Surrogate Infrastructures: Human Consciousness in the Information Age

This project is a study of collective memory in a place and time of intense change, intending to facilitate a conversation about the complexities of remembering and the challenges of humanizing the past in an increasingly fast-paced and consumption-driven world. As it critiques the architectural and anti-spatial precedents of newly suburban Poland, it imagines and exploits alternate narratives for a site that has been heretofore saturated by the singularity of its Holocaust past.

Grappling with the absurdities of history and historiography in Kraków and across the globe, the program takes on a series of infrastructures, imbued with temporal potentials, to convey tourists into and out of their vicarious treks through the city and to proselytize an architecture of decision which urges engagement and understanding of the present.

Advisor: Professor Julie Beckman