A Blank Archipelago.

When faced with the task of reconstructing a site of erasure, we tend to approach it in one of two ways: through the preservation of memory and tradition via replication and imitation, or through an envisioning of the future via “high-tech facade ecstasy”[1] builds. Both strategies are inherently problematic. Not only do they employ a similar strategy despite their vastly differing results– the use of the building as a representation of an idea– but they also both attempt to equate aesthetics with meaning. This project proposes a third perspective to address this issue with: to meet erasure with blankness.

Berlin is a city that is trying to preserve its past as it develops its future. It is historically a site of erasure, both unintentionally from war-time destruction and intentionally through the coming and going of various political regimes that pass through, as well as the site of a contentious desire to reconstruct. Debates regarding the implications of preservation, the future, and national identity, historically and at present, stand faithfully by the side of such endeavors.

Consider the Molkenmarkt as an urban archipelago: a site divided into three, arrayed one after the other. Each island is met with a different strategy to address the implications of reconstruction: an island of preserving excavated ruins within a cast, an island of scaffolding an existing garden, and an island of three buildings with temporary and permanent identities.

A Blank Archipelago positions casts and moulds as models for preserving and scaffolding each urban island. Its prerequisite is a cooperative workflow with the material along with its possibilities and constraints. The reality is a methodology in which the design of the tools used to cast the objects are integral to the project. These objects are re-employed in the project themselves as forms, structures, and scaffolds. The result of this process is a double, a twin, increasingly different in their characteristics, qualities, and appearances as the tools are refined and made more efficient as knowledge of the material grows. Both have equal agency in the project. The effect is one that is blank. An ambiguous quality that is opaque to define, which echoes the visual qualities of the material but seems to have a deeper cause. Subtextual terms such as blankness and erasure become major themes for models resultant from this workflow. Such objects that are produced from the cooperation with the material and toolmaking process are blank not only aesthetically, but also in the sense that they do not represent an idea, but instead a working process.

Consider this project a referendum for formalism, not from aesthetics, but rather from process.

¹Huyssen, Andreas. “The voids of Berlin.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 24, no. 1, Oct. 1997, pp. 57–81,

https://doi.org/10.1086/448867