Post by SCI-Arc

Undergraduate Thesis 2026 project by Hirotaka Kato + David Kim with advisor Karel Klein. Learn more about Undergraduate Programs at SCI-Arc: https://lnkd.in/gFB6e89U This thesis proposes the construction of a twin to a distant ruin: Dereici in Mardin and Stockholm’s Sverker. It is an act not of replication, but spatial inversion — a second body born asymmetrical in time, answering the first across the geography of displacement. In Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, the fable of the “Two Curious Houses” offers a piercing insight into the contemporary architectural impasse. Just as the First House anesthetized the landscape’s sublime through artifice, the obsession to “symbolize the past” is a folly that flattens and consumes the unknown of an untamable history. It castrates history into static imagery. Conversely, the Second House achieves true resonance by resting its hearth directly upon subterranean catacombs, positioning death as its indispensable foundation. There, a state of simply being is tolerated, embracing the presence and absence of relics. Extending this ontological lesson to a geographical scale, this project rejects the shallow consumption of the past; it claims the continental fracture — the distance of exile itself — as its new catacombs. The origin is Dereici, a stone ruin dissolving into the cliffside of Mardin. Here, diverse faiths once dwelled within a uniform grammar, their differences concealed deep beneath heavily layered thresholds. Where gravity and earth once bound the desires of the community, what remains today are the fractured traces of a diasporic existence. Yet, these are not monuments — sanitized to weave a consumable fiction. They are relics, inherently harboring the raw violence of an inscription that seeks to suffocate the past into a singular voice. Refusing any instituted imaginary, the fragments are left entirely untouched. They weather, collapse, and fade into the slow entropy of the Anatolian sun — an absent, melancholic anchor for a twin awakening in a distant land. The second body is summoned thousands of miles away within the industrial solitude of Stockholm’s Gasverket. Into this abandoned envelope, an (un)tamed apparatus — resolutely refusing to be domesticated — is grafted. This is Dereici’s inverted twin. It is not a mere replication of form, but rather the act of spatializing the dialectic of the relic: weaving both its material “presence” and the invisible “absence” that slipped through history into an ascending interiority. Here, the horizontal weight of Mardin is wrenched upright; the grounded pauses of the ruin are rotated into a pure flight. What accumulated as an unrealized thirst within the Anatolian stone is finally discharged here as a soaring spatial articulation, dismantling the closed silence of the gasometer. (continued in comments)