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Re-membering the Commercial Hotel in Edmonton, Alberta

This Thesis Project is about remembrance and its embodiment in the retention of the physical
history of place. That history is both individual and collective, oscillating through time,
admitting the present into the past and the past into the future. The Project reflects upon
the physical artifact and the circumstances of place which are its own history. Projected
upon this reflection is the human experience of that artifact and of that place. In addition,
within the realm of the artifact, exists the systemic, an interrelationship between and within
which induces a conceptual and physiological layering. The systemic, in turn, has a temporal
aspect which engages both of the focal ideas, memory and history.
The figures which follow record the transformation (or remembering) of an existing Hotel
structure, known as the Commercial Hotel, located in the Old Strathcona district of Edmonton.
The program reinvents the existing hotel, bar, restaurant and retail components
into a more intensive layering, or system, of variable accommodation, pub, micro brewery,
restaurant and performance venue. The existing artifact is an armature for this reinvention,
woven into the project additions, reassessing relationships to wall, vertical separation, and
inside versus outside.
The Project configures itself as having a strong street edge along the main thoroughfare of
Strathcona, Whyte Avenue, consistent with the morphological history of this place, which
is penetrated by a formal passage through the site. The passage opens up into a performance
court, previously a parking lot, which is an extension of the pub and restaurant, and an
opportunity for the site to intimately engage the variety of festivals which the Old Strathcona
neighbourhood annually hosts. The site becomes a destination of multiplicity, beyond the
established renown of the Commercial Hotel as a Jazz and Blues venue. In addition, this
multiplicity is embodied by the opening up of the internal system of the existing building,
through the vertical penetration of the brewery component. Thus, the systemic of relationships
is continuously engaged within the memory of the artifact. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Architecture and Landscape Architecture (SALA), School of / Graduate

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/4528
Date11 1900
CreatorsLintott, Christine Anne
Source SetsUniversity of British Columbia
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeText, Thesis/Dissertation
Format6091792 bytes, application/pdf
RightsFor non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use.

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