The Persistence of Memory

This project seeks to define and explore the relationship between architecture and rituals. How can the architecture facilitate rituals, or alter existing ones through built form? Architecture is determined by habit and tradition, and as buildings are so assimilated into our experiences, they become consumed by the value of its rituals. What decrees a sacred space, and what defines the profane?

Situated on Batman Park and amongst a viaduct forever in limbo, the project turns a dead space into a space for the dead – and the living. It challenges the familiarity of the city through the exploration of the known and the expected, into the unknown and the unexpected. Rituals, through repetition and persistence, are given a meaning and a myth – actions are performed to affect an object and prescribe value through the message that it utters. Through a new reading of the site and altered performances of everyday rituals, the proximity and transmutation of the profane into something ‘other’ allows for a provocation of our assumptions and expectations of a space.