The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part I: Filters
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Barry Curtis
glazed exteriority we never really see the monument, I shall attempt
to crack its eidetic veneer, to loosen meaning, to make visible
the activity of memory in monuments. It is my hope that such
a critique may save our icons of remembrance from hardening into
idols of remembrance. 19
Worried about the capacity of memorials to absorb and negate memory,
Young suggests that it is necessary to remember the process of memorialization,
to recast memory in ways that recognize its need to change, and to
acknowledge our different motives for remembering.
Memorials as outcrops of the past have been seen as particularly intrusive
at times when the future is conceived as unproblematically “progressive.”
As Christine Boyer has pointed out, such a view of the future is
increasingly untenable at the end of the twentieth century. When utopian
desires are primarily focused on restoring lost totalities and certainties,
there is a danger of repressing that aspect of the past which Aldo Rossi has
referred to as “a museum of pain.” 20
The process of uncovering the past is dialectically related to bringing
the present into question. Even the most nostalgic and factually remote
versions of lost “golden ages”—classical Greece, medieval England, Victorian
values—have been potent generators of radical politics. The
metaphoric relationship between archaeology and psychoanalysis is rooted
in a dynamic of building on the foundations of the past, where “memory
traces” lie dormant until cathected in the present.
Memory is rarely without contradictions, and it must be compromised
in order to function. It can be attached to place in ways that are transactional
and unpredictable. In Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino contemplates a
sampling of five ways in which memory can play a part in the experience of
urbanity. 21 In one city, the visitor perceives the same components that he has
witnessed previously in other cities; but as in all generic texts, there is a significant
difference. In a second city, everything that is desirable is referred
to his memory of having visited before as a younger man, so that the desire
itself is a memory. In the third, the city is a palimpsest of the past, heavily
marked with the signs of the passage of time. In the fourth, the city functions
as an armature for memory, structured in such a way that it aids recollection.
In the last, the inhabitants are preoccupied with representations of
the city as it was years before, and pleasurably regret the loss of its grace and
distinctiveness.
Like memory, the city is a play of perspectives and constellations
created by points of view adopted in time and space. Walter Benjamin has
commented that memory “is the medium of past experience, as the ground