
9 minute read
Prologue
12 Prologue
13 Setting the Scene 15 Nature 17 System 19 Memory: The Main Character
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22 Act I: life until now
23 The Break Down of Memory 25 Developing Mental Strength 27 Creating Something out of Nothing 29 Clarity on Life 31 How Memory could have shared
38 Act II: current path
39 Questioning What is Missing 41 Symbolic Vessels of Life 43 How The New Journey Might Look 47 Remembering Being Alone to Learn How to be Together in The Future 49 The Breaking Down of Barriers
52 Act III: what the future holds
53 Developing the System 55 Emigrating To Athens
58 Epilogue 62 Credits
63 Reading [in no particular order] 64 Images [unless otherwise stated, all images/graphics/sketches are author’s own]
66 Encore
67 Layers of Memory in Athens, Greece 69 Athens, then and now 73 Learning from others 77 Designing the Undesignable 78 Signage 79 Praxinoscope 80 Portmanteau
Prologue
usually referred to as the introduction
--- Athens, Greece where the land is pure and untouched ---
The bliss environment is disturbed by the introduction of human evolution and intervention. The convenient location of the hill surrounded by rivers and streams becomes a place for the humans to gather and develop. The hill now has a name, The Acropolis. Architectural structures appear as places of protection and assembly.
What is this now? The water from the streams turn to concrete, which floods the rest of the ground below the hill, turning the sacred land into a sea of concrete that flows far into the horizon.
The humans appeared to have noticed but it is too late. In a confused attempt to preserve the ancient structures the concrete tap has been turned off, and now it is quieter all we can see is the Acropolis holding onto the last piece of floating land. Below the surface are the drowned ruins that the humans are ‘saving’. Protective glass seals are being placed over the historic structures to preserve them, as they are now frail. They are just there to be admired in their preserved state, serving as a reminder of what life used to be [referencing the new Acropolis Museum built over archaeological ruins].
We now have a two faced city.
The working01 ancient and new city, and the abandoned city; The structures which were not sealed in time as they were disliked, high maintenance, ugly, ill and dying. They were going to serve no purpose in the new city so why would the humans keep them?
The problem is, they did not save them nor did they dispose of them. Now they lay on the seabed in their decaying state. The pollution of the abandoned structures is becoming too intense that nobody wants to live even near them anymore.
So how are they going to fix the problem when the humans are such hoarders? Even when it is harmful to them, they insist that the structures serve a purpose - it is up to us for that purpose to be realised...
01 ‘working’ in terms of bringing tourists [therefore money] in to view ancient structures but also in terms of the new concrete structures providing a place for the locals to live and work
--- Athens, Greece where the land is pure and untouched ---
The bliss environment is disturbed by the introduction of human evolution and intervention. The convenient location of the hill surrounded by rivers and streams becomes a place for the humans to gather and develop. The hill now has a name, The Acropolis. Architectural structures appear as places of protection and assembly.
What is this now? The water from the streams turn to concrete, which floods the rest of the ground below the hill, turning the sacred land into a sea of concrete that flows far into the horizon.
The humans appeared to have noticed but it is too late. In a confused attempt to preserve the ancient structures the concrete tap has been turned off, and now it is quieter all we can see is the Acropolis holding onto the last piece of floating land. Below the surface are the drowned ruins that the humans are ‘saving’. Protective glass seals are being placed over the historic structures to preserve them, as they are now frail. They are just there to be admired in their preserved state, serving as a reminder of what life used to be [referencing the new Acropolis Museum built over archaeological ruins].
We now have a two faced city.
The working ancient and new city, and the abandoned city; The structures which were not sealed in time as they were disliked, high maintenance, ugly, ill and dying. They were going to serve no purpose in the new city so why would the humans keep them?
The problem is, they did not save them nor did they dispose of them. Now they lay on the seabed in their decaying state. The pollution of the abandoned structures is becoming too intense that nobody wants to live even near them anymore.
So how are they going to fix the problem when the humans are such hoarders? Even when it is harmful to them, they insist that the structures serve a purpose - it is up to us for that purpose to be realised...
Diagram takes the text adjacent and inverts the colour, highlighting just the ‘a’ letters. Several reasons for doing this: represents the reference which ancient greek ‘architects’ took from astronomy for structuring/arranging buildings such as the parthenon.
