Bronte Scott

Time affects everything: it changes and is changed by humans and materials - and these humans and materials, as we know them, will one day fade and disappear. Materials shift and alter, leaving marks as a palimpsest created by innumerable beings - human and more-than-human - on architecture. These notions questions whether memory, significance and place can only be associated with status and human history. As Cornelius Castoriadis elucidates, time is incorporated into the social imaginary of a society, which is ever forming and never the same across particular societies. Perhaps it is only our social imaginary and our time that understands the significance of material in the sense of preservation, and it is challenging this notion that sits at the heart of the thesis.

In this thesis’ design response, the pavilion is positioned as one way architecture captures a human and more-than-human layering of memories, as it is unburdened by the obsession with permanence and the desire to be preserved. It has the ability to mark and be marked, to shift and change. The three pavilions here are three moments in the life of a pavilion, constructed and then changing form across 100 years. These parameters allowed the thesis to explore how embedded memory effects space, and how the passing of time effects the palimpsest of place.