The Once and Future City

Author:

Hoffmann, Andrew Patrick

Area of Honors:

Architecture

Degree:

Bachelor of Architecture

Document Type:

Thesis

Thesis Supervisors:

Juan Ruescas Baztán, Thesis Supervisor
Christine Lee Gorby, Thesis Honors Advisor

Keywords:

Architecture Memory

Abstract:

The City is a theater of memory. The gradual organization and reorganization of the city’s image reveals residual figures, or ghosts, that remain as the city’s social environment evolves around them. They are reflexive artifacts that exhibit the ideals of their previous occupants; or, as Aldo Rossi says, “[they] are a past that we are still experiencing.” In most cases, built space affirms permanence. But this is a lie. The urban environment is wrapped in a veil of sterility. So what if a new mode of intervention could puncture these self-imposed barriers and challenge these conditions? If architecture, by nature, is diachronic (meaning as existing δια "through" and χρόνος "time"), then should it not commit toward reimagining itself? Commuters, office workers, pedestrians, interact with their urban environment in ways that are defined by their stringent barriers. that have long defined the modern privatiza- tion of formerly-public space. The city relies on its networks of rail, highways, public squares, and pedestrian surfaces to link populations in extant neighborhoods and bring these multiple aspects of the city together. And yet participants in the urban environment become estranged participants in their own places due to a stratified public zone. This project proposes a system of hybridizing programs that occupy presumed-inaccessi- ble places in order to create a synthesized experience in a way that is currently barred. Understanding the city via systems of shifting icons allows an insight of how to reinvent these artifacts of meaning into a holistic system of urban architecture.