Mortalization
Architecture is leaky. Architectural representation has constantly been haunted by leakages.
They happen when a realm of representation slips into another realm, and merges ambiguously into a multi-dimensional entity. Examples are presented today by the physical dripping into digital space and digital into physical space. This 1st Semester of master studies’ design studio was immersed in this exuberant aesthetics of transgression.
Designers today are empowered to construct images, narratives, and new possibilities of world-building. This exploration into a reality where multiple representations coexist, opens a larger discussion of presumed standards of aesthetics. Leakiness transgresses political and economic constructs by being inclusive. It is an aesthetic of fluidity and is specific to technology. The binary between physical and digital is no longer; rather coexists.
Max Ernst’s masterpiece: “Robing of the Bride” is a great example of merging entities and transgressed beings. This painting was chosen as my reference for the formal behavior and its unification of the two realms.
The conceptual readings on this painting are:
- how two different forms of being are melted into one with the inner struggle or tension of becoming what one truly is.
- how all their identities are ambiguously merged and fluidified: Male, female, animal,…
- how the male figure on the left side (green half bird, half man) tries to guard the bride’s chastity and how he has failed to do so. The naked body getting out of the robe is the next sequence after breaking free from its prison. I found the whole narrative as an ongoing tension. A great “struggle” between “becoming” & “remaining”.
Architectural Translation
To transfer the conceptual term “leaky” into architecture, the process started with picking an actual building on an actual site.
I chose St.Katherinen Kirche made in 1681, located in Frankfurt Am Main.
Because of their representational values, churches and many other power-holding buildings have always been made to be resistant and impermeable, both physically and conceptually to survive throughout the wear and tear of wars, weather, and criticism. In other words, to seem immortal.
A unification of something so still, with something lively, wild and organic could be both liberating and immortalizing.
