TERMINAL : a public archive for Habana

Abstract

While most architecture projects are invested in exploring different and novel processes to produce architecture, few works have attempted to speculate on architecture's subsequent endings. The academic and professional discussions of architecture have focused on its "natalist" ambitions and a general indifference towards the ultimate death of buildings has pervaded architectural production. While we may think of buildings as enduring cultural artifacts ,in reality, they decay and perish at far shorter intervals than often expected. The average lifespan of conventional structures before the modern movement was around 120 years. Modern materials and assemblies radically changed the way buildings aged, averaging half the former construction's life expectancy. This thesis proposes to challenge conventional practice and thought structures, which reinforce this separation between architecture and time.

As architects our relationship to the buildings that we produce begins at the stage of conception and culminates at the moment of construction. Therefore, paradoxically an architect's relationship to his own work ends when its life begins. As designers, we are unable to escape the tendency of imagining our buildings in a fixed/final state. Disregarding the effects of the elements on the buildings we produce and we opt to represent them in a state of material timelessness. This thesis inquiry proposes a public general archive in the port of Havana, Cuba as a vehicle to explore the implications and consequences of time in the physical materiality of architecture. The general public archive proposed is framed between an analogous and digital data center. The public data speculated here as existing exclusively in an analogous forms of storage is meant to be held in the building for processing into their digital counterparts.

The processing of this backed up data will render parts of the buildings programs subsequently obsolete allowing us the opportunity to speculate on its bodies possible future's. If building's must die, what are the possibilities for architecture's subsequent futures? How can we find productive outcomes if we deploy material pathos in place of a modern material timelessness?