material memory lisa rapoport - plant architect inc
When we started our work as PLANT in the mid-1990s we were lucky to work on a series of projects that called into question how we would approach our understanding of the landscape, and what the role of material was within that dialogue. At the time, we observed that people did not seem to understand their local landscapes from an ecological, nor from a cultural point of view. They did not have a deeply felt tie to the land at a time when environmental concerns were just beginning to resurface after the 1960s. We created a series of architecture, landscape, furniture and installation projects whose aims were to heighten people’s awareness of their landscape, their environment, with a particular interest in the traces that past and present culture left or were leaving on the land. We believed that people must be engaged in their environment before they would take a role in sustaining it. Engaging meant staging personal and collective experiences on the
site where Conversations often figured prominently as project names and subjects. The cultural, aesthetic, historic and social framing of the place would lead to a deeper revelation of that landscape, including its systems and ecologies. Nearly 25 years later, with society’s significant collective knowledge and fear of climate change, we believe that this is still just as relevant. There is an abstractness to the global crisis that needs to be bridged with a deeply ingrained visceral connection and intimacy with local place. On Site ’s call for articles posited, ‘that the beloved tropes of narrative, identity, myth, textuality…are luxuries we can not afford right now; they seem irrelevant in the face of both the present and our future.’ We do not think this is precisely true – we think the material future is a step in the continuity of the material past. Although narrative, identity, myth and textuality
are abstractions, we have explored their capacity to be concrete, experiential and physical – in effect material. For us, material exploration has always meant exploring how material experience influences and reinforces memory. What we touch with our hands and feet – the materials that wrap around us – make a memory impression through our body experience. Heaviness, lightness, roughness, smoothness, light absorbing, reflective, solidity, laciness, materials that come from the site or site processes, or are revealed on the site, material that grows and diminishes with time, can tell a visceral story that recovers the past and re-presents in the present. I titled this article ‘Material Memory’ because just like muscle memory which creates synaptic grooves, we feel material memory creates permanent mental maps of place and community, both more relevant than ever.
At Sweet’s Farm’s 85 acres (1994–1997) this exploration was cultural and process- based, and included reconfiguring 1000 mink cages into a dining room in a clearing; an annually growing twig fence made from the forest management cuttings that measure this practice; wooden furniture, paths and look-outs made from natural tree-fells – all to create a loose itinerary for exploration. Each of these elements helped create an immersion in the material-ness of this landscape, and allowed the family that owns it and their visitors to know it through their material experience.
In 2007, we won the competition for a monument to honour the service of US veterans. The Dublin Grounds of Remembrance eschewed a traditional monument in favour of a park promoting the act of habitual walking and social gathering, reinforcing a journey of remembrance and creating new significance for a piece of remnant land. Starting at a copper loggia that frames a ravine and gathering space, the walking route uncovers the natural site, and re-contexualises an adjacent revolutionary- era cemetery. A 510 foot-long bronze handrail shaped to hold your hand back, along with a limestone path with alternating granular and smooth surfaces, guides and paces the walk. The changing sound of shoes on the ground, the hand polishing the bronze, the punctuated end points, all reinforce this walk as an act of remembrance.
PLANT Architect Inc
8
on site review 36: our material future
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator