Contours of collapse

 

design research

Kostas Manolidis, 2020

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This work is the outcome of my ongoing preoccupation with the imaginative potential of material disintegration. In this case, my interest is focused on the way ruins generate gaping interstitial spaces and fragmented forms that still retain a perceptible coherency. In ruins, building parts are missing or broken, spaces have lost their function and seem detached from any meaning they may once have possessed but traces of a former order and a structural logic are still embedded in them.

The featured scheme is testing a method of producing ruin-like formations. Only three units made of reinforced concrete are employed, designed to match in numerous arrangements. The limited number of components offers consistency and legibility in the random sculptural configurations.

Their semi-circular shapes result in an open honeycomb of alcoves that resonate with the powerful beauty of geological or archaeological vestiges. The emerging clusters sometimes evoke the porous vaulted spaces of crumbling roman edifices. By conveying the violence of collapse and the destiny of incompleteness, these schemes encode in architecture the anxieties, contradictions and desires of the human condition.