A Reassessment of Automobile Assembly as a Model for Architecture Construction

Build: to form by ordering and uniting materials by gradual means into a composite whole.Destroy: to ruin the structure, organic existence or condition of….from Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary.This paper is a work-in-progress started as a photographic survey project funded by a faculty development grant from my University. Initially conceived as a visual art endeavor, it evolved into a concept piece on materials, materiality and architecture as archaeology. After studying Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology upon completing the photo survey, several ideas and associations developed that relate Virilio’s concepts to my own body of work. The way buildings still communicate in their afterlife relates architecture and archaeology as a simultaneous phenomenon. The way concrete and steel can so eloquently express brutal force as the “architecture of the brutal encounter” (Virilio) evokes the meaning of materiality in architecture not just as simple tectonics, but as a cultural paradigm, a freeze-frame of the moment in which a building was transformed into archaeology.The following is an association of ideas emerging from the use of a camera as a tool for cultural observation and interpretation. In exploring the aesthetics of violence, the lens becomes a window through time, reconstructing not the destroyed bunker, but the violence that caused its demise. Note to paper readers: The actual presentation of this work will be heavily image driven, with original, extremely high-quality photography involved.

Volume Editors
Marilys R. Nepomechie & Robert Gonzalez

ISBN
0-935502-54-8