Its funny when you find something you did ages ago and forgotten. I found this on my You tube channel complete with short essay...
If people and their attachment to place is what makes a site a place as
opposed to a space, what happens when the people leave? In my paper
'Should Simulated Environments When Used as Empathic Design Tools be
Considered Spaces or Places?' I explored how sites are given meaning by
people and their interactions with it.
One of the strands I
looked at was how memory and place are intertwined. I photographed the
house I grew up in, just before my family moved out of it. It is odd
looking at images which for me are still loaded with meaning, knowing
that for other people they mean nothing. For the guy that bought the
house, this is how he found it when he moved in... so for him it is the
point at which he started to create his own attachments and 'sense of
place'.
I remember the epic task of stripping all the wood in the
house when we first moved there... the smell of hot air strippers
always reminds me of that... the funny people in the grain on the back
of the bathroom door... would recognise that door anywhere... the ridge
on the hallway wall... the view from my bed room window (later my
sister's room where she carved her name in the window sill)... the marks
on the door made by the dog... the kitchen table my sister drew a
spider into... the same table on which we made hot cross buns whilst
watching 'Born Free' on the tv... the pantry that was there and then
knocked down...and how I made ginger beer that exploded and made
everything in the pantry sticky... the arched window through which I
tried to give my then very little sister a snow ball but dropped in down
the back of the tv breaking it...
So I guess all these things do
still exist, but only as Bachelard suggests in 'Poetics of Space' in
our memories.... as for him a house is a container of memories. The
sense of place that we who lived in the house made... each of us having
our own particular sense of the place... are memories because we can't
actually access the site.... if we could access the house, I guess some
of the place attachment would remain even if the house is materially
very changed.
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