Price Mellon Undergraduate Fellow

 

May 2017
August 2017

Thomson (Izzy) Korostoff

Urban Studies, 2018

Izzy studies the creation, representation, and realization of ideas of place as they appear in vernacular architectures and images—drawn, printed, or photographed—of city and landscape. He is particularly interested in themed places (a category in which he indiscriminately includes museums, amusement parks, and world’s fairs) and their underlying structures, which he is investigating in this project. His other interests include temporary and impermanent architecture, digital reconstruction, alleyway morphology, and the history of window displays. It is his longstanding dream to create an atlas of contemporary Philadelphia at 1:1 scale.


Palimpsest and Collage: Operations in Spatial Authorship at Park, Fair, and Village

This project uses digital tools to examine how acts of juxtaposition are concretely and abstractly employed at curated sites of display such as outdoor museums, theme parks, and world’s fairs, and how images and processes of juxtaposition are used to bring about specific social, cultural, or ideological projects. It will test a theoretical framework of juxtaposition, assessing acts of spatial curation and authorship through the categories of palimpsest (emphasizing layering) and collage (emphasizing suddenness). Through this framework, it will explore how authors of place use architectural and textual processes to collapse, expand, fragment, and splice time and space, using digital mapping to classify and decode the spatial and temporal operations of the site and make legible the use of juxtaposition, ultimately linking this to the authors’ broader goals.