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BUILDING VOIDS
Sara Alissa

Desert landscape in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia






Building Voids - PDF




‘Building voids explores the lost narrative of desert landscapes in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in the form of site-writing. A genre that enables us to articulate knowledge as a transformative process of meaning-making the spatial qualities of writing. The work aims to address the existential relationship and the interpersonal silences between architecture and the earth. In this exploration, I begin to analyse the displaced landscapes that inhabit a residential neighbourhood in the northern part of the city, where it is undergoing a development project that neglects its desert landscape.

I intend to invite reflection on the abusive exploitation of land and critically examine the effects of urban sprawl and expansion in the city. The visual tensions generated from the sliced landscapes offer an insight into the violent practices of property developers against nature. The ecologically ruinous approach to development results in the indefinite breakage of earth as land and material.’

Sara Alissa
 

 

Echoes and Intersections is a collection of site-writings produced as part of the module Critical Spatial Practice: Site-Writing across the MA Architectural History, MA Situated Practice, and MA Historic Urban Environments dgree and PhD programmes at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.

The featured works take the reader through fixed spatial locations and buildings, and on temporal journeys across ambiguous lands and waters. Written simultaneously across the globe, our situated writing offers diverse perspectives and narratives on plural geographies, landscapes and cities, through pieces interwoven with multiple, intersecting threads.

Many of the works occupy edgelands, peripheries or crossing points, writing the boundaries of buildings, states or bodies. They explore homelands, homes and selves that have been deconstructed, revealed and returned to. Echoing with memories, histories and absent others, the sites written carry the voices of place and voices displaced or fragmented, which resonate through the materials of the land - mud, sand, sky and rock.

These writings can be read in any order, allowing connections to emerge differently upon each reading.

Curatorial committee: Toby Blackman, Chia-Ying Chao, Kanza Leghari, Charlotte Morgan & Rasha Saffarini. 

With thanks to Polly Gould, Jane Rendell and David Roberts.


Bloomsbury Festival 2021

In October 2021, participants from the class read from their work on Bloomsbury Radio as part of Bloomsbury Festival 2021, alongside Polly Gould, Jane Rendell, David Roberts and participants from the class of 2020.

Find the recordings on Soundcloud here.