Peter Hargraves Scratching the Land |
making a mark that will last until other scratches make the original illegible
courtesy Royal Museum of Alberta
milton olfert
a bump t he Orkney Isles lie just across the Firth of Pentland off the northern tip of Scotland, part of an archipelago filled with remnants of many different peoples stretching deep into misty history. One line of this story is Maes Howe, a chambered cairn located on Main- land. As a child I was confused by the fuss made over this ancient site, which was only a grassy mound not much more than twenty feet high, rising out of a sheep pasture. Now I am struck that a simple cairn is still significant to human beings nearly 5000 years after it was erected. The interest comes as much from the unknown as the known. Did the builders feel this same ambiguity? Is the intentional ambiguity we are prone to attempt in our modern works the same as that which we find in sites such as Maes Howe?
a ring
o n the dry, sage filled, Medicine Lodge Valley floor in southwest Montana I found the faded remnants of a tipi site. A local rancher told me that during his childhood the Shoshone passed through this valley on their seasonal migrations. Local lore has it that this was their last camp in the valley. The place seemed haunted, and chills ran up my spine as I stumbled through the rough circle of stones. A few kilometres from Maes Howe stands the Ring of Brodgar, a much larger circle of much bigger stones that are also the subject of lore. In Montana I stood among stones that had served to hold the tipi to the ground. Laid by humans, they marked a short, perhaps insignificant passage in the history of those humans. Perhaps it was the juxtaposition of the giant valley to these ruffled, unloved rings, but it seemed improb- able that they should have any power at all. Soon there will be nothing left to mark that place as the last camp.
From the outset, the very temporal nature of these foundations made them insignificant, and as such, they were simply left as they were on the day the tents were dismantled. Today, when a house is vacated permanently, building safety laws demand that it be demol- ished. There will be no legacy, no thrill, no evocation of a story. Do we romantically give significance to things that were not signifi- cant at the time of construction? Can we only hope that significance will be applied to our work at some point in the future, when we are no longer there to promote or defend it?
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architecture and land
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