Memorializing Complexity

Architecture neglects advances in digital technologies and virtual worlds, resulting in inconsistencies where physical space and virtual realities overlap. Cartesian mapping, perspectival frameworks, and a reliance on pure "space" are no longer useful in visualizing and understanding these new geometries of reality.

Assembly Theory, developed by Lee Cronin and Sara Walker, transforms the "object" from a discretely-bound spatial entity into a lineage connecting the present-object to every other form it has had since the beginning of time and all the environments that helped assemble it along the way. As a result, these Time-Objects operate as if space is a proxy, and are concerned instead with temporal locality and temporal separations.

This thesis takes "r/place" as its Time-Object of focus; documenting, mapping, and exploring its temporal forms before intervening to design a memorial to the battles that raged across its canvas. This memorial is not spatially local nor is it entirely formed from physical structures — it instead dances across physical environments, virtual worlds, and times as an architecture of temporal locality.