SPACOVE

In the winter of 2024 I was tasked with the restoration and refitting Spa Cove. Nanda Home, a home-technology start-up, had acquired the property; an aged structure marked by vegetation and time. The historical character was an added bonus to the company, but in practice, the local preservation board functioned less as a guardian of history than as a constraint on corporate intent. Yet within this push and pull between two opposing logics, I found that the project unintentionally occupied a temporally unique space.

While the local historic preservation board exists within a paradigm of having the ability to restore and reestablish a building into an ultimate state that has never existed before (Eugene Viollet-De-Luc, 1855). In pursuing this idealized image of the past, architecture becomes ontologically detached from the temporal context it inhabits. The Temple of Diana demonstrates this condition: once interwoven with the fabric of local life, it now stands isolated; 'preserved' through enstrangement.

Spa Cove may have met a version of this fate but instead, the interweaving of the technology company and the contemporary preservative sentiment reintroduced the building to the present. The building’s survival now depends on its capacity to host the contemporary; on its willingness to be altered. Through this process Spa Cove avoids becoming a frozen artifact. Its ontology remains continuous not because it resists change, but because it allows conversation with time itself.​