FORGOTTEN not LOST: REFRAMING BUILT HERITAGE THROUGH ARTIFICIAL EXCAVATION

Abstract

With the renewed debates around Swedish Cultural canon and questions of national identity, this thesis explores the fragility of heritage as a social construct, one always in flux and embedded in the daily practice. When heritage ceases to be lived and becomes merely documented, it loses its vitality and becomes an artefact in itself. This process creates gaps in the collective knowledge in how material- and cultural heritage are understood. The thesis engages with theories of adaptive reuse (Plevoets, 2019) through a thematic synthesis of transparency and palimpsest (Eisenman. 1998), material culture (Harvey, 2018) and ontology (Frampton, 2017) to examine the relationship between heritage, knowledge and continuity. Through literature and case studies the thesis establishes a set of design tools. These tools were applied to Ragnhildsholmen castle ruin to provide a real world example of adapting the theory into architectural form. Through an iterative process the findings are refined, evaluated by adherence to theory.The result is ultimately a design framework for a method that handles the built heritage both as artifact and narrative, exploring how collective identity and belonging is continuously rewritten through the material traces of the past. The final design proposes an architectural experiment where architecture is constructed using fragmentary traces of Ragnhildsholmen on different scales and levels of abstraction resulting in a distorted echo of cultural memory that reveals how heritage once embodied in material, mutates through time.