[Burial of a Memorial]

BURIAL OF A MEMORIAL

2019

Architectural Intervention Proposal

Hasselt, Belgium

Architecture dies differently from people.

Its disappearance is slower.

Walls linger.

Foundations remain.

Fragments endure long after their purpose has departed.

The ruin exists in a peculiar state between presence and absence, neither entirely alive nor entirely gone.

Burial of a Memorial emerged through research conducted at the remains of a monastery in Hasselt, partially destroyed during the Second World War. Of the original structure, only a single wall remained standing. The remainder had long since vanished.

What survived was not architecture itself, but evidence of architecture.

A trace.

A memory.

A wound.

Standing before the site, Tae became increasingly fascinated by the absent wall rather than the surviving one. The missing structure appeared more present than what remained. Its disappearance generated a space demanding imagination, speculation, and reconstruction.

The project therefore began with an inversion.

Rather than rebuilding the lost architecture above ground, the absent wall would be reconstructed beneath it.

Buried.

Interred.

Returned to the earth.

Using the surviving structure as reference, the missing architecture was translated into a subterranean form accessible through descent. Visitors would encounter the absent wall not as restoration, but as burial, transforming the site into a condition somewhere between monument, tomb, archaeological excavation, and memorial.

The gesture attributes an almost human condition to architecture.

If buildings possess lives, can they also possess deaths?

If societies preserve the memory of individuals through burial, why should architecture be denied the same dignity?

The work proposes no reconstruction of history.

History remains broken.

The wall remains absent.

The ruin remains incomplete.

Yet within this incompletion emerges another possibility.

Memory no longer resides solely in what survives.

Memory resides equally in what has disappeared.

Burial of a Memorial transforms absence into form, allowing visitors to encounter loss not as emptiness, but as a presence concealed beneath the surface of the earth.

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