‘a’ is for abandoned buildings, where the diagram shows demonstrates how the decaying city is hidden within the working city.
to encode a message of themes throughout the text.
visual reference to technology systems and coding.
‘‘Humans were intelligent, whereas nature was raw in tooth and claw, chaotic, murderous and not very bright. Nature relies on us for conservation, and is really only useful as a resource...There is nothing for us to learn from. As Condorcet said, Nature won’t limit the progress of humans...Yet nature has managed just fine for over three billion years without our intervention.’’ 02
[skene, 2019]
The reality of the above quote is almost the opposite. Nature is ordered, chained, and incredibly intelligent. Patterns [i.e. golden ratio, Fibonacci sequence] are found in organic structures, chains create hierarchy and ecosystems, and adaptability allows nature to survive and thrive. It is a base of something we can learn principles from yet we continue to brush it aside and build over it. Nature is so intelligent and adaptable that it can survive without us, reverse the situation however and it would be a completely different story.
The nature of memory in humans is intrinsic, something we can’t control like we wish we could due to its internal [endosomatic] nature. So we have created forms which we can control. The pencil and paper were designed to capture our personal words, cameras were created to freeze time in an image, buildings were constructed to symbolise a style of its time and museum of its place. These external forms are all attempts to relieve our minds and take away responsibility. External symbols of memories we can share or attempt to destroy; paper can be torn, pictures burned and buildings demolished.
‘‘I have been collecting worthless material for almost ten years now, taking good care arranging it, documenting it, indexing it, and preserving it from any possible damage...Today I possess what resembles an archive, or let’s say I possess a real archive that relates only to me: a kind of added memory that occupies different corners of my domestic space, despite the fact that I do not actually need it. It is an invented memory that is exhausting to me, and which I cannot liberate myself from. For this reason, I will uncover some parts of my archive, hoping that - by making it public - I can rid of its weight. This will be my attempt to destroy a memory that doesn’t know how to erase itself.’’03
[mroué, 2006]
It is the tangible that we cannot help ourselves to create, but there is only so much space to store these personal memories. So is time that we find another way or adapt and share, the way plants create ecosystems which are constantly refining themselves to suit the current context and environment?
02 03 Skene, K., 2019. Artificial intelligence and the environmental crisis. 1st ed. Routledge. p 78 Farr. Ian (2012). Memory. Whitechapel Gallery. ; Rabih Mroué, Text for the performance Make Me Stop Smoking [2006] p 184

This idea of smaller, more contained storage of memory leads us to the invention of computer storage. Blockchain04 is a system which allows information to be held in the digital world.
Blocks held within the chain structure and therefore linear formation of the system means that anyone can refer back to data stored in the chains with relative ease, that data is time stamped, public, immutable and objective.
There is a clear contradiction between the digital storage system and the intrinsic nature of human storage. The brain creates a network of connections rather than being a linear form. So it is essentially random, it is private and held only by the carrier, mutable and subjective.
Combining the two together, we can realise this idea of exosomatic memory, or form. The combination of hard fact and editable features means that ‘things’ which represent a point in time are allowed to exist as objects. As mentioned briefly in the introduction, buildings are a form of this type of combined technological and human memory. Where masses represent a point in time, sitting as museums in their place, they can however be altered meaning stories of places can be modified or curated.
Whilst physical objects created by digital equipment [such as cameras providing photographs] hold human memory exosomatically, it may be misunderstood that because blockchain is stored solely digitally that it does not take up a physical form. That assumption would be incorrect and it is important to briefly note that whilst there is a large amount of data compressed into this format it is still is expressed physically in the form of a server. Blockchain could be viewed as a form of exosomatic memory, however the argument against is that when you look at the physical and tangible object of the server [or computer] itself, no memories are triggered about the information held within the device.
There is a constant battle between the truth and the imaginative, especially when it comes to restoring old buildings, we have to go by pictures or documents trusting that they have not been altered. As much as we can attempt to delete our memories, there will always be triggers of our senses to take us back to a place in time whether we want to or not.
This brings the curious question of the thesis: Can we use architectural interventions designed to retain, reflect and create collective memory to give life back to abandoned structures?
04 explored in detail in the group booklet ‘modern ruins’

Photograph of author’s family photograph dated 1962.
Exosomatic memory is a true hybrid of digital and natural memory where in some cases it does not disappear. However in other it does if it is not looked after [including buildings, photographs etc.]
