I have always trusted what remains more than what is new. After the Asheville floods, I found myself standing in strangers’ living rooms, noticing the mud on baseboards, the pale watermark circling each room. The damage arranged itself into meaning. Flux leaves a record. You only have to look long enough for it to surface.
This became the quiet premise of my travel: If flux is the normal condition, then permanence is not the opposite of change but the residue it leaves behind.
Everywhere I went, architecture revealed itself through what had been added, patched or simply endured. I began to see three kinds of residue: material, in the scars and repairs that hold a structure together; legal, in the plots, contracts and rights that outlive the people who wrote them; cultural, in the rituals and habits that shape a place more than any drawing.
Across four sites, these residues gather into distinct themes: identity in Mongolia, ownership in Chile, authorship in Bangladesh. Berlin, the final essay, gathers the thread. A place where all three residues are visible at once and where the question becomes not what buildings are, but what they remember. In each case, the building becomes less a fixed object than a ledger of everything that has happened to it. [From the Preface]
During my travel, I kept a daily journal.
Still Here is a research project that examines permanence not as resistance to change, but as the residue left behind by flux. Developed through fieldwork across Mongolia, Chile, Bangladesh, and Germany, the project traces how architecture absorbs instability through material repair, legal frameworks and cultural practice, becoming a record of what has occurred rather than a projection of what is new.
Rather than focusing on buildings as fixed objects, the research reads architecture as a ledger of accumulation. These residues crystallize into distinct themes: identity in Mongolia, ownership in Chile, authorship in Bangladesh, before converging in Berlin, where all three conditions remain simultaneously visible.
The four essays argue that permanence is sedimented through use, revealing how buildings remember long after their original intentions have dissolved.
Independent research project funded by a $20,000 Aydelott Foundation Travel Award in 2025 with advising from Prof. Hansjoerg Goertiz.