UN_BUILDING

verb (present tense): a design strategy for preserving human memory by challenging the surface of a site by process of excavation and unveiling its relationship to its sense of place, memory of place, and spatial belonging to a place.

The practice of design has a history of the practice of “building” -- processes that include leveling a surface and building up. Over the centuries, this process has buried critical accounts, often those that are negative, dark, and filled with shame, below a surface never intended to be recovered. As a result, families, witnesses, and scholars struggle for decades after, attempting to find reconciliation for these agonizing histories of their friends, families, and allies. This generates questions, conversations, and crises about identity, human morality, worth, and cultural and social heritage, often never reaching a resolution.

Thus, I argue that the strategy of UNBUILDING is an imperative approach to architecture and design practices as a method for REDISCOVERING and MEMORIALIZING these lost legacies. This thesis will explore how architecture should be a method of excavating narratives that have been buried, lost, and forgotten by society, and argue that these rich frictions play a crucial role in present and future collective identity and memory. This will advocate for the practice of architecture as a method of providing HEALING, thus DIGNIFYING and memorializing that which society and history have concealed.

This thesis will EXCAVATE the history of the DeJarnette Sanitarium in Staunton, Virginia, a 20th-century private asylum for middle-income patients, that was separate from the government-funded state mental health hospital. The design proposal will focus on the eugenics program operated by Doctor Joseph DeJarnette in the mid to late 20th century, specifically the abuse of minority female groups in the area of Staunton through forced and undisclosed sterilization, then legal under Virginia law. The proposed site is adjacent to the Frontier Culture Museum and lies at the intersection of I-81 and I-64, a crucial area of growing urbanization of the city, but one that has deeply embedded historical roots. The practice was brought under state control in 1975, then transformed into a children’s hospital as the “DeJarnette Center for Human Development,” until 1966 when the center was relocated to Western State Hospital in Staunton, closing the original facilities permanently. Little to no effort to reconcile the past was performed by the state, besides offering a small reparation settlement to families decades later. Today, these buildings, massive in stature and real estate and once the “frontside” of the city, stand abandoned at the crest of the hill overlooking the Frontier Culture Museum, forever casting a shadow over Staunton as the parasitic “backside”.

My research proposes a non-traditional exhibition space that would bring to light this dark and hidden part of Virginia’s history, specifically memorializing the lives of women whose humanity was stripped from them by the white elite of Staunton in the 20th century. By looking at existing memorials and exhibitions, this proposal will challenge the traditional platform for representation and incorporate technological systems and explorations that would devise a multi-sensory experience for visitors, by integrating the first-person narrative of these patients told through journals, oral stories, and medical records. It includes an opportunity to include the abandoned structures of the sanitarium, as perhaps a space for remembrance or a background set to the present actors, therefore recontextualizing its existence. This thesis intends to explore the impact of the built environment on mental health and investigates material assemblies and tectonics that generate spaces of healing, both individual and collective. Therefore arguing that this dark narrative cannot become a neglected part of Virginian history, as a vital footprint on the COLLECTIVE IDENTITY of present and future generations.

The theoretical framework of this thesis includes extensive research via the lenses of medical practices, government and state regulations and laws, and personal accounts, including investigating Staunton at the scale of the city and the home. Specifically gathering accounts from present and past actors, like journals of patients during this era, lawsuits against DeJarnette, and the modern Western State Hospital records, protocols, and history, as well as the state lawsuits and reparation attempts. This will include research on the overall population trends and birthrates of the city before, during, and after the imposition of this program, the depleting populations of indigenous and African American groups, and timelines on activism trends and campaigns in the city. It will also be critical to examine state, nationwide, and global practices of eugenics and sterilization to understand Staunton’s vulnerability and susceptibility.

This proposal aims to discuss how historical narratives play a vital role in UNITING HUMANITY across time, place, and circumstance and propose the strategy of UNBUILDING as a new method to instill into design strategies, to acknowledge where we have come from, and how we plan to do things differently.

page 4 - 5 : Project Statements 100 | 25 | 6 page 6 - 7: Research Questions page 8 - 15: Annotated Bibliography and Literature Review

10 - 11| Literature Review

12 - 15| Annotated Bibliography page 16 - 29: Design Genealogy

18 - 23 | Heritage of Human Memorialization

24 - 29 | Along the Appalachian: Landownership + Displacement page 30 - 35: Precedent Analysis

| page 36- 51: Design Interventions

38 - 39 | UN_BUILDING: Memorializing the Legacy of Western State Hospital

40 - 43 | Intervention 1 | Memorial to Carrie Buck 44 - 47 | Intervention 2 | Legacy Markers at the New Cemetery 48 - 51 | Intervention 3 | Memorial to the Unnamed Victims of VA Eugenics