How to Mourn: When Life and Death are not Enough

Item

Title
How to Mourn: When Life and Death are not Enough
Description
Oh wretched ones, how cursed are your fates. The pair are frozen in the face of a pre-ordained demise, rendered dumb by forces uncontrollable and indomitable. What happens when something dies over and over and over again, or never at all? A search for a new term in place of both “Life” and “Death” is necessary for these two characters.

Herter Park and the New England Deposit Library (NEDL) are accidental twins, inasmuch as they are paired in their search for meaning and nomenclature in the space between life and death. They were both built in the middle of the 20th century, and both are scheduled for demolition in 2030. Both, too, have witnessed inextricable scenes of political malpractice, financial mismanagement, and territorialist struggles. And so, they are yoked together by when and where they are situated just as much as how and why they will end. But, what if death is insufficient?

They, instead, must be mourned. They must become melancholic, spiting their destruction in the face of doing nothing. A game arises wherein the troubles these buildings have served as scapegoats for are therein revealed by the very determination of them to last on and on and on and on. Mourning and Melancholia are tools of architectural reparation, of anti-idolic monumentalization, of post-capital reuse. As building is turned inside out, as bricks are counted, asbestos catalogued - as column stabilized, window replaced, trash carted out - so too is story unearthed, futures unbounded.

Mourning proposes an infinite delay in the face of ramping capitalistic and symbolic enterprises bearing down upon “aging” architecture. It is palliative as much as it is a death knell. Reuse can extend beyond the adaptive and the monument. And so, we march on in our task of doing almost nothing.

This thesis proposes the NEDL be deconstructed, catalogued, and stored within its own basement, as WWII documents found within the dead-books depository are declassified on site, and asbestos found within the architectural skin is interred permanently. The building site becomes a garden and also a radical unbuildable plot, spiting Harvard’s expansion plan into Allston - at least within a 200x250 foot rectangle. The building lasts forever in its astounding absence and sheer presence. The Herter Center, meanwhile is proposed to enter a cycle of infinite maintenance. The ecosystem of the park it sits within is too fragile to bear demolition, let alone construction. It, instead, becomes a school for maintenance, as the building itself becomes the corpse-operada. It is maintained, much to everyones chagrin or behest, forever.

And so, the buildings learn how to mourn.
Creator
Levine, Jonathan
Subject
Architecture
Design
History
Melancholia
Monuments
Mourning
Architecture
Epistemology
History
Contributor
French, Jenny
Eigen, Edward
Date
2023-05-25T03:56:16Z
2023
2023-05-24
2023-05
2023-05-25T03:56:16Z
Type
Thesis or Dissertation
text
Format
application/pdf
application/pdf
application/pdf
Identifier
Levine, Jonathan. 2023. How to Mourn: When Life and Death are not Enough. Master's thesis, Harvard Graduate School of Design.
30523104
https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37375336
Language
en
Item sets
Graduate School of Design