Dive with Me! Democratic Architectural Experience in the Age of Media

Abstract

Unlike Heidegger’s claim that architecture reveals its meaning through presence and direct experience, today such encounters are increasingly mediated by images. Architecture circulates first as fragments, photographed, hashtagged, and digitally reshared, before or after being physically experienced. This research introduces Jansang, a Korean term meaning «afterimage», as a lens through which architectural memory is constructed both prior to and following physical encounter, particularly in the context of ruins and fragments. Focusing on the Ruïnekerk, a fifteenth-century church ruin in Bergen, the Netherlands, the study maps how online imagery generates symbolic constellations—windows, crosses, sky openings, and the contours of earth and sky. These recurrent motifs reveal a process of digital recollection through which the ruin is continually rebuilt within shared perception. The project develops a «kit of parts», a design tool derived from mapping analyses of social-media posts, to translate these visual memories into spatial strategies for adaptive reuse. The approach, inherently project-specific, emerges from how people perceive, document, and share architecture. By shifting focus from material preservation to participatory perception, Jansang proposes a democratic paradigm for reuse: architecture understood not as a fixed object but as a living afterimage, continually shaped by the ways we frame, share, and remember space.