Figment - A Museum of Fact and FIction

Oxford Brookes Department of Architecture, Oxford

Project idea

Originally nonexistent, Marine Park, sits on the far edge of Brooklyn, away from the bustling Manhattan. Within its isolation, all that exists in physicality are old bridge pylons which are but remnants to a varied history of Native American farmers, Dutch occupation and a series of unrealized proposals. Its specific condition as a landscape of the lost brings into question of what reality these various conditions have in the present and how we distinguish between what is fact and what we perceive as fiction. The simplest answer is most often correct, and in a present wildly adulterated world, fact can only be tangible evidence, something that has physicality in existing time and if it doesn’t meet this criterion, it is fiction. The design project takes a closer look into revealing the histories within Marine Park, by resurrecting embedded fictions and providing the tangibility required for it to be considered fact.
The thesis interrogates the territory that Gertrude Stein referred to as the Continuous Present. It questions the role of the architect in the contemporary city and intervening in an ever changing urban landscape without constructing a tabula rasa or pristinely preserving the old.
A museum of fact and fiction.
Figment

Project description

Fact and Fiction and the boundaries that separate it can be explained in a multitude of ways and yet still have a sense of obscurity. The statement holds true to the fact that every fiction has a basis in fact a n d permeates through constantly morphing and modifying.

The objective is to create a similar phenomenon of space which the mind holds and creates. A space that is in choreographed or unchoreographed motion, revealing its histories and excavating embedded fictions within the landscape and through the journey of enclosures and exposures will make us question between what is fact, and what is fiction.

Technical information

A set of 10 final drawings that include an Axonometric, SIte Plan, and Various perspectives.

Co-authors

N/A