Abigail Zola

“Emotional contamination,” describes residual feelings associated with a space where a negative or tragic event occurred to an individual or group either personally, historically, or politically.  Emotional contamination affects people’s associations with place and informs their willingness to spend time in them. This project establishes a set of design principles rooted in uncovering and acknowledging the lifespan of a site, and considering how this acknowledgment can exist as an urban system rather than an individual architectural artifact. My thesis work analyzes five case studies in Berlin where political and economic factors determined the result of intervention, and how these sites can redefine our understanding of site-specific architecture as it relates to emotional contamination and memorialization.