With Building Block

For three consecutive years NKArts organized and staged a festival that took place among the remaining walls of the Fort of Shushi. The project described below is based around the recurring festival taking into consideration the particular components required for the event and the realities of the given site – the remaining walls of the Fort of Shushi.

The transient festival has a goal: to establish a tradition of festivals as an attempt to locate cultural identity while proposing means to make aesthetics and livelihood an integral part of each other.

PROJECT

In 2003 the design team began to develop an approach to the site, an approach that supports establishing a dialogue between the site, its history and the current populace of Shushi, the displaced Armenians. The transient nature of the festival in fact provided the perfect setting, the ideal stage, to project a memory of this place and launch a new attitude towards reclaiming. The design team decided to adopt the festival as an event that becomes the metaphor in developing the language of the architectural intervention in this particular situation. During the festival, the fort at once positioned as a divider, a delineator of outside and inside, now stands at the center of an event, actively performing and participating in the gathering of people from around the world.

We proposed dividing the project into phases. The first phase is called “foundations”. Foundations’ core idea is to suspend all notions or desires towards scheming a master plan for the site. Instead its goal is to reinforce the vision put forth by NK Arts. As the festival generates a dialogue and an understanding between peoples and cultures, this architectural intervention, one step at a time, negotiates the current status and role of the fort to become a preserver of histories past, a collector of estranged peoples, and a conduit for social and cultural recovery.

There are three components to “foundations”:

REHABILITATION

The first component focuses on the cleaning and rehabilitation of the site by implementing permanent landscaping, stonework restoration, preservation and reinvention of existing structures given historical significance. We produced drawings to indicate and detail the scope of work in plan and in section.

TENTS

The second component focuses on the design of tents to provide sleeping quarters for the participants and attendees. Building Block designed the tents such that each tent would be light to carry, relatively cheap to produce, easily assembled, can be joined to form larger tents, and tilted to double as a kiosk. The designing of tents offered us an opportunity to test the reuse of the fort area prior to building permanent structures on it. It is important to understand what the fort area can become, and determine over a period of light uses its appropriate role in Shushi. While building permanent concrete structures on this site may imbue confidence and seem reassuring at first, in fact they only indicate a desire not to question what is at hand and express a readiness to dispose of any artifacts that embodies many histories. In turn the latter approach is a further form of aggression towards what potentially symbolizes continuity among cultures.

STAGE

The third component includes the design of a temporary stage and canopy exploring the boundaries of local building practices and materials. The stage is a further development of the ideas expressed in the design of the tents. While the tents transform the fort into a temporary refuge, the construction of the stage offers it role, where cultures through their arts gather to act, enact, exchange, negotiate, unite and interlace as threads themselves in a coherent whole.

As part of the cleaning, landscaping, and stonework restoration, we proposed the construction of a permanent stone base for the stage that hugs one of the remaining walls. In addition to the platform, we designed a canopy designed to provide shade during the day, and protection through the foggy nights. We designed it such that it can be easily dismantled and re combined to be used as gates for the arched openings at the entrance of the fort after the festival. The canopy for the stage uses a local construction method often seen in the construction of outdoor structures. Specifically, it is a woven fabric of twigs stretched between vertical poles or woven through industrial wire mesh. We were attracted to the twig assembly partly because this method of construction is often used in humble additions to existing structures in Shushi, and partly because the fragile, perishable nature of the twigs rendered strong by the inventive weaving was inline with our overall design philosophy. We made several study models of the canopy, exploring formal qualities and expressions, keeping in mind the chosen method of construction. The result is a series of sail like components, a kit of parts that are easy to assemble on site, engages the members of the community in the construction process, using simple and available tools.

As mentioned earlier, the choice of materials and the transient nature of the proposal reflect our attitude and desire to build lightly on the grounds of a contested public space. At the same time it proposes to make a permanent mark by restoring the existing walls and grounds of the fort and establishing a location for the recurring festival.