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'DIMBELOWSTARD departamenty': land of the dead.

Part 2 Project 1999
Jason M. O'shaughnessy
University of Edinburgh Edinburgh | UK
A 'DIMBELOWSTARD departamenty'-land of the dead.

-The project is a burial landscape with associated funerary programs along the River Tiber, Trastevere, Rome.
-The project was developed through individual strategies of folding site maps, resulting in three typologies of fold of differing scales.
-The folds operated both programmatically and formally(i.e function as well as forms were folded or ingested into one another and thus hybridised).
-These newly affected landscape combinations thus became monsters;they show (MONTRE) things which have which have been taken from their original position and forced into new (often unstable) relationship's,previously un-imaginable.
-As the building incises the body of the city (Rome), so too the autopsy table is developed around the idea of the cut; specifically the choreography of the pathologist's knife upon the body (see slide 18).



Jason M. O'shaughnessy


Jason O’Shaughnessy developed some of the major ideas with which his proposition deals during a short project based on the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome. In this extraordinary building, in many ways an emblem of Rome itself, everything seems displaced and shifted (Imperial mausoleum becomes urban fortress; burial chamber (‘centre’) becomes gatehouse (‘edge’); etc). Through a strategy of folding plans and sections of the building, Jason pushed this character further, experimenting with increasingly dense overlaps of form and programme.

This was then extended into a strategy for working with an area of the city. A matrix of forms and programmes were produced through a ‘game’ of folding sites maps (3 fold typologies were produced). What enthuses me about this work is that as its horizon widens and its implications extend it, at the same time, grounds itself more fully in Rome itself (its strata, its displacements, its dead).

The themes of the folds of matter and of the incision, central to the project, comes out further in the extraordinary full-size autopsy table which the student built. This construction, which works with the gestures of the pathologist and the fluids of the body, hovers somewhere between the surgical and the magical.

1999
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