Rehabilitation in/of Laguna Vere

Abstract

This thesis is to be regarded as a reflection on the interplay between a recent ongoing personal experience, the accidents and encounters that it entailed, and underlying theoretical concerns.

I have been living in Tbilisi for the past few months.
During this time, I focused my attention on a case of architectural abandonment in the context of Tbilisi; Laguna Vere, a late Soviet aquatic complex that is today privatized and in disrepair.

In a moment of research and reflection on the tendency of conceiving reality through totalities and opposing concepts such as “inside- outside, me-other, subject-object, matter-form, local-global, east-west, state-market, private- public etc.” I happened to enter the building and experience its current condition firsthand.
Laguna Vere’s state could be analyzed and problematized in such terms; often, architectural objects or public spaces oversaturated by historic-political- symbolic-propagandistic signification tend to fall into polarized dialectics that affect and limit their perception, thus, their becomings. Opposing concepts to be regarded as forms of reductionism, implemented by power structures as control tools, that create, at a first level, a sense of nostalgia (or else, condemn), while producing, at at deeper level, public apathy, political pessimism and nihilism due to the experience of violence, impotency and passivity that the conflict causes. This manifests in a general unproductive approach towards existing (valuable) architectural objects, trapped in their being but filled with potential for new forms of appropriation and re-activation, new forms of becoming.

Laguna Vere has been framed as a symbol of the Soviet era, of International competitiveness. Laguna Vere was also a vibrant public space in the city center. It was open, green, and crowded. One could learn how to swim, how to hang out, and build networks there. It was a displace of bikinis and bare bodies, a cinema, a theatre.
Its status has deteriorated over time to one of physical abandonment and mental forgetfulness, which has been exacerbated by the city’s most recent privatization processes. Within its transformation dynamics and life cycle, the architectural object currently appears static, inaccessible, impermeable to external influences, and devoid of any link with the (public) context.

Nonetheless, no single moment in Laguna Vere’s evolution should be regarded as prominent, as either one thing or another; rather, it should be considered as a continual flux, an assemblage of singularities resulting in multiplicity.
All of the above-mentioned moments in time and space may be found as traces in Laguna Vere’s current state, and as a result, the current state also bears suggestions about the future, about what it could be but is not (yet).

In this thesis I am looking for traces; where /when to search for them and how to keep tracing?
How could bodily experience, as a tool for perception and analysis, be used to problematize the state of an abandoned space and foresee a possible future? Thereafter, in design terms, how could this space be rehabilitated and how could collective benefit be produced?