We are back with week three of the 2020 Student Thesis Showcase featuring five more projects from schools across the US and Canada! This week’s projects explore topics including memory and “homeness,” rebuilding vernacular architecture in Puerto Rico, material explorations to tell the history of lynching, violence in architecture, and repurposing space and materials for new activities. Check back on August 14 for the next group of projects. Make sure to check out Part I and Part II of this series!

Ancestral House: Memory Home by Karishma Susan Kurian, M.Arch ’20
University of Minnesota / Advisors: Patrick Lynch and Daniela Sandler
Awarded a 2020 Richard Morrill Final Project Award

A house, as it is now, is a container of memory over time. An ancestral house is no different except that it is a plural typology which exists in parallel realities of time and memory. An ancestral house is an autobiographical container. The narrations collected across three generations in my ancestral house in Kerala, India, revealed not just tangible realities but, more certainly, the validity of intangible realities of memories – spaces over time to uncover the meaning of “homeness” within a house. In my time collecting stories and narrations of my ancestral house, a mere recollection of the events that transpired in the house instigated a conversation of the home and the self from the narrators. The act of recalling memories transformed and reconstituted the self. Across all the narrations what was predominantly evident was the recollection of objects within the narrations and the memories of spaces. Objects are attributed to the memory of home and the people that make it a home. Hence, a list of nine objects was created and each object became a portal to access memories that were once lost. The project discusses the study of architectural memory over time explored through narrative speculation. The result is a “Memory House” that transcends the physical known realities of the world into the memory realm of the ancestral house. A question that led itself to the memory realm was: How does memory lend itself to the physical manifestation of the house?

In this project, we look at the possibility of visualizing the temporal plurality of “home-ness” in the ancestral house and the chance for reconciliation, wherein this list of nine objects is storing memory.

A peek into the narrations lends a unique perspective of the ancestral house that reveals the ideas of memory, home, time, and the self. In that respect, there is an existence of the ancestral house which is beyond the known realm.