Filip Dujardin plays with the boundaries between photography, architectural photography, architecture and architectural fiction. He describes it himself as “a multimedia exploration of the essence of architecture,” replacing the pixel with brick.
This classic film from the eighties immerses us in beautiful Rome and the unfinished oeuvre of French architect Etienne-Louis Boullée.
An entertaining drama about a midlife crisis and one’s own mortality.
A palimpsest is a recycled piece of parchment that serves for handwriting. The top layer of this parchment was scraped off so that the parchment could be described again. This was done because parchment was precious and no value was added to the original text. One would think that many old writings have been lost by the palimps, but the opposite is true. Often the original text remained partially visible and under ultraviolet light the underlying text is often easy to decipher. It is thanks to the preciousness of the parchment and to these palimpsestes that many ancient writings have been preserved: a spirit of the original disappears behind the new writing and leaves traces of what once was. Palimpsest is today used metaphorically to indicate layers of the past.
We can not ignore it; wherever we look, we always find elements that refer to the past. The traces left by the transformative process of time and history are omnipresent. Whether it’s about a landscape, an old medieval city, a geological transformation, a building that lets its story read over time … traces can be found everywhere. As an architect or urban planner, we rewrite and permanently rebuild our environment. We work with landscapes, cities, buildings, objects and their mutual relationships. We work with what is already, with what exists. We write about it, we interweave our own story with the existing story. A new story is created. History is a continuity and nothing remains the same. The brochure that the VAi published in response to the changed relationship between architecture and heritage carries the beautiful name ‘Unfinished Past’. We contribute to the past and continue to shape it permanently. Unfinished. An unfinished process. An unfinished past.
During the year 2019 we will pay attention to various interpretations of palimpsest in architecture.
Hera Van Sande