TA: Jinal TaunkArchitectural Conservation: Cronocaos and Care
Negotiations about urban palimpsests occur under conditions of chronological confusion—Rem Koolhaas.
Conservation is an ecological act. It has the potential to revisit the excess of architecture—it integrates retrofitting, reusing, recycling, repairing, restoring—in order to regenerate and redevelop. It requires care in considering what can stay, and what can go. It acknowledges age and decay as a means for the new to emerge alongside. It acknowledges a simultaneity of preservation and erasure. Challenging the tabula-rasa approach to design, it provides material directions for intervening in historical settings. The studio prepares students for these ongoing reimagination of the role of conservation in architectural practice. The studio has four components: seminar-styled close readings that foreground the necessity of weaving historic structures in present-day chronologically chaotic urban realms, critically studying a built form as its own material archive, use archival records to access the repair histories of selected historical buildings, developing a method to identify the structural fragilities of a historical built form, and proposing a conservation design for an existing built form. The studio uses drawing as a tool for critical evaluation of historical built form. Care as an inclusive act of architecture, and the overlapping realms of time inform the studio approach.
