The notion of mediated experience is intrinsic to the materiality of souvenirs, offering a critical route into the lineaments of memory. While hitherto the creation, consumption and collecting of souvenirs have been quite rightly presented within the typology of the formation of the personal wunderkammer, less attention has been devoted to how these objects can signify a tabula rasa onto which collective meanings can be inscribed in the sphere of political memory and national or civic identity. In this paper, we present an object that formed part of an innovative design project, Scotland Can Make It!, curated by Panel Glasgow as part of the cultural programming of Scotland 2014. In it six design teams collaborated with local makers and industry to produce new ‘souvenirs’ that elicited a process of materiality and making, and of these The Golden Tenement, a small die-cast architectural model of a Dalmarnock tenement block, was arguably the most reflective on the processes of self-feeding consumption and the generation of detritus that was one of the by-products of Glasgow’s transformative identity in the run-up to the Commonwealth Games. The object quite literally commemorates the invisible: a tenement block fought for, but destroyed, as a means to generate a new tabula rasa for the facilities of the Games; a human story, that of a family challenged and evicted, whose collaboration with the designers and makers Neil McGuire and Marianne Anderson became in a sense an exquisite corpse, an object that evokes absence, the disappeared and the lost but in which meanings and interpretations were and remain intrinsically fluid. Designed to be seen, held, displayed and collected, the Golden Tenement offers a development on the new souvenirs promoted in Scotland in the second half of the twentieth century – a means to activate collective memory in a manner that transforms object into material essence. By presenting the Golden Tenement within the framework of politicised souvenirs, such as the objects produced in the wake of historical seismic moments, we frame the process of its creation as one in which maker and object join within a critical voice to signify material absence as well as a narrative presence.