For a long time, architecture’s infatuation with tabula rasa and newness – new forms, new media, new materials, new absolutes, has drawn a line between that which has passed and that which is to come. This divide however, is more conceptual than material. Everywhere around us, the old and new exist side by side or nest in each other for a myriad of reasons ranging from the pragmatic to the nostalgic; and ideas flow through time in a continuum. In fact, when we enter an environment conceived entirely of the new (or the old) and devoid of the other, it feels stifling. The old scribes history for the new; and the new thrusts the old into the present. In this studio we explore the impassioned love affair between the past and the coming. We take “disdained’’ architecture elements, whose “outdated forms”, “obsolete programs”, “(dis)functional parts”, “expiring materials”, and “antiquated systems” have fallen out of fashion with the time, and embed within, bond together, trace over and transform them anew.
