/ Tipp Bongers, Arvid de Haan & Dirk Hoogeveen
An organic structure
formed by the residue of students
working with chemicals.
Traces
found in the BK paint booth.
The chemical reef
laying there motionless alive.
A transformation with every layer
accumulating mass.
January 2016, the seismic tremor made the porcelain statue tremble on the floor. As I ran down the stairs to help my grandparents, shivers ran down my back. Sadly, the worst was yet to come... Being born in the eastern end of the Himalayan seismic belt, my personal experiences have been the driving force of this research. Traces of the events that I have witnessed in the Indian city Shillong, have created an urgency to meet more rational living standards. In this article, I discuss my graduation project and how it reacts to this urgency by local traces of timber construction.
For over a decade, the “Wall of Names” was one of the many celebratory monuments of BK. Furthermore, it represented, by action or omission, what our faculty accepted to be the paradigms of relevance, achievement and success in architecture. Now that it is gone, understanding this wall and its background might open a window for questioning the way in which we created a monument that was supposed to represent an international and diverse community and ended up normalising gender inequality and colonialism.
