Against Erasure

A new vernacular, as I have defined it, necessitates a careful deconstruction. I have approached this process as a form of amateur archaeology. Each building is carefully unearthed and documented in a way that indicates as much of the life of its previous inhabitants as possible. I have two primary sources for the majority of the deconstructed palette. Case study #1 was originally built as a federal post office, believed to have been constructed in the late 1950s or early 1960s. Archival information regarding rural post offices is limited, and pinpointing the exact construction date is purely an estimate.

The design process methodology relies heavily on a restructuring of the process of design. Typically, even if there is an existing building, a design begins with a singular encompassing idea, or motif, or parti. As design progresses, it becomes increasingly more refined. This increased granularity forms a relationship of the materials being in service to the design. They form the design intention and are molded accordingly; even in the case of adaptive reuse or leveraging deconstructed materials.

Materials were predominantly sourced from two sites. One is a home built around 1900 and inhabited until the mid-1960s. The other is a federal post office built in the late 1950s or early 1960s, which was most recently converted into a beauty salon until 2022. Each site represents a completely different function, era, and history. Through both buildings, there are 120 years of inhabitation and history.

Various construction methods and multiple renovations, along with an evolution of material usage, revealed subtle difficulties throughout the deconstruction process. I have broken this chapter into two sections, outlining each as a case study and attempting to chronicle the history with as much accuracy as possible.

In fact, it is often the case that such aspects become fetishsized through their use in the final design. They become a statement piece to communicate that the design did, in fact, use historical elements; ultimately, patronizing their narrative.

Rather than further reducing and flattening these materials to simply be in service to the new design, can they be design instigators, can they speak to their own historiography and aid in developing a design that continues their story rather than freezing them in time? Which is often the case, the materials, at the moment of deconstruction and introduction into a new design, are intellectually frozen. They represent their history up to that point, and even if they are used in a modern context, they represent the idea of their time before.

Similarly, but perhaps less productive, is the use of reused materials that strips all historical narrative from them. The functional reuse of materials is an objectively more respectful way to responsibly design and construct. It treats these materials as no different from virgin components, which allows them to continue with a degree of productivity that they have always embodied. The danger in this approach is that it strips these pieces of the stories that they experienced. The traces of past human inhabitation are wiped away.

The majority of contemporary reuse and deconstruction design falls into one of these two categories. My desire with this new methodology is to balance each inclination with a certain sensitivity. How can these materials continue to functionally operate while maintaining their stratigraphic, historical narratives that separate them? My endeavor is to allow these material’s witness marks to be able to be witnessed without overtly celebrating their narratives. It becomes an opportunity to question their origin and their stories without having a plaque that tells you those stories explicitly.