Accurate-ish

In the highly constructed landscapes of memory in the United States, existing practices of preservation and maintenance of the past are centered on addition and expansion of what has value within the collective public memory, but there is a hesitation that lingers around the notion of deconstruction, or devaluation of historical places. In practice, acts of removal or reconstruction come from moments of rupture, rather than continuous processes of reevaluation and change. In writing an operational epilogue, this thesis is proposing a design of collapse, of reveal, that allows suppressed narratives to exist in ways that begin to leak into and overwhelm spaces of colonial history. The site, Colonial Williamsburg®, is a 301 acre open air “living-history” museum in Virginia. It is a destination for heritage tourism, located within a two-hour driving radius of Washington, D.C., Richmond and Charlottesville — all central sites of American historical mythology, and all of which have recently become sites of rupture (protest, rallies). The reconstruction of the colonial town in Williamsburg began as the passion project of a local clergyman, and was realized with the support of J.D. Rockefeller Jr. and others invested in its narratives. The goal of restoration was to bring history to life, but it also conveniently served in repairing the self-image of a place that was experiencing economic and cultural instability following the Great Depression and the end of Reconstruction in the American South. These plays for settler-colonial nostalgia led to a highly constructed and deeply amnesic experience designed by and for a singular audience to be easily dramatized and repeated. This constructed imaging of history has been retained in much of Colonial Williamsburg's® programming as a tourist destination with contemporary retail, hospitality and entertainment venues. And while time seems to be frozen in this place, there are already subtle insistences of difference in moments of landscaping, planning and construction. By proposing a series of canny and uncanny alterations to Colonial Williamsburg®, the seams of a place that holds “accuracy” at the center of its operations will start to come undone, not through a restorative nostalgic criticism, but through the emergence of a series of reflections, refractions and destabilizing realities. What might happen if we hold a mirror up to a place, and ask it to see itself?

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Moyers, Ruth Blair

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Garcia, Deborah

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• Copyright retained by author(s)

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/143170

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/143170