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The Fall / The Leap

Part 1 Project 2015
Mackenzie Nix
University of Sydney | Australia
Both war memorial and community hall, an inhabited bridge is under perpetual construction.

A scenario is imagined wherein, through the erasure of war, a bridge and connection had been lost. War liquidates. Community pulls together, grows. Out of the impetus to honour the powerful, delicate connections we build between each other and the world are found, connections that can topple and fall at any moment.

Between its predecessor’s stone abutments the new bridge reverses the original arched collapse. Communities that ‘burnt bridges’ are remedied. From the antecedent arch remnants, an open community hall is emerging. Above bombed piers, spanning and supporting stone within scaffolding, it fills the liminal space between two former combatants.

Acknowledgement of and reaction against the liquidation of war, the imagined structure balances polished remaking and objective preservation. Moments of physical and experiential suspension are created in an assemblage using remains. Its incompleteness hopes to hold off future communal destruction.

Architectural memory and a built experience unite imagined histories and possible futures. From a diving platform high above the river, one can counter the deliberate destruction in the past with the wilful action of the leap. A physical and metaphorical departure point offers an uncertain, hopeful future.

Mackenzie Nix

Tutor(s)

2015
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