We are not desolate, we pallid stones

The thesis aims to engage with the ideas of ruination and preservation through the use of casting and replication. By taking a plaster cast of an artifact it is preserved, yet the original may continue to decay. The perfect plaster copy is a pristine ruin, taken out of time and place.
When we remember, we reconstruct not only an idea of the original event, but of each remembrance of that event.

If buildings are analogous to human memory, then ruination is analogous to the act of forgetting. Through ruination, buildings become inert, pathological monuments to a previous time, losing their functional purpose.
When viewed ruins can become whatever their visitor imagines, as we all bring our own memories and contexts to reconstruct them in our imaginations. Heidegger (cited by Forty, 2001) wrote that “remembering is possible only on that of forgetting, and not vice versa”. In order for monuments to effectively cause remembrance, we must have already forgotten, and be prompted to remember.

Through the use of plaster casts and physical models, the ideas of degradation, ruination and reconstruction were explored. The use of an imagined history of ruins informed a new plan and Kahns ideas of inhabited walls were applied to create complex spaces.

Sigmund Freud uses a fictional Rome as an analogy for the human mind and memory, a city of overlaid buildings, past and present occupying the same space, as memories overlap and merge in time. Addressing this through a collection of new artifacts from imagined pasts, the proposal aims to engage with the city and
building’s past through a series of interventions and additions suggestive of replications and reconstitutions of built elements of Vienna, collected, shuffled and assembled into new forms with new purposes. Forms are developed through remembrance and mis-remembrance of architectural moments.