Meaning, Memory and Amnesia | uniformnovember

History has been gathered up and presented as heritage of a meaningful past that should be remembered and more and more buildings and other sites have been called on to act as witnesses of the past” (Macdonald 2009, p01).

People have been inspired to create new spaces, rituals and infrastructure amongst ruins for millennia, artists in particular. From London to Berlin to Rome to Manila, many cities have been continually built anew atop the wreckage of their pasts, with creative groups often leading the way.

It is this final role of ‘architecture as register’ that has gone on to help underpin an evolution to a contemporary role of ‘architecture as peacebuilder’. Driessen argues “the built environment provides cues for behaviour, meaning that architecture too is a means of nonverbal communication.

Stewart Brand ties the concept of "subconscious milieu" with architecture in his book "How Buildings Learn" by emphasizing the importance of designing buildings that are responsive to the needs and experiences of the people who inhabit them. He advocates for creating environments that consider the social milieu and the sensory experiences of the oc... See more

“peace processes must look to the past, to the violence, divisions and origins of conflict, and construct (or deconstruct) it in such a way as to allow society to move forward” (McDowell and Braniff, 2014 p05).

“A people or a class which is cut off from its own past is far less free to choose and to act as a people or a class than one that has been able to situate itself in history.” - John Berger

Ruins can be potent "containers for emergent forms of inhabitation in a damaged world." Relating to ruins as more than nostalgic, fetishized objects interrupts our memory cycles, reminding us that place can be remade in imaginative ways even when conditions are harsh.

However, for some like Cornelius Holtorf “cultural memory is not about giving testimony of past events, as accurately and truthfully as possible, nor is it necessarily about ensuring cultural continuity: it is about making meaningful statements about the past in a given cultural context of the present. (Holtorf, 2001).