The Ceremony of Tensions
In a time when social echo chambers deepen urban fragmentation, public spaces are not neutral grounds. Over time, these spaces become charged, where access, social codes, and symbolism imbue them with meaning beyond their physical form, transforming them into containers of identity and belonging. While this affirms valuable community, it also reinforces the experience of people living in parallel.
This thesis explores how architecture can intervene in this climate of mistrust by creating spaces that hold social tensions through ritual and exchange. Set in Chemnitz, European Capital of Culture 2025, a city marked by its post-industrial past and recent political and social tensions, the project proposes a ceremonial architecture that stages dialogue between communities living in parallel and the city they inhabit.
At its core is a city-wide process of gifting, where individuals contribute personal objects that speak of belief, memory, or dissent. These are wrapped into individual Gifting Cases, transported in mobile Community Cases, and ultimately housed in a civic Archive Pavilion. This transcalar system, from individual to collective to institutional, keeps diverse voices in continuous, spatial dialogue.
The architecture unfolds through a sequence of ceremonial actions: the arrival of the Community Cases marks collective gathering; a descending ramp into the archive invites solitary reflection, as participants unwrap and respond to another’s object; and a final ascent leads to the placement of cases into vertical carousels lining the pavilion walls, transforming the structure into a living repository of shared memory.
Rather than resolve tension, the project designs with it, embracing antagonism as a catalyst for trust-building and civic authorship. Presented at the Chemnitz Twin-City Conference, the project opened space for international dialogue on urban transformation in a post-industrial landscape.
