Architectural Excavation and Ground Rewriting The Imperial Examination Museum of China, Nanjing

ABSTRACT Architectural and urban rewriting in compromised historic sites is not synonymous of reconstructing history. It is more about a hermeneutic work of reading the site as a disappeared or lacunose text, which requires interpretation of traces, as well as of erasures and absences. The Imperial Examination Museum of China displays an intense narrative in five acts, where interpretative rewriting becomes a carrier for constructing a contemporary cultural relationship with the site, stirring a multiplicity of meanings and resonances that enriches both the situated memory and the new work.