After its closure in 1979, Harlem’s Renaissance Ballroom remained abandoned for over 30 years. Left to decay, it became a living document of its own gradual erasure—a testament to the violence of a proprietary system that rendered it obsolete.
(IN)BETWEEN ARCHITECTURE responds to the ways in which the logic of property functions as a mechanism of erasure. Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s method of critical fabulation, the project engages the site’s layers—its imprints, material traces, and dispersions—as fragments of discourse, weaving past, present, and future into a series of recombinant narratives.
Reimagining the site at the moment of its ruination, the material remains of the Renaissance Ballroom are treated as active elements of assemblage that might accommodate different forms of occupation made possible through the building’s fragmentation. The movement of these materials and their engagement with the temporal passages within which they are assembled and re-assembled offer a way to think beyond the finality of a building.
Following Fred Moten’s concept of seriality—"a seriality of the not-in-between, the un-enclosed”—(IN)BETWEEN ARCHITECTURE is not a design proposal, but rather a series of events—an “un-enclosed” continuum. It is an architecture in transition, an architecture of passage between form and formlessness, allowing for a spatial and temporal extension into what was, what is, and what could be.
