Losing Site: Architecture, Memory and Place

The memory of space and place are reflected in our experience. Tourism is currently an uncontrollable mobility factor - whether human, identities, cultures, meanings, information, finance and objects - that cause changes and changes in space and place. Gaston Bachelard (1964), Edward Casey (2000) as philosophers and phenomenologist have also traced this powerful connection between memory and place. The work of Jane Jacobs (2001) is essential in this reading. Yi-Fu Tuan (2001) had a different approach and suggests that memorable architecture should strengthen our memories, enhance the self, and provide layers of meaning to a space. The purpose of this article is to understanding the spatial relationships and tensions between them, and how tourism can be a factor of life or death in the cities. How dynamics allows us to gain important insights into the processes that shape the spaces and places, without losing the original identity.

SAHGB Feature Article https://www.sahgb.org.uk/features/architectural-tourism, 2021

What is it about architecture, and heritage in particular, that beckons us to travel? And what changes when we are forced into virtual experiences of place? Through an exploration of a discarded modernist monument, Ontario Place in Toronto, this paper considers how we might use virtual tools and new perspectives on travel and tourism to reinvigorate the physical site, and proposes that imagination is precisely what is needed to harness their cultural, historic and social qualities.

International Journal of Architectural Heritage

The creation of architecture, whether innovative or traditional, entails a certain attitude towards past architecture, an act of interpretation of the past, which requires a new outlook. Though architects should tread carefully and responsibly with regard to past architecture, the past should not cast its shadow on the architect's imagination, but rather be the grain of inspiration for future change and development. One should not consider the past as separate from the present and the future, for they are interwoven. It is our contention that any new architecture that addresses and interprets what was built before has the potential to offer new meanings, not only to its past self, which is re-understood, but also to our own human existence in the present and future. Following the phenomenological concept of place integrated with Martin Heidegger's phenomenological conception of time, we propose in this article a rethinking of past architectural objects as places encompassing the notion of recollection and gathering. We propose to consider past not as an aspect of nostalgia, but rather as a present indicator, a guide, for the creation of new architecture. Moreover, we would like to suggest that interpretation of such indicators should be regarded as an ethical principle in the field of architecture. The analysis of Merkaz-Hanegev, an important example of Israeli Brutalist architecture of the 1950s, a period of novel rethinking of urban dwelling, serves as an inspiring example for such an architectural indicator. This unique project can be considered as the first attempt of creating an architectural indicator for the future city of Beer-Sheva. It indicates towards a possible answer to the question: what is the nature of urbanity?

Journal of Architecture 17:1

Body, Space & Technology

Place, Memory and Ruin: for an architecture that preserves the value of the historicity of the place, 2018

Valuing the project and landscape through the discovery of fragments or incomplete realities, crystallized in time, composes a figurative frame, whose act of design in architecture, as a form of reflection on architecture itself, the place and the context, unleashes a result of a clash between two announcers: the historical word of ruin and the word of the new built. 14, sept, 2018

The SAGE Handbook of Globalization Edited by M. Steger, P. Battersby, J. Siracusa, Sage Publications, London. , 2014

Liminal Landscapes: Travel, Experience and Spaces In-between, 2012

The Berlage Cahiers #4: Reflexivity, 1995

This paper argues that modern and contemporary architecture's ideal subject is the tourist --that architecture today is designed primarily to be "visited" more than used-- analyzing various examples of architecture from Hannes Meyer and Le Corbusier to David Chipperfield and Rem Koolhaas.