The World is a Library and It's Inescapable
This project is an investigation into architecture and fiction, exploring memory and language through the creation of an architectural narrative. Taking cues from the Sir John Soane museum, Piranesi’s carceri etchings and Post-Modern literature, this building (a house of perpetual construction) embodies the spirit of Borgesian literature - a search for universality and truth.
Three characters - a Victorian watchmaker, a Renaissance engraver, and a Post-Modern librarian - convene to recreate Giulio Camillo’s memory theater. Nestled on the North side of a forgotten Nicollet island, the house doubles as both living quarters and functioning laboratory for their collective creation.
The three perpetually create objects, images, mechanisms and texts, each manifesting a portion of Giulio’s theater. Though the three create, they cannot agree upon the theater’s final form. These objects of creation are collected and gathered in single rooms, which grow and grow in a state of unending addition. The building transforms into a register of their search - a physical construal of epistemology.
This project is a fiction and should be read as such.