{"id":1088,"count":9,"description":"TUTOR: ALEXIS GERMANOS\n\n\u2018Each creative act involves an exchange. Each new work of art is supported and enriched by its sources and its cultural and physical contexts. Once in existence, the new work in turn revises its sources and contents, acting on them directly or refuting that they be reevaluated in light of its presence...in each creative act the old and the new are inextricably entwined and inescapably beholden to each other.\u2019\n- Paul S Byard\n\n30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the resurrection of the Berliner Schloss, on the site of the former The Palast Der Republik, the symbolic seat of power for the GDR, marks the culmination of the Critical Reconstruction of the City as the capital of the reunified Germany- the rebuilding of the city on the pre-war figureground plan.\n\nRecalling the fragmented writings of Berlin-born Walter Benjamin, who makes a distinction between experience \u2018with\u2019 history, rather than mere experience \u2018of history\u2019, the rebuilding of the Schloss raises many questions.\n\nThese contexts created the critical conditions for our interrogation of Berlin and the advancement of individual theses projects in which we have explored how interdependent notions of history, memory, preservation & mythology operate on the processes of our architectural design and our interpretation of the city. As storytellers, we have combined words and architecture to tell the story we don\u2019t yet know how to tell.\n\nWith reference to Paul Byard\u2019s notions of the \u2018Combined-Work,\u2019 and through a process of addition, subtraction and intervention, we have sought to explore the opportunities set-out by existing bodies of expressive material as located within our project sites.\n\nWorking in the axis of time, we have considered how architecture can reform and renew- how our building proposals anticipate change, how they can have multiple life-spans and multiple meanings as the history of the city evolves and transform. We have questioned how can one artefact or building affect the meaning of another when different expressions combine and interact?\n\nIn Unit XX we design through making. We are interested in the potential of the physical model as a heuristic device, as a tool to arrive at an idea. Models are works of craftsmanship, but they are also a mechanism for thinking and designing. \n\nWe have sought the potential of making, of engaging with the substance of materials, as a means to unlock our immanent architectural attitudes that have led to serendipitous, yet poetic and meaningful designs.\n\nTracing architecture's genealogical lines, we have examined how Berlin\u2019s architect\u2019s have looked back to the past to understand the present and reimagine the future- not to replicate architecture, but to transform it and draw out its relevance for our own era.\n\nIn this sense, we are interested in the creative tension between memory and invention or in other words, between making and the architect\u2019s memory. We have asked, where does memory end and invention begin?","link":"https:\/\/wsa-ondisplay.co.uk\/2020\/category\/master-of-architecture\/year-5\/xx-designing-histories\/","name":"XX Designing Histories","slug":"xx-designing-histories","taxonomy":"category","parent":1022,"meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsa-ondisplay.co.uk\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories\/1088"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsa-ondisplay.co.uk\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsa-ondisplay.co.uk\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/taxonomies\/category"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsa-ondisplay.co.uk\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories\/1022"}],"wp:post_type":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsa-ondisplay.co.uk\/2020\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts?categories=1088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}