Allan Wes Wilson
Photograph of the market floor before the recent renovations
‘In an act of constructing that presents itself as contingent, as something unnecessary yet at the same time desired, the contemporary architect, in his or her solitude, individually confronts history…When analyzing a particular place, the architect will encounter a simulacrum in personal memory– through strictly autobiographical episodic suggestions– of a trace bias of which he or she can establish the differences that avoid repetition.’ —Ignasi de Sola Morales. Differences:Topographies of Contemporary Architecture As a spatial metaphor, the field is the realm of multiplicity and potential, it is the ground on which something effable and common can eventually materialise from conditions that are otherwise ineffable.The nature of the relationship [between objects and the spaces between them] is, as suggested by the architectural theorist Dalibor Vesely,‘a world which is always present as a latent world waiting for articulation’. Likewise there is an aspect to the field that remains infinite, that operates not on the level of physical and tangible relationships but rather experience and instinct.As a temporal metaphor, it is into the field that we go to actively search for these connections, where we go to look for answers.The ‘field’ is participatory and indeterministic. So although that message that this neighbourhood will all be fields again initially indicates an urban condition that has been lost, it also necessarily facilitates the active interrogation of the site across a gambit of temporalities, past present and future.As each new architectural action responds to this particular field, it becomes another variable in the search for something immaterial. But it makes you wonder that if the physical environment is so susceptible to change, perhaps identity might well just be that one thing which we may never know. g
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