Reflecting on Nostalgia
Architectural Thesis 2019
Thesis Statement:
Nostalgia is a powerful emotion that promotes the human experience in design. Through a single or collective experience, nostalgia inspires positivity and creativity and strengthens human relationships. When reflective, nostalgia for the past invigorates and gives new life to the future.
Reflective Nostalgia
Nostalgia is a sentiment that can be overlooked in the world of design and the built environment. Nostalgia can be seen as solely backward-looking with many architects having eyes only for the future. The modern view of nostalgia is a longing for a place that has never existed. Reflective nostalgia aims to emphasize the existence time has on something. This nostalgia has found its way into the minds of architects and designers hoping to highlight the detail and coating of time in today’s environment. Nostalgia works to bring people, places, and time together in a dream world that comes to be through fragments of memory, both preserved and reused, which aim to create a new future.
Tripoli International Fair, Tripoli, Lebanon
Reflective nostalgia thrives in the ruins of modernity. The Rashid Karameh International Fair in Tripoli, Lebanon is a site designed by Oscar Niemeyer in the 1960s. The site was never completed and has since fell into ruin. Using the concept of reflective nostalgia, I have designed a series of interventions that activate and revitalize the site while simultaneously retaining the historical memory and the patina of time on its pavilions and monuments.