Identity Structures

Abstract

As time progresses, the original intention of an architectural place becomes residual, only experienced in its fullest form in vestiges of our memory. Our engagement with building has been pushed and distorted to the point that it no longer resembles what it represented in the past. Once this building loses all of its contextual relations to site and history, does it become a meaningless remnant of our past? We can reclaim the architectural piece for our own, by emphasizing its past place and revitalizing the space. We cannot retell the past exactly, but we can encourage others to remember it. The innate changing of ones opinion and bending them between past and present can itself highlight the lost properties of the past. The ambiguous nature of a space causes one to search past the superficial elements of the building and into the realm of subconscious. Striving and straining for what appears to be opaque can often disclose more than simple transparency. This vagueness and uncertainty caused by the bending of what is seen and what is unseen is what causes us to delve deeper into a structure, past its character determined by the material and formal constitution and into the realm of functionality and time. With this underlying meaning we can develop a sense of our past and future aspirations of a specific place as it relates to ourselves. After all we are the ones who must ordain a place as “place.” We are the ones who develop a place; we are the ones who “evolve.”