The Imaginary Variance: Collective Memories and Urban Reconstruction Part 2 Project 2023 Mesha AlradadiHalie Kim Pratt Institute | USA The Imaginary Variance proposes a conceptual framework that challenges the dominant narrative of spatial privatization in New York City by overlapping both established and emerging spaces that reside within the collective memory. The proposal experiments with form, space and, program by defamiliarizing forms of collective memory through four primary methods: bleeding, blurring, distorting, and afterimaging. Such an approach provokes an exploration into the form's protean nature, its systematic yet contingent, fabricated yet immaterial, and meaningful yet silent qualities, and questions the kind of formal agency that can surface from fragmental interferences.Depending on their initial context and program, the models it examines are implemented, grafted, or embedded within highly privatized zones of New York City in order to assess their potentials in challenging dominant systems and engrained routines. The central inquiries explored in this proposal are: What different narratives can emerge through the defamiliarization of formal fragments and the externalization of collective memories? How can a grammar of the collective facilitate the translation and framing of the relationships between architecture and the public? Mesha AlradadiHalie Kim Tutor(s)