https://ericswanson.design/Pag...

My project, Synchroni_City asks how architecture operates as a collection. Collections take many forms, from scientific archives (periodic table of elements, garment design archives) or as a work of curation set to describe an idea greater than the sum of its parts (an art exhibition). While the artifacts of a collection exist as objects unto themselves (re-contextualized by the act of collection), the observer brings their own viewpoint formed a priori to any encounter with them. This is much like the experience of the city whereby we internally map it’s volumes and facades based on individual experience, interest, and chance. As we never have a complete understanding of a city, we never have a complete understanding of a collection, we never experience it exhaustively or as instructed. As such, we less consume an intended narrative than we engage in a dynamic, incomplete dialogue with the contents of a collection, to shape a narrative among a possible many.

The extension project for the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin seeks to explore the nature of collections; a collection of artworks, a collection of discrete experiences within a new ground, a collection of post-war buildings from the cultural forum of a city recovering from it’s Fascist past, an involuntary collection buildings and former buildings, places and events that describe Berlin. A new ground occupies the void of the recent past, a collection of discrete building volumes occupies that ground, each never completely understood from a single vantage point. The museum will always be an incomplete experience, obliging each of it’s visitors to (re)construct a whole from the fragmentary, episodic understanding of its parts. As a collection it enables an ethos; it resists cohering to a single, pre-determined entity or narrative. It remains unstable and slippery, sublimating itself to the user.