Peihao Jin + Zamen Lin

History, as we know it, is only one of many facts. Our thesis perceives history as non-linear, where there is no singular cause and effect, but a field of multiple possible interpretations. Each site therefore exists not purely in its present moment but contains an accumulation of its histories, a compounding of its past, present, and future. Histories, not history. Absences, not just presence. The site of Estonia’s Tartu Cultural Center today exists as petrified pieces of something old and a living piece of something Other. Akin to a palimpsest, it comprises the memories of what once existed but also the embalming of the living present.

Our thesis proposes selecting, reading, interpreting, integrating, and mediating traces embedded beyond existing contextual conditions. Aspects of excavated histories are conflated and manipulated to form a complex ecology of systems, suggesting possibilities for organization, form, and tectonics. Steering clear from the literal reconstruction of history, the registration of selected histories produces a series of local reactions that inflect and deform the whole. Histories registered here is not of symbolic significance but one of multiple non-sign readings, where the sign and signified no longer exists in one-to-one relationships. This spatial heterogeneity enables the architecture to enter into multiple, even contradictory relationships that refuse to settle into fixed nor stable hierarchies; an uneasy whole.