Facade Terminus 

 

Preservation is rapidly becoming an obsession, where most recent and undistinguished structures are immediately preserved and speculated to be valuable in the future, while façades with most historic and cultural value are violated or “cloned”, adding to the absurdities of authentic and reproducible.

 

The aim of the larger project is to suggest an anti-preservation strategy, and focused on the façade as the most legible element of the historical and cultural image of the city. My aim is to preserve the most important quality of Berlin - its ability to constantly reinvent itself. I exaggerate that quality through series of fictional scenarios from the heist and processing to release, and that longer process involves a set of victim sites as well as a speculative façade depository.

 

This vast exchange will accumulate a bank of both historical and contemporary facades by stealing them from the city, and thus affecting value as well as rescuing these fragments

from conventional intervention. Further, beyond simply curating and storing the facades, I render it as a dynamic element, test how it could interact with other samples, and thus create

a new drive for architectural experimentation and construction in Berlin. In my technical study, I closely follow the fates of key sample facades from three target sites, and focus on a series of infrastructural, mechanical and services inventions - suggesting that the theoretical conjectures are also feasible. Once the facade crosses the long depository “river” and is either

returned to its original site or forwarded to catalyse another, the legibility of whether it is an original, a fake or a re-invented version is blurred.