ABSTRACT
Theoretically, modern architects, identifying social memory with history and hence perceiving it as an impediment to original design and more generally to progress, discounted the role of memory in the conception of their buildings.2 The architects of the War Memorial Gymnasium were no exception; nor would it seem were the students and officials who commissioned it. As one architectural commentator expressed it in 1944, ‘the past is a distraction and a tyranny’.3 It was a sentiment echoed by a contemporary UBC student who wrote of the burden, deceit and anachronism of architectural styles seeking to recall the past. But then, how might a modern architecture – of glass and concrete, of a vocabulary of forms intentionally stripped of any associational or literary aspect and entirely bereft of the symbolism and rhetorical figures of ornament – compel a recollection of anything beyond itself with any specificity or predictability? How could architecture, in this instance, bring to mind those who had served and died in a modern war, and their sacrifices and aims? Can social memory, denied a role in the conception of modern architecture, circulate without these architectural supports? Architecture served the individual in negotiating the here and now, of reuniting the feel of the modern world with the instrumentality of its production. If modern architecture was about forgetting – about steeling itself against the ‘distractions’ and ‘tyranny’ of the past – what purpose would it serve in housing a war memorial? Is the relationship of memory and architecture then, as Adrian Forty has recently asserted, ‘less straightforward than some recent discussions might lead one to suppose’.4
