Portrait of Memory

Architecture is the moment when our society’s values are printed onto earth, visions brought to reality. But we no longer recognize the reality that lies beneath our feet. And yet, we stand on that telluric memory: the attached recording presents a summary, a portrait of the memory of a place, in this particular case the portrait of the city of Copenhagen. It is simultaneously organics, minerals, living creatures, nutrients and toxins, as well as phenomena like decay, drought, erosion, spillage, excavation, dwelling and labor. This recording is a slice of our shared memory, formed of the past, embodying the capacity to cultivate a future. Everything we build out of has always been, and will always be here. 

On a limited planet, ideas of limitless growth and advancement are delusions made possible by only looking into the immediate future, by postponing solving problems beyond the horizon of the quartal economy. We pretend to live in a mirage where virgin theories and pieces emerge out of a void, accelerating forever advancing development. Thus human actions have resulted in a new geological era, the anthropocene – or more precisely described by the term capitalocene, where it’s not just human presence per se, but the disproportionate human effects on earth that are affecting the “almost eternal” aspects of the planet. This technocentric worldview governs our thinking, and makes genuinely sustainable measures seem like limitations for technological advancement. We perceive the planet as something limiting our imagination, rather than the precious enabler of life that it is. 

But if architecture strives to depict our values, what status can be ascribed to a building that destroys the livable planet under our feet? Can the current architecture still speak to us and create “sacred” spatial experiences, as the best kind of architecture is said to do? Is beauty beautiful, if it exemplifies our blindness to the environmental disaster that threatens our existence?

For this reason, meaningful discussion on human activities and their effects necessitates a shift in temporal scale; a geological timespan. The current, seeming limitlessness and act of alienation separate architecture from its history, context and effects. We keep attempting to resolve a crisis caused by overexploitation of resources with an aesthetic and form that since modernism have manifested a supposed liberation from resource scarcity. Reconnecting with memory, through recognizing the continuous recording, sustainability no longer limits us, as it becomes embedded in the very essence of architecture. 

Following the words of Anna Tsing, living in the capitalist ruins precarity has become the condition of our time. Hence, architecture can no longer search for solutions that are conceived in an instant and perceived to be unchangeable. We need to let go of the concept of architecture as a tangible, stationary “piece of art”, with virgin birth and an end of vanishing into thin air; architecture as a new, unique gimmick, a product, a monument with such phases as the invention, the time of construction, the finalized state and the end of life cycle. Instead, we need to embrace the full meaning of the “work of art”. The key being the “work”, the act, the process. 

Understanding architecture in relation to where it has been, where it’s coming from and where it’s going, steeps architecture in memory. By embracing this temporal perspective, we understand that ideas are not born out of thin air but shaped by their history and structures are not built out of “virgin” materials, but out of our limited earth. Rechanneling our attention back to that deeper understanding of the recording, we can create architecture that acknowledges its inherent relation to the circuits and the limitedness of our earth. Through remembering, we acknowledge the collective nature of architecture, sharing the authorship, and realize that architecture does not begin or end with us. Architecture no longer thrives to explore the “new”, but the eternal, the continuation. All of our traces will be recorded into the shared, telluric memory.