Michael Koehler

Parallel with a professional practice in architecture and historic preservation, I like to imagine fictional constructions in drawings, models and collages. Past series of renderings have been set in developing/declining neighborhoods where the urban fabric and its voids form new pathways that traverse the area, punctuated by events—fictional cityscapes. Continuing work explores a distant site on & off the tip of Nova Scotia. It’s a well-known place from childhood that was lost—kept living only in ideas and sketches—and has returned as an archaeological dig, turned growing villa. My intent with these, and other series of designs & illustrations, is to tell stories in architecture with narratives informed by history, precedent and imagination. In my historic preservation work we study the stories of the making of environments in the past and tell them anew. In these reinvented environments, I hope to find later chapters that still preserve a place’s original, big idea.