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Emma Brodie
Monument to a Creek

UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY

SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, PLANNING, AND LANDSCAPE

MLA M1

EVDL 668 | LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE STUDIO II

INSTRUCTORS: MARY-ELLEN TYLER + JAMIE JOHNSON

I worked through my project with a desire to monumentalize a forgotten form - the creek - which has been fundamentally degraded over the past 100 years from infrastructural and transportation projects in East Calgary. The memory of the changing form of Nose Creek was completely lost; paved over and reduced to 6 lanes of highway.


Working with the creek as my focal point, and intrigued by the lost and forgotten history, functionality, and beauty of this waterway, I became intrigued with the idea of daylighting the lost identity of the creek, creating a piece of land art that celebrated it's form, in order to monumentalize what we so easily abandoned to history.
 

This project sought to balance both a physical representation of the memory of the creek, but also a reminder of the hard, goal-oriented, infrastructural projects that destroyed it. This was an opportunity to evoke a reaction and create an experience that alluded to many philosophical iterations of the "sublime". Obscurity in both the intellectual and physical sense (no referent for the landforms); Privation (there would a sense of silence or solitude currently missing from the site); Vastness (horizontal scale that diminishes the relative size of the observer); and infinity, succession, and uniformity (a form with limitless progression).

Land | Terre Design Research Network is a collective aimed at increasing awareness and research in landscape architecture across Canada. Academic researchers from seven institutions are joining forces to reduce the country’s geographic span by tackling research questions that impact us regionally, and nationally.

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