The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part I: Filters
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Barry Curtis
ture of late-twentieth-century cities. Although modernism as a universalizing
and progressive project attempted to unite aesthetics and social function,
it did so at the cost of defining function narrowly. The fantasy of a
definitive solution, what Jean-François Lyotard has called a “final rebuilding,”
failed to account for the complex relationship of new architecture to
the past, as an embodiment and a commentary on the passage of time.
Architecture obliterates and constitutes the past. It establishes itself
in relation to a time and place of origin, and it also endures and is
marked by the passage of time and interpretation. Architecture is always
suspended between inventory and memory, so that its significance articulates
meanings at once in syntagmatic and paradigmatic dimensions. It provides
containers for memories in a culture where they are superabundant.
Marc Augé has suggested that the term “super modern” is a more effective
way of describing the present than “post modern” in order to account for
“this time overloaded with events that encumber the present along with the
recent past.” 17
Cities as a matrix of routes, junctions, and structures function as a
compelling metaphor for memory. Elements acknowledged to be “historic”
are surrounded by superimpositions that in some cases replace other build-
3.5 | Galleried street project, from S. Marco to the Rialto.