ABSTRACT
Ruskin's “Lamp of Memory” situates power in permanence, eliminating the agency of dismantled projects within architectural history and overlooking embodied energy in consciously erased landscapes. Barton's Sites of Memory explains that the built environment provides collective history and cultural memory; yet the legacy of Black architectural heritage within the American South has been plagued with invisibility and trauma through the antebellum enslaved community's architecture of impermanence and postbellum acts of conscious erasure. A radical tectonics approach reaches beyond built permanence, revealing cognitive and embodied structures. Empathetic structures that acknowledge systematic oppression, exclusion, and exploitation in the built environment are nascent forms of radical tectonics but that they typically do not surface lost histories, memories, and values. As explored in a case study of the Equal Justice Initiative's National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, forensic architectural history can quantify a site's social changes, displacements, and environmental inequities.
