Title:
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Memory Complex : Competing Visions for a Post-9/11 New York
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This thesis will consider the competing imperatives of past and future that are
materialised in five interconnected but distinct architectural sites within the city of
New York following the attacks on the World Trade Center. Its principal concern is
the manner in which the radical changes to New York's built environment force an
encounter between two traditions of thought previously held to be distinct, if not
directly opposed. The design challenges currently facing the city have initiated an
unprecedented dialogue between philosophies of memory and mourning on the one
hand and theories associated with vitalism, innovation and creativity on the other. The
division between these two philosophical camps has been particularly acute within the
domain of architecture, each one informing a separate set of design tropes and
building types. Memory oriented deconstructive and psychoanalytic theories motivate
the aesthetics of voids and absences featured in much contemporary memorial and
museum design, while the writings of Gilles Deleuze influence novel experiments in
digital form creation and non-linear urban planning. The political, economic and
affective complexity ofpost-9111 New York necessitates a response that rethinks the
traditional boundaries between these previously independent design approaches. An
architecture is required that mobilizes memory, not as the conservation of the past, but
as a mode of living historically that is the precondition for change.
The thesis is developed across five architectural examples ranging in magnitude from
the small spontaneous memorials that emerged in the weeks following 9/11 to the
large-scale landscape urbanism project that is transforming the Fresh Kills landfill
(containing WTC debris) into a public park. Consideration of these sites pushes
philosophy on both sides of the memory/innovation divide into new configurations:
Giorgio Agamben's aesthetic theory ofpoiesis suggests an as yet unrealized potential
for community within memorial design; Jacques Derrida's concept of
autoimmunization presents a link between deconstruction and the politics of life; and
the recognition of the place of memory within the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze
establishes an alternative relationship between his thought and the practice of
architecture.
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