Stephen Alexander Wischer
North Dakota State University
stephen.a.wischer@ndsu.edu
Time becomes human,” Paul Ricoeur has argued, “to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode” (Ricoeur 1984, 52). If so, then space, too, becomes meaningful through the re-narration of its latent stories—its cultural stories, traumas, rituals, and deeper myths—embodied anew in architectural experience. In an era increasingly dominated by digital abstraction, algorithmic optimization, and the despatialization of memory, then, architecture’s role in reenacting the stories of place has perhaps never been more urgent.
It is not through programmatic formalism that narrative reenactment becomes a spatial act, but—as this paper explores—through material resistance, poetic association, and imaginative storytelling that emerges through making. At the center are architectural artefacts—alternative, poetic models—that play a role as tools of interpretation and world-making in both historical and pedagogical contexts.
To frame this exploration, I turn first to the artist Anselm Kiefer’s La Ribaute, a sprawling studio and compound built over decades on the site of a former silk factory in southern France. Kiefer’s work offers a compelling model for how architecture and representational making might serve as ritualized spaces of mythic reenactment—what Vesely and Pérez-Gómez would call a “re-presentation” of foundational experiences through layered forms and symbolic material encounter. At La Ribaute, ruins are not erased but are inscribed; underground bunkers and tottering towers are interwoven with installations of lead books, spaces filled with straw, sculptures and paintings made of palimpsestic materials and a chamber made of lead. These structures physically reenact the lingering presence of specific historical events—their spiritual and phenomenological residue.
Kiefer’s work can be understood as a form of techne-poiesis: a transformative mode of making that resists closure and invites interpretive reenactment through embodied engagement with matter and myth in deeply moving spatial encounters (Wischer 2022). He spatializes myth, memory, and trauma through an accretion of material acts that embody both the fragmentary nature of history and the hope, however partial or critical, of reconstitution. The architecture of La Ribaute is constituted through analogical layering—of materials, forms, metaphors, and references—as with paintings such as Shevirat Ha-Kelim (The Breaking of the Vessels), which draws upon Kabbalistic cosmology and the myth of primordial rupture. These assemblages sustain a condition of ambiguity and ritual participation.
Such techne-poiesis pedagogically grounds my own teaching at North Dakota State University. For a decade-plus, I have led graduate architecture studios structured around the making of artefacts as poetic inquiry and site-bound storytelling. Students begin not with programs or typical visual forms but with a question: how might one interpret forgotten, invisible, or mythic dimensions through acts of making as an event? These studios—framed by phenomenology (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty), hermeneutics (Ricoeur, Gadamer), and poetic representation (Pérez-Gómez, Frascari)—draw heavily from the lessons embedded in Kiefer’s work and on Ricoeur’s hermeneutic imagination, a recursive structure of emplotment that brings the world into language and language back into spatial form.
In tandem with philosophical inquiry and hermeneutic research into the history of their topics and sites, students engage with culturally charged or marginalized landscapes by fabricating variable-scale material artefacts—castings, assemblages, narrative models, installations, short films, or hand-crafted books—that function as interpretive devices, operating as thresholds between past and future, self and other, seeing and speaking. These spatial fictions allow students to rehearse the ethical and poetic implications of their emerging proposals.
These studios cultivate a form of storytelling that begins with tactile engagement—with artefacts through which myth, trauma, and cultural memory are unearthed. Meaning emerges not from programmatic logic and abstraction but from resistance: from the friction between body, tool, and material.
Daniel Ness’s 2022 thesis exemplifies this process. He began with an artefact, not a prescriptive diagram. Drawing from Yizkor Bikher—memorial books written by Holocaust survivors—he constructed an ephemeral installation of earth, ash, suspended fabric, and light. As participants read aloud from translated texts, a projected image of the ruin-dwelling Lilith figure from Jewish folklore flickered into view through cascading sand. The resulting experience was a ritual of unconcealment, converging voice, material, and myth in a spatial event. The artefact became the seed for a speculative museum imagined as a performative unfolding across a layered and haunted topography.
Ashley Kilzer’s 2017 thesis Ruins of Alvira explored how memory can be embodied through acts of tactile inscription. Her project emerged from a process of corporeal making—a poetic excavation of history and self. Drawing from Suzanne Cataldi’s phenomenological reflections on the “reversibility” of death, Kilzer staged a performance, her body covered in wildflower seeds and pigment, creating a living shroud. As this coating cracked, was peeled away, and reassembled, it became an artefact of rupture and regrowth. This fragmentary process gave rise to a project for a ritual procession through the abandoned WWII munitions bunkers in Alvira, Pennsylvania, where projected images of suppressed female figures accompanied visitors in descent.
These projects set the stage for Tyler Gefroh’s Silences of the Scorched, a deeply affective artefact that reenacts the story of a young girl who folded a thousand paper cranes in the hope of healing from radiation-induced leukemia after the Hiroshima bombing. Inspired by Marco Frascari’s tropological method, Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, and the poetics of ruination, Gefroh hand-crafted hundreds of origami cranes from ephemera collected at historically loaded sites, darkened them with charcoal rubbings, and suspended them in space to form a constellation of silences—neither monument nor model, but a performative site of ritual mourning. The resulting artefact activated what Daniel Libeskind might call “the void.” It enacted myth; each fold marking a memorial gesture and each pause a listening.
