MacKenzie Loewen

Advisor: Carlos Rueda

Design Thesis Panel, An Open-Ended Story: Exploring Counterpreservation in Architecture.
Exterior of the Rubin Block, west façade, Osborne Street.
Exploded section tracing the accumulated layers of building material, plywood, paint and art media on the west façade’s retail space over time.
There is a tree that has nestled in between the south side of the building and its neighbor, creating a type of inaccessible courtyard. By allowing it to start to grow inside the building (with the partial removal of walls and/or roof), the interior space will continue to shift and weather as the tree fills out.
A drawing that imagines opening the first floor to the public, increasing flow between the street and the building’s interior. The middle retail space is drawn back through the first floor, creating a pedestrian alleyway, with public art, posters, and graffiti allowed to accumulate inside.
Interior layering: the building’s composition is revealed through aging paint, peeling wallpaper, uncovered brick, removed staircases, and exposed ceiling beams.
Rendering of a first-floor interior space with planned interventions.
Køpi is one of Berlin’s most legendary Hausprojekte (co-housing projects). Due to the presence of squatters and their care for the building, its planned demolition was able to be prevented.

An Open-Ended Story: Exploring Counterpreservation in Architecture

“... representations of the visible will always show residues and traces of the invisible.” 1

This design thesis aims to explore the layered material history that exists within a building, and asks the question, how can an aging structure be revitalized without its tangible layers of story being erased? As a building’s life unfolds over time, it absorbs and displays evidence of those who have used it, as well as the impacts of weathering and interactions with the surrounding landscape. As time passes, the building becomes a palimpsest, bearing stratified traces of its earlier iterations, wherein its current form allows an understanding of its past form(s). This thesis investigates the ways a structure retains the story of its use (and misuse), and how its palimpsestic nature can be encouraged and learned from, instead of removed and forgotten.

This thesis draws on the research of Daniela Sandler, and her concept of counterpreservation. By selectively maintaining a building so as not to erase evidence of its history, but to contribute to and augment it, counterpreservation embraces weathering, decay, and story. While standard heritage building conservation firmly establishes the past within the present, counterpreservation is an ongoing, community-led process of layering and intervention. 

The chosen site is the vacant Rubin Block at 270 Morley Ave in the South Osborne neighbourhood. This three-storey former mixed-use apartment building stands sequestered amid a growing residential and commercial area. The juxtaposition of building and site highlights the separateness in the Rubin Block’s abandonment; an isolated object surrounded by activity. Its history is richly layered; built in 1914, it was inhabited for 100 years with multiple occupants and different businesses, and sustained several renovations, two fires and one murder. Its vacancy since 2014 has only contributed to its physical and figurative thickness, with break-ins, deterioration, and various public art. This thesis proposes an intervention to the Rubin Block that both revives it and contributes to its ongoing palimpsestic nature, continuing to absorb story from its inhabitants and the surrounding community.

1. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (California: Stanford University Press, 2003), 10.