About Palimpsests

Here's an incredible opportunity for you to throw down some lyrical architecture & to do some cartographic story telling.

The core of the matter is the gathering compiling, layering, composing, & editing of TRACES in the city. There are contingent issues to these traces- legibility of the trace, relevance & plausibility of the trace, traces that act literal or figural, chronological place of the trace, correlation & depth of the set of traces, & scale of the trace. Of course all of these are interconnected design decisions- and yes, this is a design exercise. Everything you do in a design class is design or you are not holding to the subject matter. If you are not designing you are not doing.

There are amazing layers out there that can be analyzed and brought through as a trace. I've seen maps, most of them in my or Sean's collection that reveal potage gardens, fruit orchards, city walls, parliament houses, fish markets, railyards, nunneries, buildings, nomadic settlements, parking lots, city parks, conflagrations, and much more on the site. In your palimpsest how important is it that you are able to read the layers of traces once assembled? Does there have to be a direct geographic correlation of the layers of traces or are they compressed into the site as a sort of residual memory of the greater neighbourhood / precinct? Is your tracing set a condenser, compressor, or direct register of traces? How do your traces critically relate to and work didactically? mnemonically? In either case they need not but you should be aware of thes potentials and address them in a palimpsest. Naive and unedited traces laid over one another is just a collection. You are mapping- composing- if you will.

The reliance on a written date next to the trace image must diminish and the graphic itself must primarily communicate.

Know the words I use. They are the sort of words that people who design use to discuss and critique each other. The education of the professor and the student are converging and your status as intellectual juvenile is drying up. Soon you won't be able to say I'm better at this than you because I'm just more educated and experienced.
Body Blow. Body Blow. Upper cut. Knock me out!

From the wikipedia entry on Palimpsest:
Architects imply palimpsest as a ghost —- an image of what once was. In the built environment, this occurs more than we think. Whenever spaces are shuffled, rebuilt, or remodeled, shadows remain. Tarred rooflines remain on the sides of a building long after the neighboring structure has been demolished; removed stairs leave a mark where the painted wall surface stopped. Dust lines remain from a relocated appliance. Ancient ruins speak volumes of their former wholeness. Palimpsests can serve a noble duty in informing us, almost archaeologically, of the realities of the built past.
Thus architects, archaeologists and design historians sometimes use the word to describe the accumulated iterations of a design or a site, whether in literal layers of archaeological remains, or by the figurative accumulation and reinforcement of design ideas over time. An excellent example of this can be seen at The Tower of London, where construction began in the eleventh century, and the site continues to develop to this day.

Back in April there was an event here in the city called:
MONTREAL AS PALIMPSEST: ARCHITECTURE, COMMUNITY, CHANGE
Conference in the history of architecture
The city of Montreal is a palimpsest, a series of surfaces upon which various actors, communities and organizations have left their trace in the form of the built environment. Much as the early seigneurial system of land division is still visible in many quarters of the city, so too are subsequent layers of urban and architectural development still alive, if only in the form of memories, in present-day Montreal. What is the nature of the relationship between a city, its memories and communities, and its ongoing transformation? Graduate students in architectural history have chosen thirteen distinct sites in Montreal to explore these questions. Drawing from the past, present and even the future of their chosen sites, the presenters of MONTREAL AS PALIMPSEST will explore the significance of architecture within the cultural landscape of Montreal.

Look at how this "Prethesis" student at another university (Cornell) is talking about architecture. It should sound somewhat familiar to you this summer.