Spatial Biographies
Lilit Hakopyan is a Ukrainian architect based in Zurich. She approaches architecture as a complex field in which the most compelling questions emerge at the intersection of disciplines. Her work explores socially engaged practice, the epistemology of architecture and interdisciplinary approaches, as well as the political, social, and cultural aspects of architecture.
Her professional interests includes vernacular practices, spatial justice, local building technologies and embodied spatial knowledge.
Since 2022 she has been the co-founder of the 2402forum, a Zurich-based platform that resists hybrid russian military aggression through art. She has co-curated a film club, moderated public discussions and practiced cultural advocacy for Ukraine.
I once read how Peter Zumthor described the summerhouse where his grandmother lived. In fact, he describes embodied memory of being there. Although I have never visited this place, the description evoked a spatial experience: dark wooden room, the cold touch of a door handle, the light and the silence.
Our perception of architecture is shaped through embodied experiences such as textures, flow of time, habits, weather, sunlight, humidity, smell and so on. The image, the drawing, the render, the photo and other 2D representations that are used in architectural practice indeed cannot fully convey the embodied experience of the space.
There is a fundamental discrepancy between how architecture is experienced and how architects represent it. So which medium carries the architectural knowledge?
What exactly disappears and what stays when buildings are no longer there?
With a full-scale russian invasion in Ukraine several cities are erased, thousands of residential housing are bombed, people are forced to leave their homes. Yet people continue to carry embodied knowledge of those spaces in memory, experience and imagination. By including embodied spatial knowledge, spaces are perceived not only as physical structures but as lived relationships between people and places.
This project explores which spatial knowledge survives after architecture is destroyed. At this conceptual stage, the project aims to collect testimonies and spatial memories in an open online archive and develop a publication in the next phase. The project recognises displaced communities as legitimate holders of spatial knowledge about their homes in response to the destruction and Russian military invasion.
This project creates a possibility to encounter spaces that no longer exist through embodied knowledge of those who experienced them, revealing an important hidden layer of architectural knowledge relevant for practicing architecture, for the future post-war reconstruction included.