The Architecture of Memory: Creating Personal Memory Within the Collective

Abstract

This thesis explores the theoretical, psychological, and phenomenological notions of the singular personal memory and the collective memory through civic architecture. The main design guidelines are inspired by the ancient teachings on the mnemonics of rhetoric and the phenomenology of the imagination. This thesis uses architecture and space as a medium to be an interpretative tool of narrating the sequential event of the Halifax Explosion of 1917. Architecture as an art form can deliberately be created to mimic, represent, and express key moments of an event, which when experienced individually through the duality between body, memory, and light, the personal memory becomes the primary mode of story-telling. The civic collective memory is always changing dependent on time and intentional involvement. These processes are recorded through theoretical texts, drawings, and physical models that serve as interpretive tools for the haptic dialectics of memory, imagination, phenomenology, and the play on atmospheric emotions.