Ms. Abigail Zola

Professional Background

Abigail Zola received a master’s degree in architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design and a bachelor’s degree from The Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at The George Washington University. Her master’s thesis centers on “emotional contamination,” which describes residual feelings associated with a space where a negative or tragic event occurred personally, historically, or politically to an individual or group. Emotional contamination affects one’s associations with a place and informs their willingness to spend time there. Her project establishes a set of design principles rooted in uncovering and acknowledging the lifespan of a site, and considers how this acknowledgment can exist as an urban system rather than an individual architectural artifact. Additionally, her project includes an analysis of case studies in Berlin, where political and economic factors determined the result of intervention, and how these sites can redefine our understanding of site-specific architecture as it relates to emotional contamination and memorialization.

Fellowship Research

Abigail Zola was awarded the Fred and Maria Devinki Memorial Digital Humanities Fellowship for her research project, “Uncovering Emotional Contamination: Redefining the Process of Site-Specific Analysis.” This multi-part project seeks to uncover the emotional contamination of Holocaust sites through deep listening of oral testimonies, architectural recreations, and analyses of these sites. Ms. Zola’s research aims to produce a digital archive of sites that individual survivors associate with their experiences in direct and indirect ways. This archive will highlight the lifespan of a site before the emotional contamination occurred, what experiences the individual had with the site that led to the contamination, and the current state of the site both physically and symbolically within its context. Additionally, the fellowship allows Ms. Zola to translate the analysis within the archive into visual and architectural representations using digital tools like mapping, 3D modeling, and diagramming. Her project aims to create an interface that showcases the lessons learned through the process of undertaking this type of research and a replicable methodology for engaging with emotionally contaminated sites in the future.

Residency Period: October 1, 2023–June 30, 2024