In Between SynchronicitesDiagenesis: A Choreography for Architectural Sediments
Mar-June 2023 Supervisor: Susanne Zottl, Norbert Steiner
Analogue Digital Production, IKA,
AKBILD
Rooted in the geological process of diagenesis—where sediments continuously transform into solid rock across deep time—this project challenges architecture’s traditional bias toward permanence and immutability. By drawing a parallel between geological cycles (formation, alteration, erosion, and re-formation) and the mechanics of human memory, the intervention treats the built environment as a responsive, evolving record shaped by time, perception, and forgetting.
work archive
Fascinated by its striking parallels to the intricate mechanisms of human memory. Much like diagenesis gradually transforms and preserves information in a rock over deep time, our memories undergo a process of sedimenting the complex interplay between emotion, awareness, and perception.
Just as rocks' formation alter sediment's texture, color, and composition over eons, the passage of time refines and reshapes our recollections. Our memory evolves, disappears, replaces, matamorphoses like sediments, sculpted by the very processes of forgetting. This parallel between mnemonic and geological phenomena underscores how both encapsulate information's perpetual transformation, preservation, and evolution that cannot be separated - but an enduring records of our personal and planetary histories.
The slow, gradual permutations embodied in rocks can be traced back millennia, yet pinpointing their genesis and terminus remains elusive. From the vastness of geological deep time and the gradual, imperceptible changes accruing over epochs, we grapple to grasp transitory instants amidst time's relentless currents.
research on diagenesis.
The workshop begins with a drifting tour along the MTR Island Line, followed by a hands-on session where participants can create their own “mapping box for getting lost”. Un-navigating the signs and arrows we tend to instinctively follow, the mapping kit invite us to a journey of reimagining commuting: through detours, undesired path, imaginary routes. As we surrender to the possibility of getting lost, perhaps ending up somewhere stranger, but might we discover new ways of moving, sensing, and being in this city?
Field Trip to Domus Aurea, Rome.
The idea that frame this project is time. From the word diagenesis, I begin to see how this term from geology which describes the geological process of rock formation can also be perceived as well in the transformation of architectures, as we started to observe the accumulated layers of deterioration, traces of demolition and transformation of the place over time, In my design proposal, I aim to reconsider the spatial experience of domus aurea in relation to its historical chronologies, the new spatiality of domus aurea attempts to envisaging links through of time, while transforming the existing relationship between the Domus Aurea and the multilayered site conditions, the project seeks to connect the links of the existing condition of the site through slices of time, of which the fragmented image from the past can be juxtaposed and at the same time correspond with the present.
Plan of domus aurea after intervention(red).
Relation to the device Praxinoscope?My architectural proposal starts with the thought of theatrics techniques as an analogy of Domus Aurea, as both manipulates the level of immersion with techniques that changes ones perception of time and evoke the voyeuristic tendencies of the observer, and since the role of the observer is essential. No theatre nor stage can exist on its own, it's always full of audience, or waiting for people's arrival. In the development of cinema, the screen act as a boundary between what is seen and what can't be seen, the image draws spectator's fascination with and recognition of the object. In theatrics and optical devices before the invention of film, time is abstracted in to frames and experience in the form of afterimages, And I came across this animation device, a praxinoscope, of which I perceive it as an inspiration for my design project. I started to imagine a space where the viewpoint becomes wandering, transform the site dynamically.