Elisa Rothenbühler

This thesis starts with the following observation: The prescriptive, temporally fixed interior inadvertently places limits on the body's expressive conduct and unfolding identity. Urbanscapes like New York City, through their fixed structures and grids, also flatten one's sense of self and relationship to time. Located between the Harlem and East Rivers on Randalls and Wards Island, where, historically, the city has maintained "order" by excluding the undesirable, a Restoration Center uses water and light to bend time and shift space. By combining the movement of the body with an evolving interior space among the island's ruins, a palimpsest of remembrance triggers the imagination of a collective future.