Architecture as a political act
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IS THIS OUR CITY? One day, a person recollected the past memory of the city , he want to find out the place which in the old photograph, he went to the same place but all the old are gone instead of full of high-rise buildings. That lead us questioned ourselves is this our city, a iconic prosperous city? Thesis Statement Today, along with high speed commercialized development, architecture is becoming a empty container without the power of conveying history and culture. Like today’s museum, it just a container for culture and history, the building itself may not present anything for history. Secondly, architecture today is controlled by politics and upper class to performing a superb city image to show how prosperous of this city for the audiences around the world. But what behind this kind of image is our culture is being eroded by over-commercialized development. Architecture used to be a representation of history, memory an culture, now is a predator which nibbling our culture. We could see lots of historical buildings pulled down replace by the modern and businesslike architecture. In this macro-control system, the politics is at the top of the triangle, the architects always follow the needs of the city market or developers, the bottom culture ad users only can obey the super structure above. So what is the actual role of culture and architecture constructing our city today? although this kind of macro-control system makes our city looks like more prosperous, What if some political actor leads by culture and users? give a freedom to the bottom area to let them reverse the top down triangle and form a distinctive city image for themselves.
Research 01 Deduction – how does the architect, artist, photographer use their ways to covey culture in the city. Architect – The city within a city – insert series of new nodes to form a distinctive experience of a city . Creation of a series of frames or scenes . Location of items like pavilions or temples creating new points of attention). Organization and development of the scenes using literary themes (Japanese Zen poems). Artist – Explorable City – Add new exotica to arouse people’s passion to re-discovery the forgotten corners of city. The outdoor exhibition Event Horizon consists of 31 life-size sculptures which are placed on rooftops , ledges of buildings and city ground. It leads us to use a di fferent way to explore and discover the unknown city. Photographer – Time Machine – Photo Overlays Create a Then and Now Perspective. -Sergey’s collection of photos are a meld of old and new. He’s collected numerous photos from major historic battles of WWII, such as the defense of Moscow, and overlaid these locations with present day photos of the same places. The result is a virtual portal into the Second World War, with a “where are they now?” Type perspective, but using landscapes.
02 how can architecture be a tool to present history From study diff erent professions uses their deduction from their distinctive perspective to convey history and recall memory. I summarized how the architecture can be a tool convey culture and history of the city .
One is Temporal Transformation – a dynamic image – which we can see the time changes . For the temporal transformation, first approach is dealing relationship between new and old – Mutualism and Derived. Another one is Spatio-temporal engagement- the visual linkage generated by body movement in space-time changing. I am moving, the city is changing. So we could see a series of the past and present city images by experience. The different moments where this two time images overlap, disconnection, interaction, will remind you to remember where we are, what we had and history of the city. Another one for conveying history is Time-stamps – a static image, for those events which leave a image or feeling in our mind at one moment.
Site For further study, I select Central as my potential site. Because Central is a extreme example of over – commercialized and centralized area but behind this superb city image is its culture are being eroded.
First Review Panel
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