According to AMO, 11% of earth’s surface is under some kind of protection law, regulating human intervention. The City of Ahmedabad advertise itself as yet another city striving to become a “heritage city”, implementing various restrictions on how to mediate and intervene in the old city fabric. Gustav Mahler wrote – “tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire”. From that point of view it is quite paradoxical how much effort we put into preserving objects and land masses, instead of the so called, intangible heritages, such as: rites, crafts, oral traditions, knowledges, performances etc. Michelle Foucault describes history as “…an archive constantly rearranging its hierarchy”. In the air of him and Mahler, I am suggesting a “fora” for intangible heritages, a complement to the ordinary museum. The idea is that the building will host two groups, conducting some kind of intangible heritage, at the time, encouraging them to refine their own craft but also hoping for a cross-fertilized product that could be of relevance today. Each group will be hosted for approximate six months, then the spaces will be rearranged in order to fit the new practices that replace the former.

Carlo Scarpa, Italian architect, designer, painter, had a vision of a deliberate juxtaposition of the presence of the past against the backdrop of the present. Such are the conditions that describe various palimpsests, partially legible windows into the past. Reconstructing the Ca'Foscari (1935-37), Scarpa's first real commission marked the realized reconciliation between the old and the new. The finished work of the Ca'Foscari reflects the poetic manner in which the presence of the history and the present moment are allowed to be what they are no more, no less; yet the two operate in ethereal symbiosis. A perforated semi-transparency and sophisticated manipulation of light evolved to become the governing strategies for future projects. Revelatory changes in materials establish a relationship with an evolving fabric. Scarpa believed that arranging such exhibits as the Ca'Foscari project kept these delicate reconciliations at the forefront of one's mind. In an era of placelessness, Niall Kirkwood states that history's failures are repeating themselves. In efforts to "Hold Our Ground" he make the revelation that spaces built from the 1990's on may deteriorate faster than expected as landscapes evolve. Spaces are redesigned with new forms masking what was. Kirkwood proposes a working paradigm, similar to a palimpsest, to provide legible insight into a site's past. This thesis investigation is intended to explore possible reconfigurations of history's artifacts, lending themselves to a dialogue between the past and the present as applied to a conceptual palimpsest. This is possible taking Scarpa's ability of weaving a new work into the ongoing dialogue of an evolving fabric paired with the fusions of modern/historical impulses of sculptor Isamu Noguchi strung with Walter Hood's improvisational analysis whereas the site informs the design. This design project will take form as a revelatory unveiling of Love Plaza's history, one of Philadelphia's many reused canvasses. / Master of Landscape Architecture

This essay is a critical review of the Swedish writer, Theodore Kallifatides' novel Brev till min dotter (2012) ('Letters to My Daughter'). It is formatted, thematically and inspirationally, by Ovid's two works Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, written while in exile in Tomis (today's Constanța) on the Black Sea. I have organized Kallifatides' fictive narrative of his pre-Junta (1964) emigration from Greece (where he was born), his multilevelled refashioning of the source material, into a palimpsest that contains three rhetoric layers: the epistle, the autobiography, and the pamphlet. The first depicts the slow transition of 'Ovid', the presumptive Roman imperialist and colonialist, into the less self-centered icon of the Ars Amatoria fame and the more accommadating listener to the people around him. In the second, I show how 'Ovid' is merging into the persona of Kallifatides, a migrant who voluptuously absorbs his new language (Swedish). A language that he masters with the innovatory skill of the best postcolonial writer. The third constitutes a universal praise song of freedom of speech and gender equality. Ovid, in Kallifatides portrait, is feminized.

The intention and aim of this investigation is to pursue a coherent and cogent argument, as the architectural discipline exists as a profession of relationships, where nothing exists in isolation. Volume 1 is a vantage point from which to view and interpret the ensuing volumes. The project flowed from a personal belief and passion shared by both students. The project aims to allow each student to develop and situate their individual schemes around this central argument, responding to various inputs and effects that the volume offers. The approach to this project is rooted in an understanding of past, present and future, with particular focus on the future as a response to the past. The project is speculative in nature, and should be viewed, understood and interpreted as such. / Dissertation (MArch(Prof))--University of Pretoria, 2014. / Architecture / MArch(Prof) / Unrestricted

This is an architectural thesis on weaving. The city is a massive textile, a patchwork of buildings, infrastructure and people. We alter the urban environment within the confines established by lot lines, streets and zoning similar to the weft on a loom, conforming to the rules of the warp. The proposed design aims to incorporate the demands of a globalized world while retaining the identity and scale of the traditional Washington building type - the rowhouse. The architectural project, located near Fourteenth and U Streets, Northwest, in Washington, DC is a hybrid of programs - a textile school, a gallery and bar for the Textile Museum, artist studios, a restaurant, leaseable space for offices and residences as well as a public garden. This complex design reflects the evolving nature of cities and a building's ability to adapt to new demands and technology; similar to the ancient art of weaving's ability to transcend centuries of evolution while retaining its inherent qualities. / Master of Architecture

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Innerhalb der handschriftlichen Überlieferung, die aus dem Mittelalter auf uns gekommen ist, gehören Palimpseste zu den Zeugnissen, die schon immer in besonderer Weise das Interesse auf sich gezogen und Phantasien beflügelt haben.

This thesis explores tensions within UK childcare policy and welfare reform. Through an ethnographic study of policy implementation, I examine themes of government, governance and governmentality. The evidence based policy movement assumes that the nature of evidence is self-evident but ethnographic data reveals how implementers draw on cultural resources of interpretive repertoires, myth and symbolism to make sense of policy. Central Government structures the policy implementation process with a “core offer”, hypothecated funding, a timetable and targets. Local policy actors manage implementation partly through tick box performative practices but they stretch time and juggle money. Implementation practices comprise branding, reification and commodification processes and the design of elastic policy products. Change and stasis are both in evidence with time-scales experienced variously as tight, as long running or as plus ça change. The community is produced as subject and object of governance, as an agent of change and a site for policy intervention. This glosses over childcare as women’s issue, market tensions and social class determinants of child poverty. Drawing on a range of theoretical resources and using the analogy of a palimpsest I show how discursive governance achieves a temporary policy settlement. This is neither workfare nor welfare but an unanticipated creative set of outcomes, exemplified in a circus project. I reveal some relatively hidden aspects of public policy and analyse give-away artefacts as hyper-visible policy manifestations. Commitment to a public service ethos is in evidence with policy implementers exercising their discretion in the interstices of market and state bureaucratic governance regimes. The Sure Start brand moves on from a flagship programme to Sure Start Children’s Centres but a novel Community Learning Partnership struggles to tug the oil tanker of children’s welfare services in a radically new direction or solve the wicked issue of child poverty.