ABSTRACT

Fragments of ideas and thoughts come to the fore when moving. Being mobile somehow allows fluidity to establish connections to all kinds of places. Recollections of travelling along or does it resist our perception; we only experience it, as Walter Benjamin says, through distraction, a collection of moods and systems which affect our memory. ‘One of the keyare superimpositions of planning and projection. In various conceptualisations of what it means to navigate and inhabit the city, the impact of space is posited on shifting sensations the emphasis has shifted from intention to use, as Jonathan Raban noted in his prescient exploration of the “soft” elements of cityspace—“the city invites you to remake it.”’ 1 It feels his road for nearly 20 years. I’ve been thinking about how we understand places, so the architecture becomes invisible. Despite our everyday experience of it, is it through familiarity issumptions of writing about cities and urban experience in the twentieth century has been that they are causative of, or constructed by the neurotic tendencies of the subject—that they and moods—not what is there but what is supplied or projected—markers of past experiences in which the pedestrian becomes an avatar of hopeful or anxious presence. Increasingly and looks different today, but then again it feels and looks different every time I travel along this part of the road. I wonder if something, albeit imperceptible, has changed. Maybe I’m not remembering it correctly, but that large cinema complex wasn’t around last time I came along here and also that new shopping complex. Then again, maybe I just didn’t one town and driven through another, perhaps even two or three. The conurbation sprawl just keeps on going, its boundaries fluid, its end never in sight.’ As Paul Barker has probably the ones who feel they have ‘arrived’. Now anxiety creeps in, their positions defined but open. Moving on, not knowing when to stop, what to leave behind, what to leave since it may be that only ruins express a fact completely.’ 3 ‘I am convinced that the future is lost somewhere in the dumps of the non-historical past; it is in yesterday’s newspapers, notice. The cement collar stranglehold that the ring road established is evaporating. The centre seems to be creeping outward. You can travel for miles and not realize that you’ve left commented in relation to the growth of malls and “edge cities”, people like to stop change at the point which benefits them most.’ 2 The constituencies who govern these decisions are standing. What are the things which can be retained, which signal to us clues about the past, present and the future? ‘But the question of the fragment in architecture is very important in the jejune advertisements of science-fiction movies, in the false mirror of rejected dreams.’ 4 24 May 1912. This was its first incarnation; what a symbol of optimism, of forward thinking. A structure that seemed to embody the opportunity to attain a speed whereby time might be arrested, that we might finally achieve a sense of now, to arrive at the present communication. Then there’s recollection and memory. Through this our travelling continues, from the realms of physical change to the emotional and mental states that by their nature They always had been and always would be the same. But the universe is now thought to have been born in a primordial explosion some fifteen billion years ago and to have been history may be more widely self-announcing. Berlin…modern, architecturally “new”, confesses its earlier devastation in the very “newness” necessitated by that devastation…. Or that forever eludes us. What are the ways and means that one generation employs to communicate meaning to the next? Tradition, objects left behind, go hand in hand as direct can be seen to be influx. ‘Until the 1960’s, the universe was generally believed by physicists to be eternal; so were the properties of matters and of fields; so were the laws of nature. growing and evolving ever since.’ 5 From, to. Stop, start. Old, new. Here, there. Here and now. And back again. ‘If the war involves a country’s total population or its terrain, the again Paris, architecturally ancient, silver-white and violet-blue, announces in the very integrity of its old streets and buildings (their stately exteriors undisturbed by war except by the occasional insertion here and there of a plaque to a fallen member of the Resistance) its survival, its capitulation.’ 6 The city has always remained a place for new Issues of identity, security, civic pride, status are all up for consideration and with each successive group in authority, so these issues take on new meaning. Maybe it is about we will be constantly drawn back to the memories and emotions that are triggered by this place or that, by the things that remain unaltered, by the clues that are in the architecture that’s encrusted with barnacles…But every shell we pick both literal and metaphorical Places to disappear into and places that disappear from view. It may be a biological destiny to keep moving, keep changing, but to up has its histories, and you certainly don’t choose those histories…. You have to account for the encrustations and the what end? feeling at home, or whatever that could mean. Is the other man’s grass greener, or is it a case of altering the perceived mistakes of earlier generations? For all that things change, or spaces yet to be reconsidered. The porosity of the new seeping into the old only partially resisted. ‘I imagine a historical person as being somehow like a hermit crab inertias, just as you have to remain accountable to each other through learning how to remember, if you will, the barnacles you’re carrying.’ 7