memorials of forgotten names
anthropocene museum 5.0: reinscribing new york city
Advanced Architectural Design Studio | Columbia University GSAPP | Instructors: Kabage Karanja, Stella Mutegi (cave_bureau)
What is a museum anyways?
This seemingly innocuous institutions, or buildings with seemingly innocuous arts and curations... are still operating as a ‘warehouse of stolen loot’ as Zing Tseng calls them. In this project, I investigated the new means of sharing knolwedge and connecting with the lost past. Shifting away from the multiscalar terraforming and archaeological tools that were once misused, how do we use the ‘grammars of geology’ to redifine our future.
Language and landscape are perhaps two most condensed but raw record of our past, present and future. Using these two as an artifact, I decided to insert an urban - landscape - architectural interventions that are curated at multiple scales to tell a story of a past, and inspiration for the future.
How does the forgotten names of places allude to the original identity of the places?
How does the current language continue to form new identities of these places?
How do place names change over time or territories? How do they adjust themselves to us, and how do we adjust ourselves to them?
How can we re-discover the lost identities of these places that were endeared by the Native Americans? What can we learn from their oral tradition?
How do we tell stories when we don’t understand the same language?
How can we use architectural interventions to tell these stories? Should they be embedded into the forms and programs, or should they directly encourage the act of storytelling?
“Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home”
-Martin Heidegger
SITE PLAN (TRAIL)
Urban trail that revolves around Shorakapkok, bearer of the Inwood Cave Hills, and traveling to six other Native sites, each with distinguished character and history, and at the same time, traveling through history through the significance of their names.
The original names of these places have been handed down, studied, modified, preserved, erased, forgotten, and revived. And their identities followed, and shifted over time. And so how do we tell the stories of their past?
The strategy is to study their names, their original meanings, and their connection to the present day character. Instead of encapsulating them in a museum, their stories will be told through landscaping and architecture that relate back to their significance and the relationship they had with the First Nation.
SITE PLAN (SHORAKAPKOK)
The meaning of Shorakapkok could be traced back to multiple sources. The Mohican “showaukuppock” meaning cove, The Delaware“w’shakuppek” meaning smooth still water, another Delaware “shaphakeyeu-aki” meaning the wet ground place, Unami “shakuppek”, and of an unknown origin - “the sitting down place” Shorakpkok will be the starting point of the journey through a web of urban trail, as the birthplace of the Inwood Hill Caves, and a beginning of the story.
