Rotch Travelling Scholarship 2020 Competition

Archive for Scale: Olivia Heung

How do we draw relationships, curate our belongings in an ever expanding world ? How do we make room for our ideas and sentimental junk as time passes by ?

Museums have prevailed as a depository and timekeeper for cultural artifacts, reading and defining the present through the careful selection of cultural artifacts. But lately it seems they’ve run out of room. Today, modern museums have turned to an agenda of expansion. Growing taller, wider, square-er and sometimes underground, we’ve strayed out of the cabinet of curiosities and stumbled into a colossal white room.

The ‘Archive for Scale’ explores how the miniaturization and augmentation of architecture and its legacy aggregate in indeterminate proximity. It explores the museum type as a vertical bazaar of content on constant refresh where disengaged walls, digital media, physical and phantom objects vie for room and attention. As the making of architecture no longer implies the production of physical objects or analog rituals, can we imagine an alternative platform in which the formal and formless collapse - a site where time, material, and scale are shared between the two ?