GROUNDS OF CARE
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.

Ettore Sottsass Jr.’s Metaphor, 1972-1979

Geology

Planet

Century

Landscape

Decade
Building

Day
Human

Section 1

Section 2

Section 3

Section 4

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LARA AVRAM

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