The Eyes of Memory: Architecture, Ownership, and the Future of Painful Pasts
- Frazer Macdonald Hay
- May 10
- 4 min read
Written by Frazer Macdonald Hay
In April 2025, The New York Times published an article titled “Can a Decaying Hospital With a Grim History Be Brought Back to Life?”, chronicling the proposed redevelopment of Crownsville Hospital in Maryland. Once a segregated psychiatric facility, Crownsville’s history is embedded with institutional racism, medical abuse, and social marginalization. Its future, as imagined by developers and some community leaders, is now one of healing, wellness, and opportunity. But such transitions raise critical questions: what happens when sites of historical trauma are reimagined through optimism? Can places be rebranded without their histories being rewritten—or worse, erased?
An old Russian proverb warns: “Dwell on the past and you will lose an eye. Forget the past and you will lose both eyes.” This adage encapsulates the tension many communities face when dealing with difficult heritage. We are not meant to remain trapped in the wounds of history—but neither can we afford to forget them. Memory, especially uncomfortable memory, is not simply backward-looking. It is the foundation for ethical action in the present.
Psychiatrist Carl Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious offers a profound lens through which to understand sites like Crownsville. For Jung, the collective unconscious is an inherited psychic structure filled with archetypes—universal templates of experience such as suffering, healing, oppression, and transcendence. These archetypes manifest in symbols, dreams, myths—and built environments. A place like Crownsville, with its stark corridors and institutional facades, does not just tell a story. It holds emotional and psychic weight. It is part of a deeper symbolic language we all intuitively read.
To redevelop such a site without engaging these layers is to risk psychological repression rather than social healing. Crownsville is not a blank slate. Its very architecture is saturated with meaning. As Robert Bevan writes in The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (2016), “the virtue of a built record to this method of ideological production lies in the apparent permanence of brick and stone. Buildings and shared spaces can be a location in which different groups come together through shared experience; collective identities are forged and traditions invented. It is architecture’s very impression of fixity that makes its manipulation such a persuasive tool” (p. 24).
Architecture is not neutral. It carries memory—and those memories can be manipulated. Hannah Arendt, writing decades earlier in The Human Condition (1958), observed that “the reality and reliability of the human world rests primarily on the fact that we are surrounded by things more permanent than the activity by which they are produced.” When the built environment is reimagined too cleanly—when permanence is disrupted without care—our sense of social continuity is also at risk.
This is why the politics of memory matter. Those who claim ownership over the past often dictate what is remembered and where. As Buciek et al. (2006) have argued, memory is not merely about recall—it is a hegemonic device that influences behavior in the present and aspirations for the future. In places enmeshed in historical violence or rapid transformation, memory becomes a battlefield. Competing groups vie to define it in their image. The risk, always, is that official memory crowds out vernacular or emotional memory; that one version of the past becomes sanctioned, while others are rendered invisible.
The guardians and authors of memory set the parameters through which history is inscribed, curated, and publicly experienced. They decide which stories are told through monuments, plaques, or architectural reuse—and which are quietly neglected. Too often, the narratives that dominate are those that align with political agendas, market forces, or ideologies of progress. Meanwhile, lived experiences—especially of marginalised communities—are subordinated or excluded.
Memory exists on multiple scales—individual and collective, official and unofficial, public and private, literal and exemplary. As scholars like John Bodnar and Paul Shackel remind us, public memory is never fixed. It is a negotiation—a “fluid process” shaped by governments, institutions, communities, and the media. In transitional societies, or post-conflict contexts, memory becomes not just a historical concern but a political and ethical one. The question is no longer what happened? but whose version counts, and what should we do about it?
Crownsville’s transformation into a site of “Black joy” can only succeed if that joy is rooted in truth. Not just symbolic acknowledgment but real reckoning—with the institutionalized violence that took place there, with the memories held in the bricks, and with the people who carry that past in their bodies and families. Memorialization must not be a token gesture or sanitized branding exercise. It must be a process of collective meaning-making, guided by those most affected.
To forget is to endanger our psychic and civic integrity. But to remember well is to offer the possibility of healing—not through erasure, but through inclusion. If we hope to build futures from the ruins of pain, we must learn to see with both eyes open.
And beyond Crownsville, we must ask: how many other buildings with uncomfortable truths are left rotting? Are these un-monumental sites—those crumbling hospitals, schools, prisons, and asylums—part of a broader agenda of silencing, of controlling the past by allowing it to decay into invisibility? If memory is power, then the neglect of these spaces is not benign. It is strategic. It is time we looked again, and looked harder, at what and who we are being encouraged to forget.
Bevan, Robert. The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War. London: Reaktion Books, 2016. ISBN: 978-1-78023-597-4.
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.
Jung, Carl. “The Structure of the Psyche,” Collected Works, Vol. 8, par. 325.
Buciek, K., Juul, K. & Sørensen, N. (2006). "The Battle for the Past."
Bodnar, John. Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Shackel, Paul A. Memory in Black and White: Race, Commemoration, and the Post-Bellum Landscape. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2003.
Till, Karen. “Places of Memory.” In A Companion to Political Geography, edited by John Agnew et al., Blackwell, 2003.
Rowlands, Michael. “Remembering to Forget: Sublimation as Sacrifice in War Memorials.” In The Art of Forgetting, edited by Adrian Forty and Susanne Küchler. Berg, 1999.
Perlmutter, Philip. Legacy of Hate: A Short History of Ethnic, Religious, and Racial Prejudice in America. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999.
