No. 13 (2022): Memory, Memorabilia and the Making

In the new time consciousness of modernity, Jürgen Habermas tells us, historical memory gives place to an ahistorical use of the past, which explains the abstract language of avant-garde aesthetics. Suffice to think of authors such as Picasso and Le Corbusier and in the relationships their work establishes with the past. In their collections particulières, memorabilia ranged from vernacular to primitive and classical artefacts, the operative value of which rested in their aesthetic qualities, independently of their place in the continuum of history. The past was a source of raw material, opening new conceptual and morphological paths in the subversive processes of creation. As structuralists would put it, the past provided them with signs to be implicated in new sign structures, constructing new meanings.

Exhausted the impulse of modernity and the post-modernist collage of historical iconography, how do architects use the past in defining new aesthetic paths? In today’s image-based culture, what operative role does memorabilia play in the processes of architectural creation, be it in morphological or in conceptual terms? How does memorabilia, and memory in general, act as a catalyst for artistic thinking?

In a time when architectural design is increasingly subjected to building regulations, restricting its freedom as a creative act, Joelho - Journal of Architectural Culture is particularly interested in the operative role of memory in the creative processes of architectural design.