Kyle Pollara - Site

Kyle Pollara - Precedent

The Igualada Cemetery offers a different approach to engaging the site than the previous examples. The morphological study nestles itself within the landscape and creates an indistinction between the territory of the living and the spaces of the dead.


The site BECOMES the structure, and the structure is sculpted to engage the user along a serpentine walkway that burrows below the grade of the surrounding city, offering a temporary escape from the urban typology of the Barcelona.

Kyle Pollara - Precedent

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The key concept in the Berlin Memorial was to separate the external "field of experience" from the internal "structure of memory."


By maintaining this distinction, Eisenman creates a place that represents nothing, a zone of social production that invites playfulness, rather that conjuring the harsh realities of the past.


As individuals wander deeper into the field, the growing height and instability of the stelae recreate the oppressive experience of the holocaust.


The holocaust memorial offers licence to the user to engage the landscape as they see fit. By instigating social production, the structure ensures an architecture of permanence not unlike that of Rossi's Modena Cemetery.

Kyle Pollara - Precedent

The Modena Cemetery, located in Italy, is a working example of an "Architecture of Permanence" set forth in Aldo Rossi's book "The Architecture of the City"


The main concepts are:

• typology
• social content
• urban artifact
• scales of reference
• locus (historical reference)

These are the plans of the cemetery


Rossi uses typology and repetitive formal elements to dislocate the urban artifact from it's historical context, creating a condition that offers multiple textual readings of a singular element


The result is an inversion of interior space that challenges the part - to - whole relationship of the courtyard and the function of the columbarium and ossuary.

Kyle Pollara - Program

The program i chose as an example of political architecture is the columbarium. The proposed columbaria is a building in which to store the cremated remains of US war veterans ranging from the Gulf War to the present.


The program plans to address issues pertaining to the role of the soldier within the political sphere of the bios. What is the relationship between the soldier's personal life - and their duty to his or her sovereign?

Some of the issues engendered in the columbaria are:

• social roles of the military service
• elevation of status (internal and external to service)
• symbolism and memory
• integration of landscape
• biopolitics

The proposed columbaria will attempt to redefine the characteristics of funerary architecture, making the structure primarily a space for memory and reflection, but also as a catalyst for social production leading to a more personalized integration of the bios and polis in American society.

Kyle Pollara - Installation

The purpose of the following installation is to reveal the unseen forces that guide individuals as they travel across Pratt Campus.

The process of data collection was simple; beginning at the two main gates located on opposing sides of the campus, I followed random participants as they made their way to specific destinations.


As a side task, I also noted a series of general statistics and monitored any significant stops they made along their trip.


The mapping determines territories engendered on the campus by first marking the intensity of deviations along individual paths.


As one looks at the destination points, there are specific sovereign zones, and also places in which the members of the bios have claimed agency. Furthermore, there are common spaces that neither the sovereign or the bios have dominant control (common). As the main territories are revealed, alignments of unclaimed space create a structure seen as the Zone of Indistinction - a place which offers opportunity for slippage between the hierarchies of territory.

The final proposal for the installation is to provide signage along the points of deviation that will instigate activity amongst the unclaimed spaces. By overtly exemplifying the subliminal tendencies of the bios with signage, the hope is to release individual paths (or localizations) from the pressure of sovereign control - rendering the individual free from the dogma of the sovereign destination.