ABSTRACT
Places of memory inspire creative thinking and story-telling about the historical past, reminding us of worlds we have lost in the broader pageant of the past. When Walter Benjamin re-visioned history as a porous surface whose holes provide windows into discarded memories he suggested that ‘if we look for them they will open to us like heliotropes meeting the gaze of the sun’.2 Throughout this book we have fixed our gaze – in very different ways and from a variety of different disciplines and professional standpoints – upon the porous surface of the history of the War Memorial Gymnasium – the Memorial Window, the monumental entrances (and exits), the bleachers on the basketball court, the bowling alley, and outwards along the old ‘desire’ lines to the Women’s gymnasium and Varsity Stadium. From it we have looked across the campus to the Osborne Center, which never did, in fact, replace the War Memorial Gym as the home of the School of Physical Education. Within and around the gym we have sought to illuminate meanings and memories of the past and to elicit new understandings about the ideal modern body of architectural discourse and the education of the athletic body in higher education in the years following World War II.
