Eternal to Ephemeral is my Final Year Project that questions if a building should be everlasting, and investigates how a neglected building may be adaptively transformed to encourage contemporary and future uses. The selected site for my research is one of the four oldest ceramic factory in Laveno-Mombello, Varese. Led by enlightened entrepreneurs in 1850s, ceramic industry has once been the main economic source for Laveno Mombello for more than 100 years, until it ceased in the late 1990s. It has defined the early infrastructure for transportation, and radically transform the urban formation of the town.

The vision is to revitalise the rich history of pottery making by implementing active learning programme that combines traditional hand building skills and ceramic 3D printing technology. As such, the neglected building will act as a skeleton (scaffolding) for the users to actively design and create their own ceramic space within. The reversible characteristics of the clay material will allow spaces to transform from time to time, eventually achieve eternal presence via ephemeral traces. The design outcome sets up an adaptive reuse typology that considers materiality as a key strategy to conserve the identity of a place in its contemporary context.