If the urban landscape is a network of politics, material, and data continuously formatting new potentials and trajectories, it is also a landfill of forgotten spaces, unwanted histories and elusive worlds. Efforts to progress are inevitably accompanied by equally enthusiastic attempts to erase the ill-fitting remnants of a city’s spatial history. This talk will make a case for design as a tool for revisiting—and recovering— the sparsely recorded phases of our urban histories. Positioned at the slippage between documented truths, unfinished business and mythic tales, this lecture will explore the role of hybrid representation techniques to dissolve obvious markers of past and present, fact and fiction, exposing our quixotic desire for permanence in the face of constant change.

Kristi Cheramie is the Prince Charitable Trusts/Kate Lancaster Brewster Rome Prize Fellow in Landscape Architecture at the American Academy in Rome and associate professor of landscape architecture at the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State University.

The shoptalk will be held in English.