BUILDING MEMORIES:
THE ARCHITECTURE OF CULTURAL MEDIATION THERESA MADER
“Collective memory [...] is a current of continuous thought still moving in the present, still part of a group’s active life, and these memories are multiple and dispersed, spectacular and ephemeral, not recollected and written down in one unified story. Instead, collective memories are supported by a group framed in space and time. They are relative to that specific community, not a universal history shared by many disparate groups.”1 -Christine Boyer Canada and the United States share an inseparable history. This interdependence characterizes each nation’s growth, framing contemporary Western Culture as a product of waves of progress, born from struggles, disputes, revolts and war. In the wake of these waves, sites of former conflicts define a network of permanent scars on the land and the people of a country. In the absence of physical markers of this history, there often exist trails of photographs and alternative forms of documentation. These records uniquely identify each site by reconstructing history’s timeline. Every physical environment is bounded by the constraint of time. It is this notion of time that augments a site’s complexity by allowing current perception to form a collective memory. This thesis challenges the notion of collective memory through program and form, studying the capacity of architecture to act as a cultural mediator on contested sites. It employs Africville, the site of a razed black loyalist community on the shores of Bedford Basin, Nova Scotia, as a testing ground for designing the distinction between memory, nostalgia, history and progress. Boyer, C. (1996). The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainment. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.
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ADVISOR: RICHARD SOMMER M ARCH THESIS REVIEWS FALL 2010
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