Lobster Revolution 1989-2024 Part 2 Project 2025 Frank, Wai Shing Li Oxford Brookes University Oxford | UK The lobster survives by moulting, shedding its shell to grow, leaving its soft body exposed. Each moult is a passage through risk, where vulnerability enables transformation. In 1989, the people of Timișoara broke through the hardened skin of dictatorship in a similarly precarious act of becoming—an uprising born of courage, pain, and the need for freedom.The Palace of Culture, witness to that unrest, carries its imprint. Wounds remain visible, etched into walls and joints like sediment. Scars are not repaired but absorbed, folded into the structure’s evolving form. Restoration here is not erasure, but a form of listening. Memory settles into the materials, refracted in their textures, fractures, reflections.On December 20, 1989—the day freedom was declared—a warm glow rose from within the Palace. Not to celebrate, but to remember. A signal for those who stood, those who fell, and those who carry the weight of knowing. In this rewritten timeline, the building does not revert. It adapts. It becomes an exoskeleton—defensive, alive, porous—growing stronger as it breaks. No longer a building, it is a body in transformation. The shell cracks. The light rises. History is exposed and held openly within the city's heart. Tutor(s)