Memory
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(Memory Introductory Essay)
Memory and Architecture: investing, constructing and housing recollection
Michael J. Ostwald, The University
of Newcastle
Memory is the process wherein the past is recalled in the present.
This process typically involves two components—a phenomenological
trigger and the associated emotional or psychological response to this
trigger. While the term memory should refer to a person’s recollection
of an event which they have actually experienced, in architecture the
term has a more diffuse and inclusive range of meanings. In architecture,
memory is often used more abstractly to describe any connection between
the past and the present. Thus, memorials and monuments, which often
relate to events which few people have directly experienced, are seen
as participating in the processes of memory creation and stimulation.
Similarly, architectural forms and tectonics are assumed to have the
ability to control or shape the way in which memory is triggered. In
this sense architecture is seen to be addressing a collective cultural,
societal or transcendent memory. For this reason memory has become a
perennial theme in architectural discourse not only to describe the
capacity of an individual to recall the experiences which have shaped
their lives, but also to describe more broadly a variety of possible
connections between the past and the present. This paper introduces
three ways of considering the role played by memory in architecture
as a means of elucidating contemporary discourse in architectural history
and theory.
City as Storehouse: the framing of memory in the East Perth Cemeteries
Rachel Trigg, Curtin University of
Technology
Places of the dead are framed within Australian cities as silent storehouses
of personal and collective memories. Despite this, such places are commonly
ignored and are rendered uncertain and uncomfortable remnants of a forgotten
past. Central to this problem is the way in which places of the dead,
so strongly tied to the sacred and the mythological, are presented and
experienced within cities shaped largely by secular modernism. While
the relationship between history and the city was challenged by modernism,
contemporary urban design attempts to reconstruct a sense of shared
memory. This results in architectural fragments, severed from their
historical, physical and social context, being awkwardly reframed within
the contemporary city.
This is the case with the East Perth Cemeteries, the only Perth graveyard
from 1829 until 1899. After decades of neglect and vandalism, barely
800 gravestones now remain from an estimated 10 000 burials. This erasure
of the markers of memory has recently been accompanied by the reinvention
of history by the East Perth Redevelopment Authority (EPRA). Significant
portions of the cemeteries, particularly those once reserved for non-Christian
and non-European burials, have been replaced by townhouses complete
with mock heritage facades. In endeavouring to symbolise and legitimise
the newly gentrified community in this way, EPRA silences ancient Aboriginal
culture and more recent multicultural and industrial pasts in favour
of the memorialisation of white pioneers.
The example of the East Perth Cemeteries is one component of a larger
doctoral study into the framing of places of the dead in Australian
cities.
Communal Memory: two memorial projects by Richard Leplastrier
Rory Spence, Department of Architecture,
University of Tasmania
This paper examines two of Richard Leplastrier’s designs for
symbolic memorials: the recently completed Volunteers Memorial (2001),
in Sydney’s Domain, and the unsuccessful invited submission for
the Australian Hellenic Memorial Competition (1986), Canberra, in the
context of 20th century approaches to monumentality and the design of
memorials.
There are common elements to Leplastrier’s memorial projects.
They seem to avoid the suggestion of the veneration of a single object,
and they seek to make connections with their landscape contexts. They
imply an extension of the act of remembrance beyond the specific people
and events officially commemorated, to broader communal values and aspirations,
thus tying the particular subject to society as a whole and the wider
human condition. Thirdly, they are concerned with the making of places
for everyday human occupation rather than simply for the contemplation
of an iconic monument: they invite interpretation and evoke use. They
also suggest ideas of ritual and performance. Perhaps most important
of all, they imply transcendence of loss. The paper demonstrates how
these ideas both recall and depart from earlier approaches to the memorial
and suggests that they imply a questioning of the artificial separation
between life and death in many western societies.
Getting Lost: amnesia and resistance in the transformation of places and place names in Singapore
Roxanna Waterson, Department of
Sociology, National University of Singapore.
Few cityscapes have undergone such continuous remodeling as Singapore’s
over the past few decades. Transformation of the city’s appearance
is matched by equally far-reaching experiments in social engineering.
Not only buildings have changed; place and street names have also been
altered. The latter is a political act more often associated with revolutions,
but is here part of an ongoing campaign to transform patterns of language
use, and hence of identity. In line with the promotion of Mandarin over
Chinese dialects, certain older names have been given new, Mandarin
names. This process of occlusion risks alienating those who feel attachment
to original Hokkien or Malay names, which had real associations with
local topography or past activities. The new names are unpronounceable
for many, and lack any association in collective memory. Public resentment,
however, has led to the reinstatement of some older names. The outcomes
of the remodeling of the city and its memories are thus to some degree
negotiated. Tiny threads of personal, emotional rootedness to place
allow people to feel a genuine sense of national identity and attachment;
thus the long term disadvantages of a too ruthless erasure of the past
become apparent. The paper situates these issues in the context of recent
research on landscape and social memory.
