narrative, in which they exist.
The way history is narrated, and shapes collective memory, is explored; investigating how monuments have a dictatorial tendency. Counter-monument studies reveal that often only a certain version of history is represented, due to the subjectivity of memory. Often the full truth is hidden beneath many layers—out of sight. Counter-monuments do not reduce viewers to passive spectators and instead ask people to search for meaning and understanding within themselves—to question all that is presented.
The landscape of multiple memories extracts and distorts history from the site and around Berlin; to create a diverse and ambiguous proposal; which reflects the variety of collective memory and suggests; not all is as seems. The design methodology resurrects the structural grid of the factories on the site destroyed during the war—their columns project from the ground. They are cut, cast, traced, scaled and manipulated to interrogate the history presented. They also dictate the positioning of new structures—intertwining old and new. The critique on preservation further uses the listed building to explore research findings. Each existing building is treated in a different way, challenging various aspects of preservation:
The House: Monument Abstraction
The Chimney:Monument Subtraction
The Factory:Monument Addition
The rest of the site: Monument Multiplication and Division
The Anti-Museum becomes a gallery of multiple memories, set in an abstracted monumental landscape—where history is questioned and discussed in public engagement. Collective memory is expressed as an ambiguous landscape—as not all is as it seems.
Collage-Model Encasing the House Monument
Master Plan
Proposed Entrance to the Site
Process of Making the Model – Tracing and Digging the Columns
Axonometric View–The Anti-Museum set back from the partially demolished existing factory.
CONTACT EMAIL: abilucas@hotmail.co.uk
Curated by Andreea-Ioana Ciutac