Former buildings, previous use and weathering have left their outlines and marks on walls that become fields of memory, which are both extremely rich and free from spatial elaboration. History is here read through the absence of the building, through traces on the surface that give anthropological references and hence make a very different visual approach possible. Here time and human action are seen in the depth of the wall through remnants of whatever was previously there.The ‘looking at’ becomes a ‘looking through’ — an act of seeing that no longer stops at the sur (the above) of the surface but that penetrates through it and so removes the superficiality of the common surface. Reading these walls as a palimpsest and as documentation of the ‘not anymore’ allows at the same time an association with the moments to come. Enriched with memory but spatially open, these incomplete moments in the city stand for continuation and oppose a final structuring of place.
Other media like film and photography already have discovered these territories and it is time for architecture to work not against these images, but to recognize them as potential fields of investigation and equal components of the city-fabric.These zones — the densely layered surfaces that are by character temporal and autonomous — are open for subjective and self-defined projects, which might assist a new way of looking at these areas and question our common definition of beauty. But, to begin with, we have to try to see more in these images than their negative connotations; indeed, we might as well accept the potentials that lie in ‘negativity.’
Alexander Eisenschmidt began his architec- tural education at HTWK in Leipzig, Ger- many. Later, he obtained a Masters of Architecture at Pratt Institute in New York City and is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania where his research investigates the relationship between architecture and ideology.
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