The Sanctuary Series (2013-2017) is the repurposing of blueprints from 1993 originally created as designs for a sanctuary in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Additions were made to an existing building to serve three disparate functions; a Synagogue, an Episcopal Church, and an Entertainment Center. The appearance and dis-appearance (physical dissolution) of the previous history occupies the picture plane. These works are a modern equivalent of a Palimpsest. Unlike Medieval Palimpsests, in which text is scraped off and reused, in this series of blueprints, attention is paid to the previous history and intentions of the architect’s codes and symbols. In some works the memory of the architects marks are honored and in other works they disappear, but for me the memory is not forgotten.

 

The Archimedes Palimpsest is a parchment codex palimpsest, which originally was a 10th-century Byzantine Greek copy of an otherwise unknown work of Archimedes of Syracuse and other authors. It was overwritten with a Christian religious text by 13th-century monks. The erasure was incomplete, and Archimedes’ work is now readable after scientific and scholarly work from 1998 to 2008 on images produced by ultraviolet, infrared, visible and raking light, and X-ray. The Palimpsest is the only know copy of “Stomachion” and “The Method of Mechanical Theorems” and contains the only known copy of “On Floating Bodies” in Greek.