Site

From the reading "on site", by Carol J. Bruns

At present, site is frequently seen as a synchronic phenomenon, irrevocably divorced from other times...

Site has come to mark a particular conjunction where the temporal is eroded by the spatial and where history becomes the isolated image of its residue.

The principle of the master plan is to design the space of a terrain over an extended time; there must exist a similar, perhaps paradoxical potential for plotting the time of a terrain over space, which would differ from an architectural narrative or promenade by specifically accounting for growth and change in time...

The understanding of site is neither self-evident in looking at a particular example nor explicit in theoretical terms. Every site is a unique intersection of land, climate, production, and circulation. Peirce Lewis has stated that "most objects in the landscape-although they convey all kinds of 'message'-do not convey those messages in any obvious way."

Though the site is a product of culture, it is by nature not a finished or closed product. It is an artifact of human work that can neither be completed not abandoned. Its meaning can never be determinable. The site, like the human condition is open. This is the surplus of site, its indefinable excess.