Regional Reuse: Regenerative Adaptation of the Former Provincial Museum of Alberta

Abstract

Edmonton’s abandoned Provincial Museum and Archives of Alberta demonstrates a history of Western building practices in the 20th Century shaped by the colonial frontier mythology, a reliance on resource extraction, and the dissolution of humans from their surroundings. After over a century, the city’s architecture has become stretched between extremities of systematic patterns of tabula rasa developments and inauthentic historic preservation, resulting in a placeless urban landscape. Through the former museum and archives, the thesis creates a regenerative architecture institute that redefines the roles and practices of architects to celebrate ephemerality, pluralism, and a connection to place. The thesis uses a paratactic as a methodology and a tool to inform a fragmentation and combination of the existing building and salvaged parts from local buildings slated for demolition. Informed by adaptive reuse and regionalism, the design imagines a new post-colonial vernacular for Edmonton based on non-extractive building methods.