Lina Ghotmeh, the 2021-22 Frank Gehry International Visiting Chair in Architectural Design, delivers a public lecture, A Place for Life — an Archaeology of the Future. This online and in-person event includes a conversation with Dean Juan Du and is the second of two public Gehry Chair events.
More than a method of work, Archaeology of the Future is a real approach to the built environment invented by Ghotmeh through her practice, Paris-based Lina Ghotmeh — Architecture. Her firm’s designs develop from thorough historical research and emerge as exquisite interventions that enliven memories and senses. In this Archaeology of the Future, every new gesture is drawn from the traces of the past. A link is drawn between Time, Memory, Space and Place, but also between the Human and the Natural. The past meets the future as histories are unearthed and memories excavated to allow for questioning, innovation and a more sustainable architecture.
Through a “humanist” approach, Ghotmeh’s practice emphasizes the work of the hand and craftsmanship. Through this, the built embraces the traditions of its localities, while validating the subjective experience and the collective memory of those who experienced them. Projects such as the Estonian National Museum in Tartu, Estonia find their contexts in difficult pasts, listening to ancestors and promoting their voices to guide us toward better futures. Similarly, Stone Garden in Beirut, Lebanon anchors that city’s eventful past in the present by calling forward its ruins, its “voids,” its histories of conflicts and its ongoing challenges. Home to inhabitants but also to the Mina Image Center, a space dedicated to reflection, debates and exhibitions on the Middle East, the building embodies an Earth-like envelope, hand-chiseled by artisans fleeing neighbouring wars. Its skin was further imprinted in 2020 by the Beirut port explosion, an event that emphasized the ephemerality of our breathing bodies and their relationship to the built one.
In the epoch of the Anthropocene, the need to build better futures has become more urgent. From circular economies to energetic autonomies, the mission of architecture is clear: to achieve a future of symbiosis where everything is a resource and nothing and no one is forgotten.
For more information about the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, visit us at http://www.daniels.utoronto.ca
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