- Title
- Beneath the shadow of a fig tree: Exploring the Intersections of Memory, Architecture and Narrative through the Design of a Memoryscape for South End, Port Elizabeth
- Creator
- Patsalos, Daniella
- Subject
- Architecture, Domestic -- Designs and plans
- Subject
- Architecture -- South End, Port Elizabeth
- Date Issued
- 2020-09
- Date
- 2020-09
- Type
- Master's theses
- Type
- text
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10948/59116
- Identifier
- vital:60265
- Description
- Operating within the fluctuating boundaries shared between memory, architecture and narrative, the following treatise explores the possibilities of magical realism as an architectural mode for the expression of hybrid realities, hidden narratives and imaginative worlds. Magical realism, in its essence, creates space for the interactions of diversity and the disruption or transgression of accepted categorical boundaries. As such, it facilitates the fusion or familial co-existence of possible worlds, spaces, systems or ideas that would be, in some contexts, incongruous, making it a useful medium for the voice of postcolonial cultures. Magical realism is subversive in nature, adopting an in-betweenness and all-at-onceness that resists, or rather inverts, conventional perceptions of what is ‘magic’ and what is ‘real’. In testing the potentialities of an architectural interpretation of magical realism, the project assumes a collective form as a magical realist memoryscape, representative of the tangible and intangible narratives that constitute the selected site of South End, Port Elizabeth. More than just the merging of the ideas of memory and landscape, a memoryscape is expressive of the interdependent, entangling manifestations of place and remembrance while also portraying an unravelling of the stories, mythic narratives, materialities and metaphysical phenomena of space. A memoryscape is therefore the point of homogenisation at which the concepts of memory, culture, emotion, narrative and landscape converge. South End was once a spirited and multicultural community faced with the involuntary trauma of displacement and loss as a result of the Group Areas Act of 1950 and the destructive ideologies of the Apartheid regime. Thus, drawing upon the themes of dreams, nightmares, memories and consciousness, the memoryscape is composed of a series of four metaphorical ‘cities’ that translate the chronologies, traces, ruins, embodied experiences and subjective iconographies into architectural realities that reflect a true cartography of the South End narrative.
- Description
- Thesis (MA) -- Faculty of Engineering, the Built Environment, and Technology, 2020
- Format
- computer
- Format
- online resource
- Format
- application/pdf
- Format
- 1 online resource (72 pages)
- Format
- Publisher
- Nelson Mandela University
- Publisher
- Faculty of Engineering, the Built Environment, and Technology
- Language
- English
- Rights
- Nelson Mandela University
- Rights
- All Rights Reserved
- Rights
- Open Access
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | SOURCE1 | Patsalos_Daniella 215015681 Final Treatise Document.pdf | 44 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |