Some of those lost buildings were know simply from faint remnants of their plans, others have captured the imagination of architects who have given them new life. The subject of reconstruction being so enormous, one may consider here one or two points. Most importantly that architecture deals with the search for origins not with the creation out of nothing. Architecture instead points always to the models it overcomes conditionally so that it may formulate its own modernity. Buildings can only be made out of other buildings.
Architecture shapes itself.
Its forms can no more exist outside architecture that the form of a sonata can exist outside music. The studio will investigate these and similar ideas in connection to the reconstruction of the Asclepeion at Pergamon. Students will be given an incomplete fragment of the antique building to their own designs and in accordance with a contemporary brief for a Business School. The building will be sited in the contemporary context of a university campus. Reconstruction here is not to be confused with archaeological restitution.