The Ennis house was famous before it was even built.  It never had a chance for a normal life.  All of Wright's buildings attract some attention, but the Ennis house was the final textile block house built high in the hills for everyone to see.  It stood above the valley, majestic and magical, capturing the imagination of all.  At 93 years of age, the house has seen many people come and go.  In recent years, massive damage has made the ever present ticking of its mortality a great concern for preservation foundations who have worked to save the house.  As they replace the house piece by piece, one cannot help but wonder, is it really the same house?  Houses cannot live forever and once they are gone, like people, they live on in images, film, and memories.  Only through media can the spirit of a building be preserved. 

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This thesis explores preservation of architecture through media, with the Ennis and its 23 film credits serving as a case study.  Rapid technological advances within the past 50 years have made physicality less important.  Today we get our mail electronically, read books on our phones, and video chat with friends half way across the world.  We face today, a situation where most people see architecture through images rather than actually visiting the structure; and yet we continue to physically preserve buildings.

 

Let us begin our discussion with the age old feud of Le Duc V. Ruskin.  John Ruskin argues in favor of physical preservation as if a building is frozen in time, while Le Duc argues for the accumulation and interpretation of the buildings history to be preserved.  In our modern age,  I would propose that a building can be physically preserved in its original or "iconic" state, while the digital world can preserve many versions of the same building.  

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"A preserved building and a photograph both exist as images of something not present, and yet neither is that exact thing."  - Sarah Blankenbaker & Erin Besler -  in "Neither/Nor: Unfaithful images in Photography and Preservation".

 

In this passage Sarah and Erin present the idea that a preserved building, like a photograph, is no longer what it once was.  It has now become a photograph of itself taken at the point of preservation and no new experiences exist for that building.  This point of preservation is the building's death.  It now exists only as a monument to mark its former life.

 

"A monument in its oldest and most original sense is a human creation, erected for the specific purpose of keeping single human deeds or events (or a combination, therefor) alive in the minds of future generations." –From “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Charater and Its Origin” by Alois Riegl.

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When a person dies, we mark their grave and pay our respects, but we remember that person through photographs and videos, not by the monument that marks their grave.  Photos and videos allow us to remember their voice, their movements, their personality, and their spirit.  Images allow us to see them at many different points of their life in real time.  The same is true for architecture.  A preserved building serves as monument to itself.; a sort of mausoleum.    While the soul of a building can be preserved through images and media.  

 

"Film is a medium in which time is sculpted. In architecture, space is created. But a space can never acquire a sense of being - in other word, a sense of "place" - unless it is also endorsed with a sense of time. Without a temporal dimension, a space is no more than an illusionary existence that never engages any tangible experience and feeling - like a film that is never watched.' The time of a place is thus a living experience full of memories and anticipations." – from “Nostalgia and the Idea of an Urban Ruin” by Danny C. Chan

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In Memoriam: Preserving Architecture through Media, proposes a traveling pavilion that attempts to physically preserve the Ennis House through media.  The pavilion is a reconstruction of the Ennis through the analysis of its representations in film.  The pavilion also incorporates digital projections of images and film overlaid onto the area of the house where it was filmed.