Arts Thread

The rich shipbuilding history of Deptford Creek in London has long been forgotten. The Mnemonic Museum of Shipbuilding is designed on the site directly east of the Deptford Creek Lifting Bridge and acts as a mnemo-technique for the construction of a collective memory of Deptford’s shipbuilding history. The museum also addresses the significant number of artefacts stored by museums by exhibiting those hidden in boxes of the Greenwich National Maritime Museum. The building revolves around the character of Mary Lacy (1740-1795), a carpenter and shipwright aboard HMS Sandwich. The spaces are divided into a chronological succession of galleries representative of Deptford’s shipbuilding industry from the 16th to 21st centuries, achieved through varying lighting conditions and architectural details, and a private residence for Mary Lacy. The latter is designed as an artefact of the museum and is representative of a carpenter’s living conditions on an 18th century ship. Mary Lacy is the museum’s carpenter and crafts a new apparatus every high tide. This resonates with Henri Bergson’s theories of memory as visitors gradually build a collective memory of Deptford’s shipbuilding history by revisiting the museum and encountering new exhibited artefacts. The traditional architectural design approach is inverted to derive the large-scale from the small-scale and consists of crafting details that gradually inform the building’s architecture.