Reimagining Residual Spaces of Conflict

At the beginning of 2020, I was fortunate to receive the Branner Traveling Fellowship through UC Berkeley’s department of Architecture, to be completed that summer. Though my plans were delayed as a result of the pandemic - and in the meantime I finished my masters degree and started a job - I was finally able to complete my research in the summer of 2022. I traveled for about 6 weeks, and documented my trip using a blog (viewable at the “blog” tab above) with the intent of reflecting on the sites and organizing my thoughts as I went.

The basis of my research is the idea that war and mass social conflict have shaped the built environment and contributed to our relationships with public space. Spaces that represent conflict are often approached through either erasure or preservation; removed from the collective memory, or suspended in it. This project explores an alternate approach: the potential for residual structures of conflict to be repurposed through adaptive reuse.