Architectural History and Criticism Commons^™

You're Making Me Sentimental, Chris Geng

Masters Theses

My project is a personal search for a different way to see the footprint we have left on the landscape. A way of seeing that finds potential in existing buildings without placing the building in the background, that instead engages sentiments in order to approach reuse as an act of layering that retains the memories of before. I went about uncovering the memories of a site through film photography, a process equally rooted in nostalgia and sentimentality. These images attempt to capture the beauty of melancholy and in turn, ask the architect and audience to slow down and contemplate as …

"Never Forget": Embodied Absence And Extended Relations Of Care After 9/11, Sophie L. Riemenschneider

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a reflection on how loss was articulated in the wake of 9/11. The terror attacks engendered a memorial style that sought to give shape to grief, acknowledging it without filling it in or erasing it. This new style, which I term embodied absence, exists across a range of mediums, from literature to architecture. It is such a potent memorial form because it also captures the traumatic process, which is prolonged, layered, and potentially open-ended. However, despite their ability to mirror the nature of trauma, instances of embodied absence never verbalize the attacks’ root trauma—the disconnect between our …

Living Memories: Rethinking Remembrance, Timothy Mulhall

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis will interrogate conventional types and methods of memorialization, challenging the memorial as a complete product. Developing from inquiries into alternative acts of commemoration, this investigation will seek to conceive a memorial in the making. Memorials must be alive, changing, constantly developing as a result of interaction. The reliance on overly abstract, rhetorical conditions of design will become obsolete. The static condition of the image-friendly object will be replaced with a dynamism influenced by time and participation.

Acknowledging Our Past: Race, Landscape And History, Alea Harris, Kaycia Best, Dieran Mcgowan, Destiny Shippy, Vera Oberg, Bryson Coleman, Luke Meagher, Rhiannon Leebrick Ph.D., Phillip Stone

Student Scholarship

This book is the product of nearly a year's worth of student research on Wofford College's history, undertaken as part of a grant by the Council of Independent Colleges in the Humanities Research for the Public Good initiative. The research was supervised and directed by Dr. Rhiannon Leebrick.

"Guiding Research Questions:

How did Wofford College and its early stakeholders support and participate in slavery?

How is the legacy of slavery present in the landscape of our campus (buildings, statues, names, etc.)?

How can we better understand Wofford as an institution during the time of Reconstruction through the Jim Crow era? …

I Hear You Now, I See You Then, Quinn Hunter

Art + Design Masters Theses

In the research driven project I Hear You Now, I See You Then, I refer to the contemporary and historical erasure of the labor of African American women using research gathered from the southern plantation economy to create an art installation. The objects in this installation are primarily made with artificial hair integrations and utilizing labor intensive methods that are similar to those used to install the hair on the Black body. The objects I make reference the luxury items in the domestic spaces of historic plantation sites that have been re-branded to be used in the wedding /tourism industry. …

Never Forgets: Traumatic Trace Within Public Space, Jan Descartes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper will interrogate the ways in which ephemera from events affects the human and non- human environment and how the absence, manipulation or presence of traumatic trace weaves itself into the atmosphere of the past, present and future. It will look at space and the ways that trace manifests itself in hierarchal spaces and Lebbeus Woods’ concept of heterarchial spaces, which are organic and/or horizontally organized. A thread throughout is the question that if trace from trauma can exist in the visual field, i.e. the physical or digital landscape, in a way that maintains a discourse without perpetuating oppression. …

Memory + Architecture | The Act Of Forgetting, Mariel Mora Llorens

Architecture Senior Theses

This thesis proposes the activation and repurposing of buildings associated with traumatic memories as a means of studying the ways in which architecture embodies memories and aids in the process of forgetting. Architecture and the built environment are linked to the creation and recollection of memories because they trigger four of the senses that are related to memory.

To forget is an active, not passive endeavor. Conscious forgetting is not an act of erasing memories, but transforming them by removing the emotional responses that are produced by our recollection of these memories. Like memories in our brains, buildings that have …

Surrogate Infrastructures: Human Consciousness In The Information Age, Cayce Davis

Haslam Scholars Projects

This project is a study of collective memory in a place and time of intense change, intending to facilitate a conversation about the complexities of remembering and the challenges of humanizing the past in an increasingly fast-paced and consumption-driven world. As it critiques the architectural and anti-spatial precedents of newly suburban Poland, it imagines and exploits alternate narratives for a site that has been heretofore saturated by the singularity of its Holocaust past.

Grappling with the absurdities of history and historiography in Kraków and across the globe, the program takes on a series of infrastructures, imbued with temporal potentials, to …

Architectural Constructions Of Memory & The Ruin In Post-1989 Berlin, Gilda Hanna Gross

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

El Valle De Los Caídos: Spain’S Inability To Digest Its Historical Memory, Michael Heard Johnson

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

From Socialist To Post-Socialist Cities: Narrating The Nation Through Urban Space, Joshua Hagen, Alexander Diener

Joshua Hagen

The development of post-socialist cities has emerged as a major field of study among critical theorists from across the social sciences. Originally constructed under the dictates of central planners and designed to serve the demands of command economies, post-socialist urban centers currently develop at the nexus of varied and often competing economic, cultural, and political forces. Among these, nationalist aspirations, previously simmering beneath the official rhetoric of communist fraternity and veneer of architectural conformity, have emerged as dominant factors shaping the urban landscape. This article examines patterns, processes, and practices concerning the cultural politics of architecture, urban planning, and identity …

The Church Of San Francisco In Mexico City As Lieux De Memoire, Laurence Mcmahon

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

San Francisco, memory, lieux de memoire

The Lateran Baptistery: Memory, Space, And Baptism, David Tyler Thayer

Masters Theses

In the fourth century, the Lateran Baptistery was sponsored by Constantine the Great; it is the first extant free-standing baptistery known from the Roman world. In the fifth century, Pope Sixtus III renovated the baptistery through a newly-emphasized spatial hierarchy and the appropriation of some of Rome's most cherished structural elements and decorating themes. The result was a unique space that created a dialogue with Roman memory for the specific function of the baptismal rite it hosted. This thesis will analyze the spatial and symbolic forms, and the baptism ritual to show Sixtus III’s interaction with the Roman tradition of …

Architecture And Memory, Mary Patterson

Architecture Senior Theses

"The primary focus of this thesis is to understand the role and responsibility of architecture in provoking memory."

"The vehicle selected for the pursuit of this thesis is an Institute of Maritime Etruscan Studies sited in Cerveteri, Italy, one of the most memorial and testimonial sites in Italy today."