The Privileged Place of Home: place, memory and the disease of nostalgia
Nicole Sully, University of Western
Australia
In the centuries prior to the advent of printing, scholars who practised
the ars memorativa, often undertook travel specifically in order to
expand their repertoires of backgrounds for their memory palaces. Thus
the act of travelling became associated with not just the pursuit of
knowledge and experience, but also with memory. However, in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries this association with memory and travel was
tragically inverted with the rising incidence of a much feared disease,
known as Nostalgia.
Nostalgia was a sometimes fatal bout of homesickness, a form of melancholia,
which was essentially a disease of both memory and place, which while
now dismissed as psychosomatic, or merely ‘nervous humours’,
was surrounded with such trepidation that impending travellers went
so far as to avoid prolonged absences from home in fear of contracting
the disease. This paper will investigate the relationship between travel
and memory as expressed through the disease of nostalgia. Tracing the
disease from its seventeenth century origins through to its twentieth
century transformation from ‘disease’ to ‘sentiment’,
this paper will draw from the thought of Gaston Bachelard and the films
of Andrey Tarkovsky to argue that the disease of nostalgia was a pathological
connection to place, which, through memory, idealised and problematised
one’s connection to home.
Site and Ascription: the Octagon within the Great Palace of the Byzantine Emperors
Nigel Westbrook & Karina
Sunk, Faculty of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Fine Arts,
The University of Western Australia | Department for Planning and Infrastructure,
Government of Western Australia
In this paper, we will discuss a specific example of Byzantine architecture,
the octagon and chapel of St. Stephen within the heart of the Great
Palace in Constantinople, To Megas Palation, as a case study for the
delineation of the interplay of site and ascription within Byzantine
imperial architecture. The operation of the function of ascription will
be presented as a form of spoliation taking both physical and rhetorical
forms. We will make reference to recent textual, topological and typological
analyses in examining both the continuity and discontinuity, memory
and erasure of the Great Palace.
Six Doubts About Architecture
Graham Crist, RMIT University
An architectural work is always the result of considerable collaboration.
Despite this, traditional architectural history tends to foreground
an author, placing that author in a lineage, and isolating the work
from other contexts. In the architectural work of Melbourne office Six
Degrees, collaboration is a sufficiently important idea to become a
primary focus. This is seen both in the structure of the practice, and
in the nature of the works made by that practice. Collaboration is understood
in an expanded sense, as a working method which informs the projects,
an interaction with the built process which is less predictable, and
more a negotiated relation to specific urban or economic situations.
The collaborative process radically affects the work, reducing its formal
purity and authorial clarity. Techniques involving reclaiming found
objects, and incorporating built remnants are seen as an architectural
collaboration with outside circumstances which create doubts regarding
the boundaries of the work. The focus on collaboration in Six Degrees’
work has consequences for the way in which architecture might be approached
through practice and criticism, shifting focus away from uniqueness,
isolation and clarity, instead seeing all architecture as an addition
or perpetual negotiation of some kind.
Starting from Scratch: building the Meridien Bank in Lusaka
Sam Ridgway, School of Architecture,
Landscape Architecture and Urban Design, The University of Adelaide
In his recent book, Uncommon Ground: Architecture, Technology and Topography,
David Leatherbarrow questions the “valency of architecture”
in the West on the grounds of its method of construction. Specifically,
he asks how an original and creative work of architecture can be conceived
and built using industrialised, premade materials and elements. He claims
that the use of “ready-made solutions largely transforms design
invention into choice, converting creativity into selection.”
In industrialised countries, architects have a long history of leaving
thinking about building materials and systems to others and this may
be part of the reason we have reached a “crisis” in contemporary
architectural practice.
The design and construction of the Meridien Bank in Lusaka (1992-1994)
stands in stark contrast to this mode of architectural design and building.
When the architect Walter Dobkins asked the Quantity Surveyor what materials
there were to build the bank the reply was that “there were none.”
As a result Walter sourced raw materials which could be hand tooled
on site using local “cottage industry” skills and techniques
from the squatter settlements. While this was in part an attempt to
produce a building suited to and representative of its region it is
also the manifestation of a very different way of thinking about building
technology.
The Town of Givors, Substratum of Tony Garnier’s Cité Industrielle
Pieter Uyttenhove, Department
of Architecture & Urban Planning, Ghent University
Mythification has, from the start, eclipsed the memory embedded in
one of the most emblematic icons of modern architecture : the plan of
the Industrial City (« Cité industrielle ») by Tony
Garnier, drawn initially in 1899-1901 during his stay at the Villa Medici
in Rome.
