Publication

Open Monument

Research on Ephemeral Commemoration Architecture and Modernist Patrimony

Marta Jecu (Ed.), Revolver Verlag, Berlin, 2013

Contributions by : Stéphane Bauer, Nuno Sousa Vieira, Carlos Bunga, James E Young, Stefan Tiron, Sinta Werner, Luis Santiago Baptista, Juergen Mayer H., Ursulla Müller, Ulrich Müller, Sancho Silva and Christian Troberg, Yukihiro Taguchi + Chiara Ciccarello, Liviu Chelcea, Cristian Rusu, Cristian Rusu, Patricia Morosan, Vintila Mihailescu, Matias Machado, Fritz Teufel, Rainer Langhans and Fritz Teufel,Delio Jasse, Paula Nascimento, Luca Pozzi, Felix Escher, David Maranha, Hironari Kubota, Marta Jecu

This volume deals with historic or fictive monuments that have disappeared as a consequence of changed ideological or political systems, and with what happens to the persistent accumulation of information in their remnant material carcasses. In focus is how this lost information is converted when a change of paradigma occurs within the current social thinking.

Theoretical texts, guest essays, visual inserts by artists, reference material and interviews trace how political vestiges, processes of commemoration and the appropriation of cultural information can shape a dynamic memorial culture, one infused with cross–references that can effect its architectural outcome.

The contributions gathered in this volume investigate: moments in which the city itself throws out information from its fabric and the void that this displacement leaves behind; the imprints and mutations left over time in the built form; architecture as a reservoir in which information is selected and confined until it practically disappears; the fossilization of the recent industrial heritage that is assimilated as a sort of futuristic recreation of the past, one that retrospectively distorts reality.

The contributions engage in a series of arguments about how to use, adapt and reconsider the architectonic legacy of modernism, and to concoct a permeable monument, non–symbolic, that proposes a dynamic historicization.

 

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