Architectural Conservation: Cronocaos and Care

Negotiations about urban palimpsests occur under conditions of chronological confusion. Rem Koolhaas. Conservation is an ecological act. It has the potential to revisit the excess of architecture—it integrates retrofitting, reusing, recycling, repairing, restoring—in order to regenerate and redevelop. It requires care in considering what can stay, and what can go. The studio prepares students for these ongoing reimaginations of the role of conservation in architectural practice and consequent built environment. The studio has four components: seminar-styled close readings that foreground the necessity of weaving historic structures in present-day chronologically chaotic urban realms, critically studying a built form as its own material archive, developing a method to identify the structural fragilities of a historical built form, and proposing repair and elemental interventions to a structurally fragile historical built form.