My art project is another bridge to connect memory and architectural heritage through the digital environment. This project comprises a kind of topological key to old vernacular houses which I redevelop to shape architectural spatial logic within the context of virtual reality. The selected components and rationale of house’ grammar from 19th century are carried forward into new context about the old domestic places. Once these houses existed in reality but were removed from the townscapes because of urban renovations. On the base of archive drawings like plans, facades and sections I reinvent now digitally the buildings. However, my intention is not to build their total avatars. Avoiding the standard definition of house, I take something from the past and reuse it in a different way, into new concept of architectural design.
There are no-gravity and no-linear sequence of time into the new arrangement of architectural composition. With conceptual reference to Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, I reuse familiar elements: hearth, window, roof, and spaces: attic, basement, porch, yard, and the logical connections between them into unseen perspectives. This composition is like a spatial puzzle of missing parts. The user experience of my art forms a collection of impressive architectural souvenirs since going from one house into another one is walking on an alley of memories. Being into the house means to reimagine or to leave empty fragments of the old architecture.
There is a strong background theme in my art work that arises broader issues concerning heritage preservation and more precisely its opposition – the loss of architectural heritage. I address in a new discourse in digital environment, the theme of vandalism. One of the most influential visioner of architectural heritage Francoise Choay is author of analyses on the phenomenon of vandalism. Her main thesis is that actions for preservation occur when the total absence of architectural heritage is realized and reconsidered. The shock of loss evokes reaction for protection and preservation of what remains in different ways from new laws and conservation protocols to new research and art works. In several art-projects destruction of architecture is conceptual platform. One of the most significant examples goes back to the 1970’s in New York, where an architect, mostly popular by his title anarchitect, Gordon Matta-Clark in photographs focuses on old buildings in the moment just before their demolition. This is the crossing point with my art project where the reconstructed houses belong to the group of lost architectural heritage.
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