Formal Manifesto I

Formal Manifesto

The new container is a response to the conflict of expansion and preservation. It is a new building with its own program that expands vastly over a site while also preserving as a type of artifact the existing city that currently inhabits the site.

The combination of these two types the new and the historic creates indeterminacy of place and object. With the introduction of memory into the object, the object begins to embody both an idea of its self and the memory of its former self.

The new container is a deep structure designed for expansion and consumption. The container manifests its self as vertical slabs. On the one hand, the Slab is a generic building type associated with public buildings and the expansion of modern day city centers. On the other hand it is the powerful formal language of the Mayan Temple and the Pyramids.  Its formal banality in intended to contrasts the complexity of its containment.  

The slab is the narrator. It guides the visitor through a procession of unexpected intersections. It does not necessarily destroy but rather alter the way that we perceive the familiar or what we will call the native object. It is at the intersection between the native object and the slab that its Cartesian linearity is broken and history is bent.

These intersections manifest themselves in five different  moments:

Displacement - Containment through seclusion.

The physical movement of the native object to allows for the passing of the slab.  It is pushed either vertically up or down from its original location on the site and relocated to a new level within the slab landscape. This action can cause the native object to be elevated to the level of a tower or sunk deep into the ground in a recessed piazza.

Repulsion - Containment through exclusion

This occurs when the slab maintains its linearity but splits to avoid the native object. This event causes a break in the slab but has no effect on the native object. Repulsion can be combined with the event of Displacement. It creates a platform, if displaced, or and area on the original site, if no displacement occurs, where the native object can be venerated.

Impression - Containment through embalming.

This occurs when the slab distorts to preserve the native object and in doing so it is forced around the object deforming and taking on an impression of the object. Once the object is embalmed it decays.  The slab replaces the native object, containing and preserving by mimicking.  This event is not about the presences of the object but rather about the recognition of its absence.

Intersection - Containment through incorporation

Intersection occurs when neither the slab nor the native object are displaced. The slab contains the object by slicing it into sections. The native object is both destroyed and preserved within the slab.  The residual spaces between native object and slab become inhabited as rooms.

Consumption - Containment through entombing

This is a full burial of the native object. The object is contained in a tomb deep with in the slab.  These rooms are repositories, sacred spaces designed for the veneration of the native objects.