To overwrite, is to inscribe new text on top of other writing. It is to write into what came before. To not erase. To not start anew. But to adjust, adapt, accommodate, and add. It is a specific orientation to history and the future— where each can co-mingle in the space of the present. As such, overwriting puts us in a particularly interesting position vis a vis architectural preoccupations with both heritage and the-new. It is a radical acceptance of what exists, and speaks the contradictory language of our shared present. Dense with history, multivalent in its meanings, and polyvocal in its expression, the overwritten city is a condensed artifact for the Laboratory of the Future.
Through our research on the built environment of Tbilisi, overwriting has emerged as THE syntax of the city—a contemporary vernacular that has risen to a shared language. Century-old houses are subdivided; adjacent flats are merged; historic facades are punctured; and new balconies are bricked-in. Our project, then, looks to extract from this language a series of
data points, samples of the overwritten city, in order to better decipher its future.
This project proposes a series of architectural core-samples—1mx1mx3m assemblages—that gather and index different episodes of the overwritten city that inhere within the walls of Tbilisi. Each core-sample is a compressed scenario of everyday life, just as it is a compressed cross-section across time. Within these samples are an accumulation of stories. An accumulation of materials. An accumulation of labor. An accumulation of time. Layer upon layer, the core samples of the city are an index of the many episodes in the long 20th century of Georgia.
A square meter is at once the abstract economic unit that governs architectural quantities of the city, and at the same time it is a data point dense with architectural qualities—that gathers histories, building technologies, attention and distraction. Within these square meter samples, historical residues pile up in ways that deeply challenge received aesthetic and conceptual ideas of both heritage and modernity, history and present, past and future.
And throughout, these core samples speak to a conversation across time—in a kind of architectonic collaboration between the past and the future. This is not the typical architectural obsessions with either history or newness—rather, its an acknowledgement of the thick present in which we live. The core samples point to a new politics of aesthetics that does not rely on the clarity of meaning, but rather on its overproduction. The transformations archived within the core samples map the changing attitudes toward self, family, and society just as much as they map the changing regimes of ownership, freedom, and choice. And in the core samples we can chart this cross section of time as we position ourselves within the continued process of rewriting the future, one square meter at a time.
