This is one of the four design projects that I did in my Master study in the UK, 2017-2018 academic year. The brief we received was to remodel a shopping mall in Dubai, United Arab Emirati (UAE) with the theme Place and Identity. The most exciting and also challenging part of this project is to identify the identity of a city that is suffering from an identity crisis.
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Student projects
The inspiration for the design comes from the concept of the individual and society. It is interesting to discover the role of childhood memories (from the interviews) in recalling a sense of a place in its deepest essence. In other words, childhood recollections are a sort of interpretation of dreaming in regards to “purity”. In other words, what keeps these memories vivid regardless of time is the belief in authentic feelings. It is often said that a dream is simply a multiplicity of hallucinations or a distorted reality from unconsciousness. I, however, believe that only when dreaming, the individual has a chance to be confronted with himself, a journey into the interior of his own world.
In The destruction of memory- Architecture at war, Robert Bevan observes how collective memories embedded in buildings through the architectural destruction as ethnic cleansing. Even though, the buildings do not have their own memories but they do carry the memories of a community invested in them. This investment is the reason for their very existence in a societal context. Therefore, the demand for preservation or reconstruction is a natural reaction to protect memory…
During the colonial time, the political conflicts and spatial disparity were considered as the main cause of the discontinuity of collective memories in Vietnamese society. In North and South Vietnam, the perception of citizens was systematically manipulated by the political discourse so that the image of each side was deliberately demonized under the eyes of their counterparts. This paraconsciousness, the misconception due to social conflicts (Sabelli 1998) consequently broke down the social cohesion insofar as the social ideologies were changed to the core…