In the introduction of the publication he made of his Industrial City
in 1917, Garnier indicates that his project wants to offer an alternative
to old industrial cities analoguous to those situated in the south of
Lyon. Surprisingly, Garnier nowhere points by name to any particular
town as the source of inspiration for his Industrial City. However,
a close reading of Garnier’s introduction doesn’t leave
any doubt, and verification shows that, in terms of topography and urban
composition, the Industrial City was indeed copied on the site of Givors,
a small industrial town in the south of Lyon. Not only the geographic
relief and the landscapes are formally similar, but also the general
structure and several urban parts of Givors are taken over in the site-plan
of the Industrial City.
The silence of Garnier about his direct source of inspiration would
not be so odd and consequential if architectural historians had later
been able to reveal his example. During one century though, historiography
never looked behind the icon and continued in a certain way Garnier’s
disguise. Despite several original efforts from historians like K.C.
Pawlowski, L. Piessat, D. Wiebenson and O. Cinqualbre to reconstitute
in an analoguous or analytical way the site of the Industrial City,
Garnier’s concept was never retraced to its direct formal origins.
These particular facts lead us to three questions which this paper examines:
reality, formal resemblance and disguise ; historiography of modern
architecture ; and the contemporary meaning of the Industrial City.
Translating Memories into Memorials by a Performing Body
Reena Tiwari, Curtin University of
Technology
City spaces work as a palimpsest, where memories are inscribed and
re-inscribed through time and cultural contexts. This paper explores
the way in which an urban setting along with a performing body, shapes
and constructs a ‘monument of memory’. This monument, while
defining the past, is still able to link to the present. This paper
proposes that a physical setting, which has the capability to unfold
events or performance, becomes a key in translating memories into memorials.
This paper develops an argument against contemporary approaches towards
memorialisation in light of Henri Lefebvre’s critique against
a dualistic thinking about space, where architectural space is viewed
in opposition to the mental realm. A third type of space – a lived
space, that is unconscious, non-verbalised and where a body is able
to express itself, is proposed as a link between the architectural space
and mental realm. This paper highlights the construction of the lived
space i.e. the monument of memory, where a bodily performance is able
to re-construct the memories (mental realm) on the actual physical space.
This re-constructed lived space is not about re-creation or replication
of the past environment, but is re-constituting and building within
the present framework based on the footprints of the past. The nature
of this lived space, and the way in which the performing body constructs
it, is examined by analysing a performance episode in an urban square
in Varanasi, India.
Underlying Ethos in Indian Architecture: Critical Regionalism in
the age of Globalisation
Shaji Panicker & Michael
J. Ostwald, School of Architecture and Built Environment, University
of Newcastle, Australia
Professor Kurula Varkey has identified eight “psychic-cultural
constants” which he believes have been manifesting themselves,
in various ways, in Indian architecture throughout history. His eight
constants are examined in this paper and a ninth constant is derived,
which the authors posit underlies all of the eight constants of Varkey.
The ninth constant will be seen to be sympathetic to the contemporary
developments in Indian society, which are exemplified by the writings
of the anthropologist, Arjun Appadurai in his ‘Modernity at large’.
The paper also questions the possibly superfluous concern, advanced
in recent times by most contemporary writers and practitioners of architecture
in India, that of losing one’s architectural identity in the wake
of globalisation.
Varkey’s eight constants and this authors’ ninth one will
also demonstrate and support the possible application of Tzonis and
Lefaivre’s interpretation of Critical Regionalism to solving the
contemporary issues of identity constructions in Indian architecture.
However, the paper does not posit that Tzonis and Lefaivre’s Critical
Regionalism is the best and only solution for solving the problems of
identity constructions confronting post-independence contemporary architecture
in India—rather, it anticipates a possible solution.
The Weissenhofsiedlung and the House for Dr. Christ
Sean Flanagan, school of architecture,
university of auckland
The house for Dr. Christ stood upon the grounds of the Weissenhofsiedlung,
the renowned exhibition of Modernist housing built by the Deutscher
Werkbund in Stuttgart in 1927. However, despite its prominent location,
it was never included among the Weissenhof buildings for exhibition
purposes and it was neither mentioned nor photographed in the exhibition’s
official record, Bau und Wohnung (1927). It has also passed without
mention in the official history of the Modern Movement. There is no
explanation for its exclusion, even though it reveals much in regards
to the organization of the Weissenhofsiedlung and the formation of the
Modern Movement.
The conventional silence surrounding the house represents an agreement
amongst Modern architects and historians not to comment on this difficult
neighbour. By tracing the casting aside of the house for Dr. Christ,
this paper seeks to examine the terms of the agreed silence that organised
the Weissenhofsiedlung.
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