Spatiality began its life as a speculative short story I wrote for a class in architecture school called “The Memory Ruin.” It told the story of a man who had abandoned everything he had known and wandered lost in the wilderness until encountering the ruins of an ancient city that had been built over with a grafting of structures of almost an alien nature. There he must confront his past and the memories of what he had left behind. Many of the pieces of that story make it into the beginning of Spatiality Book 3. I was very interested in the tensions that could be elicited between the formalism of an architecture of ancient stone and a nearly chaotic construction of metal inscribed over it and how that could affect one’s perceptions of self, space, time and memory.
Many of my interests while in school that inform my series Spatiality concerned ruins, ancient forgotten places, echoing with lost memories. Additionally I am very interested in how architecture is informed by and informs our memories, much of which I covered in my last post. A ruin is a particular sort of memory space, one that contains the tracings of all that had come before and is now lost.
I lived in Italy as a child for few years and I strongly recall the relationship between the ancient Roman architecture, the medieval world built upon that and the modern that now inhabits it. I always remembered whenever there was construction of any kind, there were ancient Roman ruins being uncovered. Besides the castles, bridges and narrow medieval streets of hill towns, the Roman Forum was the greatest playground a child could ask for. So I was keenly aware that all civilization is built upon the remains of the one that preceded it. This idea runs through both “The Memory Ruin” and Spatiality.
Also at the time when I was writing “The Memory Ruin,” adaptive reuse was a very prevalent subject and although I felt like there was a strong case to be made for the possibilities of adaptive reuse I was less interested in inhabiting an existing structure seamlessly or “politely” as it were, but in a disruptive or expressively contrasting way that could elicited the very strongest aspects of both the new and existing structure. My fifth year thesis project attempted to explore this idea by creating a series of grafted structures within and around an abandoned rural water treatment facility to create a sort of retreat/spa or sanatorium where there was a “taking of the waters” literally within the boundaries of the old holding tanks. One of my strongest influences at the time was Lebbeus Woods, who created incredibly evocative drawings and models of constructs in war-torn and otherwise damaged places and introduced the idea of an architecture that was radical, almost anarchical in nature, populated with concepts of parasites, grafting, scars, sutures, scabs and the like. These concepts greatly informed some of “The Memory Ruin,” Spatiality, as well as my own architectural thinking.
About this time I also became very interested in abandoned industrial ruins, factories, steel mills and plants in places like Baltimore, Philadelphia and Bethlehem, PA, Richmond, VA and mines in West Virginia. I began traveling to some of these places and photographing them. I found them to be very evocative, filled with the melancholy, that sense of loss that inhabited the ancient Roman ruins I encountered as a child. These structures rusting and decayed, caked with grime and overgrown with moss and plants, are slowly disintegrating back into the past.
