| This Master's Degree Project explores the concept of meaningful architecture as an avenue to preserve the culture and heritage of Alberta's Coal Branch. Cultural heritage has long been recognized as essential to the well-being of the people in a community in that they remain "rooted" to a valued past. The Coal Branch, once an isolated but thriving community of miners and their families is today an assemblage of mining relics, hamlets and abandoned towns. Yet, it remains a small but important piece of Alberta's history. In recognition of the challenge to preserve cultural heritage in the absence of historic resources, this project seeks to embody the memory of the unique experiences shared by the early residents of the Coal Branch---the joy and sorrow, the isolation and fraternity---in a contemporary architectural intervention.;Key words. Coal Branch, cultural heritage, preservation, memory, isolation, community, meaning, senses, spirit of place.;The critical examination of three conceptual strategies---spirit of place, landscape and architecture, and architecture and the senses---provides the framework for this Master's Degree Project. An analysis of five precedents selected to represent and support significant aspects of each of these approaches generates a broad understanding of the theoretical position, and in turn forms the foundation for the design. The proposed interpretive centre confronts the challenge to create meaningful places through a collaboration of landscape, architecture and sensuous experience, to embody the spirit of Alberta's Coal Branch. Designed to stimulate recollection and to evoke feelings of isolation and community it is an architecture inspired by, and to preserve, the cultural heritage of Alberta's Coal Branch. |
