Memory

List by author
List by title
List all abstracts

Abstracts

(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.

top