Bodies, Buildings and Other Broken Matter
Exhibited in the Wiesner Art Gallery,
January 20 – March 24, 2023
Design Thesis
Advisors: Sergio Lopez-Pineiro, Cristina Parreño Alonso
Spring 2023
Harvard University, MIT
In a culture of replacement, this thesis looks at ‘broken’
fragments – in our bodies, buildings and landscapes, in an attempt to reframe
the agency of repair across an entanglement of temporalities. Once a bustling
Romanian spa town with a small power plant thriving on the soft extraction of
minerals and hot waters, Govora’s healing landscapes now sit abandoned, prey to
commercial redevelopment.
Through a petrographic approach, a writing through rocks, this project attempts to reveal understandings of what is below ground and render the ghostly figures of what was above. It frames a story about the passing of time in the recovery of bodies, organic and inorganic, within a post-industrial landscape, questioning the ‘groundedness’ of any intervention which might lie in it – specifically, through acts of burial, insertion, assimilation and detachment.
Through a petrographic approach, a writing through rocks, this project attempts to reveal understandings of what is below ground and render the ghostly figures of what was above. It frames a story about the passing of time in the recovery of bodies, organic and inorganic, within a post-industrial landscape, questioning the ‘groundedness’ of any intervention which might lie in it – specifically, through acts of burial, insertion, assimilation and detachment.
Ettore Sottsass Jr.’s Metaphor, 1972-1979
Geology
Planet
Century
Landscape
Decade
Building
Building
Day
Human
Human