ECOLOGICAL MEMORY, ARCHITECTURES OF EMPOWERMENT
Design Studio, Georgia Tech, Fall 2021, Instructor: Elisa Dainese
The activist center was designed around a program which encourages interaction between age groups, inspired by the fact that many participants valued memories from a different phase of life. This interaction creates an opportunity for knowledge exchange: the old might teach the young how to cook and the young might remind the old how whimsical ecologies are. Public spaces serve also as entry and circulation to facilitate interaction amongst ages. Transition spaces serving as vertical circulation and service lanes bring the user into program niches, to the bike shop, cooking classroom, or activist center which brought them to Ecological Memory. As the user moves up through the building they pass through layers of Ecologies. At first ground level then the level of the surrounding tree branches and finally the tree canopy. The tensile structure over ecological memory represents the sky, similar to the fabric in Architectures of Diaspora.