Dan Porwoll’s 2021 thesis The Two Sides of Otherness: A Cross-Cultural Regeneration of Reality is the most comprehensive example, engaging the intertwined concepts of myth, memory, and border conditions through an extended design-research sequence. Inspired by Merleau-Ponty’s notion of chiasmic perception, Edward Casey’s reflections on “edges,” and Rachel McCann’s essay “Wild Beauty,” he focused on three emotionally and politically charged thresholds: Korea’s Demilitarized Zone, the Russia–Ukraine border, and the Carlisle Indian Cemetery in Pennsylvania—locations understood as embodied sites of trauma, where reenactment could become a mode of empathetic reconciliation.
Porwoll’s began by creating hand-crafted artefact-books filled with fictional stories, images, and materials drawn from site research. These served as poetic repositories—hybrid documents that gathered resonance from history, myth, and imagination. Drawing inspiration from John Hejduk’s Masques, he invented six characters per site, each acting as a threshold between image and word, body and place. Unfolding each page became a ritual in itself, a kind of architectural invocation. As he writes, “Through unfolding these narratives, we understand the edges not as lines, but as folds—reflections of each other.”
From these narrative books emerged fifty-plus vignette drawings capturing imagined encounters between figures such as the Dreamer and the Defector, the Dictator and the Student, and the Designer and the Newscaster. These drawings were not conventional architectural illustrations but allegorical stage sets—ritualized scenarios of place-bound reenactment that made visible the inner dynamics of conflict and transformation. One drawing, The Battlefield reframes the Korean propaganda war through the lens of Seokjeon, an ancient ritual stone-throwing game. Another, The Plinth, positions the media as both pedestal and pit—a performative threshold of power in both Koreas.
The final architectural proposition was conceived as an act of resymbolization. A mirrored pair of towers on either side of the DMZ houses a bell in one and its striker in the other. Physically separated by border and ideology, they are united conceptually by the potential of imagined resonance. The unrealized act of ringing becomes a symbol of latent empathy and deferred unification. Here, architectural space is the site of invitation, not closure. Porwoll’s towers, like Kiefer’s towers at La Ribaute, are less forms than rituals: artefacts of reenactment that transfigure trauma into presence and memory into architecture.
Memory, as Federica Goffi notes, is never static; it is always in the making. And, as Gadamer writes, tradition does not bind us—it offers “a horizon within which we orient ourselves” (Gadamer 2004, 304). This pedagogical emphasis on artefactual making cultivates precisely such orientation. These and similar projects foreground the artefact as a site where reenactment takes architectural form. They demonstrate how retelling stories of place becomes a generative method for design rooted in deep listening to what has been silenced, neglected, or dislocated. Through tactile engagement and metaphorical resonance, students do not “represent” place but create encounters that enter a place’s story—where place speaks through language, materials, and spatial encounter.
The reenactment of place stories becomes a kind of world-making, in the sense initially coined by Nelson Goodman and later expanded by Ricoeur and Pérez-Gómez. It goes beyond design to be about poetic reinscription—about the return of sacred and symbolic dimensions to architecture through the processes of embodied imagination. As Ricoeur might argue, architecture is redemptive, not simply mimetic; it configures stories that allow the past to be refigured into hope.
This paper advocates for a renewal of architectural imagination through the reenactment of place stories via artefactual modelling—where ritual making becomes a form of becoming language. As Anselm Kiefer’s work reminds us, the disappearance of shared religious symbolism in the modern world has not eliminated the sacred—it has relocated it. In The Children of the Mire, Octavio Paz suggests that the arts have inherited the spiritual tasks once held by religion—not to replicate its dogma, but to create new symbolic orders. “Poetry is revelation,” writes Paz, “and all true revelation is a re-creation of the world” (Paz 1974, 7). In this view, the poetic imagination is reason’s grounding. By breaking open normative forms of language and representation, it opens a space for transformation.
The artefacts this paper explores are precisely such acts: poetic reenactments of place that invoke myth, ritual, and memory as vital conditions of being, not solely designs for buildings, They remind us that architecture, at its best, is a story, not a solution, and not a product but a practice of shared becoming.
References
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- Cataldi, Suzanne. “Reversibility: The Ethical Ground of Memory.” In Merleau-Ponty and the Possibilities of Philosophy, edited by Bernard Flynn, Wayne J. Froman, and Robert Vallier. SUNY Press, 2009.
- Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. New York: Harcourt, 1959.
- Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London: Continuum, 2004.
- Libeskind, Daniel. Between the Lines: A Journal of Contemporary Architecture. London: Academy Editions, 1995.
- McCann, Rachel. “Wild Beauty: A Sensuous Ethics of Architecture.” Architecture and Culture 5, no. 1 (2017): 115–130.
- Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968.
- Paz, Octavio. The Children of the Mire: Modern Poetry from Romanticism to the Avant-Garde. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974.
- Pérez-Gómez, Alberto. Attunement: Architectural Meaning after the Crisis of Modern Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016.
- Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative, Vol. 1. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
- Wischer, Stephen. “Spiritual Lessons from Anselm Kiefer for Architectural Pedagogy.” In_bo: Ricerche e Progetti per il Territorio, la Città e l’Architettura 13, no. 4 (2022): 86–96.
