Author: Laura Clark

Archiving the Everyday and Representing Bestowed Significance

Studio: MArch Thesis

Advisor: Piper Bernbaum

Year: 2020-2021

Project Description

Memory, although personal, ambiguous and perplexing, is universal. Represented in various manners, memory exists in the past, present and future of our emotional, mental, and physical space, continuously constructed and re-lived by our actions. This thesis explores the formation and recollection of memory by creating an archive; indexing ten architectural elements of the everyday, creating a network of tangible memories, meaningful, personal, and fluid across time and place. Memory has three sites: a place where it is formed, a place where it is recalled, and the path of travel in which it is transported, the human brain. A global phenomenon, memory is sited and recalled in mundane or contradictory places from its formation. How do we attribute value to sites of recollection? How do we represent memory? The resulting archive of this work accentuates how everyday architectures are potential sites of bestowed significance, and are not merely mundane elements of the built environment.