Eulogy to Architecture: The Three-Dimensional Collage City of Nostalgia

Author

Molly A. Evans, University of Arkansas, FayettevilleFollow

Date of Graduation

5-2017

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Architecture

Degree Level

Undergraduate

Department

Architecture

Advisor/Mentor

Jacobus, Frank

Committee Member

Rudzinski, Russell

Second Committee Member

Minar, Edward

Abstract

In our time of existence on the Earth, human beings have designed and realized beautiful things. As we face the challenges that confront us today, we begin to understand the fragility of humankind’s creations. Many of the world’s cities and buildings lie in ruins, gazed at by tourists, studied by scholars, while more lie buried in the ground for hundreds of years, some never to be rediscovered. Everything around us is an accumulation of knowledge and ideas built upon for centuries, now facing questionable circumstances. Of course, the more recent Aleppo and other Middle Eastern cities have fallen subject to bombings over the past years, now lost forever. Climate change threatens coastal cities around the world; natural disasters unexpectedly take from our grasp things that we have had for centuries. Nothing is for certain. Nothing lasts forever. Every built structure, no matter the value, eventually falls. What if the earth is one day no longer ours? Its livelihood depends on us, and our sustained wars and climatic abuse continue to decay the soil we walk on and the air we breathe. Will humans be forced from the planet that we have forever called home? This project imagines a new world built on the framework of nostalgia. It is a eulogy to architecture, a compilation of fragments of our world to recreate a place once lost. The city is designed as a three-dimensionalization of Rowe’s Collage City so as to create an assemblage of parts that form a whole. Various scales of fragments of earth, ranging from single buildings to neighborhood fabrics, are arranged in a volumetric space. This space is located away from the gravitational pull of the Earth, making it possible to collage fragments vertically as well as horizontally. The city embraces both the beauty and imperfections of the collected places. To call it a utopia is forward, considering that the majority of each of the employed places were not originally designed as utopian; thus one cannot project utopianism upon them simply because they have a diĐerent context. One might question how an organic system of organization could ever be considered utopian, considering the lack of planning. However, if utopianism is based on the perfection of the human itself rather than the environment, this city aims to imbue a sense of nostalgia in each human mind, with the idea that these places are inherently important to us as a species and to our connection to Earth itself. This project is a visual essay about the importance of what humans have created for themselves on the Earth. It is a conceptual idea that aims to transcend fears of loss by giving hope for a new world collaged from existing fragments of built fabric.

Keywords

Blank Space Project; sustainability; Japanese Metabolist movement; architecture

Citation

Evans, M. A. (2017). Eulogy to Architecture: The Three-Dimensional Collage City of Nostalgia. Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses Retrieved from https://scholarworks.uark.edu/archuht/27