Negative Ruin investigates the museum as both a spatial and political construct. The project emerged as a respond to the external socio-political pressures the instituiton has been facing.
I imagine the museum migrating into three parallel conditions: a boundless digital archive, an excavated physical site, and [our] collective memary. Drawing on Rachel Whiteread, I use the façade of the National Museum of African American History and Culture as a casting device. Its negative form becomes the concrete exterior of a new institution in New Orleans, transforming absence into presence. In this way, the museum itself is Z approached as an artifact - a negative ruin that embodies embedded memory and resilience.
Located near the Treme neighborhood, the railroad, and the Mississippi River, the project proposes a hybrid architecture combining exhibition spaces. archival storage, and freeport functions. Artifacts circulate visibly throughout the building, allowing visitors to perceive how meaning shifts between contexts of display, preservation, and exchange. Through this project, I explore architecture as a medium capable of framing cultural narratives and making institutional processes spatially legible.
Advisor: Liz Diller
