Sharon is a designer and researcher based in London. She is interested in exploring how communities influence cities and urban landscapes, her work focuses on connecting places, stories and memories to shape engaging spaces. She is a recent AA Diploma graduate and has experiences in Hong Kong, Seattle, Mexico City and Oslo.
Memory is a Strange Place
Oslo continues to rapidly expand but with no room to grow. Erasure has become the de facto instrument to make room for development. Memory is a Strange Place documents a taxonomy of buildings, seen as undervalued, facing threat from demolition with a future master plan in Oslo.
Can we make room while preserving and restoring what is there? Can both old and new coexist? Monuments and institutions are defined as historically and culturally valuable to be preserved, but the prosaic and the mundane, our current everyday surroundings are deemed as insignificant and negligible. They can be disposed of at any time. Our day-to-day communities, the identity and values within are also taken away simultaneously. Even without historic and cultural preservation values, these spaces are still operating for people to live, work, dwell and engage in. Cities and new developments are actively rejuvenating for modern living and future growth, but the present ordinary lives that piece the city together are passively being erased. What remains are harmful building debris and obscured, fragmented memories.