C o s m i n      G e o r g e s c u

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I think that one of the worst fears one can truly fear is forgetting, especially the fear of being forgotten, of oblivion, of leaving no trace behind in this world, of not being remembered. Oblivion is like never having existed. The fire at the National Museum of Brazil in September had irreversibly destroyed an entire archive, including documents related to Indigenous populations sine qua non an evanescence of this information could be produced, a social amnesia, a "lobotomy of Brazilian memory". Its consequences were compared to the destruction of The Great Library of Alexandria, which led to the disappearance of the largest archive of sources and knowledge in the ancient world.

In the sense of fears of oblivion and related to social amnesia, preserving the present, keeping our knowledge about our civilization has become a current concern. Time capsules have become a tool to combat these fears if historical sources would suffer an eradication, thus helping future historians and anthropologists to know and understand the past. Most capsules are thought to be accessed after a predetermined period of time. Such an archival approach is the Memory of Mankind project of preserving human knowledge that does not focus only on its end points, the origin and access to the archive, but aims to be reviewed and updated periodically, every 50 years. The preservation of information has been carefully studied, the contents of the archive being engraved on ceramic tablets inspired by the Sumerian clay tablets, carrying sempiternal information, deeply deposited in the world's oldest salt mine, the natural environment with the best archival properties.

Social memory is nowhere more present, more publicly enshrined than in the built monument. Architecture resides in two distinct ways: the built artifact and its representation. The built one is the subject of quotidian appropriation, it is rather a versatile body that transcends the project, reveals a series of fundamental deficiencies, is modified inextricable by changing needs, ages and weathers. In this sense, archiving and preservation of representations is a project per se that compensates for the imperfections of the building and provides the fundamental means to recover architectural purity.

The project on Regina Maria Boulevard was held in two intervals. It has started as a preparatory and precursory instrument of the proposal itself, working with the pre-eminence of the city, with what exists and precedes us. It was the occasion of a patrimony studio, of an archival research, a direct analysis, of ascertainments, sensitive intuitions, of a fidelity to the place through drawing, of criticism and subtle interpretations. This study has acquired archival valences when we later realized that we can leave something behind us, that we can leave as legacy a concrete situation, an x-ray, a witness to the current circumstance. Thus, the Regina Maria Archive was born, perhaps a presumptuous name, but which collects in a judiciously organized coffer registers of redrawn projects of each construction (plans, sections and views), informations, references and current photographs. An archived memory.