Lecture 10 - Musings

City and Memory

Good music today, an Australian classic, Skyhooks’ "This is my city", released in 1976, by Mushroom Records. Took me back to high school, or just after anyway.

Today, Mirko elaborated on how memories (and people) are involved in the making of place, therefore, a city. He also spoke about heritage conservation and how this practice help or hinder a place and its memories.

People recognise a place because of what they experience within the space and the memories created from that experience. To follow on from that, city dwellers build memorials to remember a certain time or person and these memorials are the reminders of what went before. Sometimes these memorials can only be significant for a particular group of people, but it does not make the memorial any less significant. Anzac Square and the Shrine of Remembrance has great significance to the people of Brisbane and Australia, but a newly arrived visitor or immigrant from anywhere outside of a British settled country would have no idea.

Every place has a history, whether we know it or not is irrelevant, and that history is what makes a place, a place, somewhere memorable for some reason, as stated above. Just because we don’t know a place’s history does not make a place ‘null’. It’s like the crashing tree in a forest, if no-one is there to hear the sound, is it a sound? It still happens, and who is to say that it does not register with the birds, animals, insects etc.

The same thing with a place’s history, just because no human with writing ability is there to record it, does not mean it has not happened.

Architecture itself goes a long way to creating and reinforcing people’s memories; as a place to experience and a lot of it being so long-lasting, e.g. the Coliseum. It takes something three dimensional and makes it fourth dimensional due to the added aspect of time.

I’d like to add another dimension here, that of sense, especially smell and my partner often mentions the ‘presence’ of a building. The feeling a building evokes within your body. I know that sounds weird, but I have experienced it myself, especially in places of great suffering, such as a jail. Maybe it is a ‘sixth sense’ or maybe I am just going crazy.

With regard to the heritage question, it looks like it has been going on for quite some time, in one form or another. Sometimes the form is a quarry, such as the Pyramids, where ancient peoples used the stone to build elsewhere. This practice has greatly affected our ability to recreate what has gone before, therefore, heritage practices have needed to be modified and legislation enacted to prevent this destruction by ‘stone robbers’.

Over the last century or two, different countries have enacted charters and other legislation to protect the building or area in question. I totally agree with the practice of preservation rather than restoration. The shoring up of walls, the use of new material where there is no idea of what was there before or cannot be recreated, Old Government House in the QUT grounds is a good example of this type of preservation, mostly interior.

We must always remember that cities are for people and people have their memories ‘embedded’ in the architecture of a city. Treating this architecture carefully, no matter what its age, goes a long way to establishing a ‘platform’ for these memories.