The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

3.1 | Joseph Heinz il Giovane, Capriccio.
Place is the product of a relationship—part subjective projection, part internalization
of an external reality. It is also distinct from a spatial continuum.
Among the evaluative mechanisms that discriminate place from space
is memory; correspondingly, amnesia is an operation which reverses that
process and dissolves place back into the indifference of space. In this chapter
I explore some of the determinations of place.
Any architectural act seeks to establish a place through a process of
enclosure and metaphoric association, but the role of the consumer has been
progressively advanced in constituting significance. Certainly since the
1960s, the idiosyncrasy of place has become firmly established in writings
on urbanism. The imposition of meaning has been allowed to be idiomatic
and subjective; at the same time, meanings have increasingly been acknowledged
as belonging to different interest groups.
As a result, processes of planning that seek to create meaningful
conjunctions and memorable epiphanies for an undifferentiated public have
been exposed as fragile and perspectival. The modernist projects, which proposed
making urban forms ephemeral and responsive to change while implying
that technology could be definitively represented in timeless and
Purist styles, have been put in doubt. Interest has been renewed in the past,
the provisional, the symbolic, the deferred—and in various local and ecological
solutions.
The article I contributed to the Strangely Familiar catalogue was
about Venice and a recent proposal to modernize it by building a metro sys-