Culture of Remembrance and City Space. A Contribution to Architectural and Urbanistic Interpretations from Ruskin to Postmodernism

Abstract

This paper analyses the ways in which the importance of remembering a city’s past has been defined from the mid-19th till the beginning of the 21st century for the purposes of architectural and urbanistic shaping of the city. Three main conceptions of how a city is remembered are reconstructed in the paper as they offer different perspectives on appropriate ways of the transmission of history in the city as well as the importance of such transmission. These three approaches are cultural, neo-rational and postmodern. Cultural approach was originally developed by John Ruskin and it appeared as a reaction to the processes of industrialization and restauration of antiques. Neo-rationalist movement, visible in the works of Aldo Rossi and Léon Krier, can be interpreted as a protest against the commercialization of space. Finally, postmodern position is built on the desire to shape a multidimensional space with multiple meanings. The paper concludes that these three approaches look differently at the issue of remembrance in the city, depending on how they conceive the relation between society, space and the past. In addition, these approaches can be useful in designing an empirical research, which would examine the reception of memory, i.e. the evaluation of different aspects of remembrance by different populations in the city.