Architectural History & Visual Culture

In Losing Site Hornstein takes us on a dizzying pilgrimage from the Guggenheim to Google Earth, from Toronto to Tel Aviv, showing along the way how architecture, place, and memory work together in dynamic interplay. Hornstein's themes are as wide-ranging as the places she explores: nationhood and nationalism, war and demolition, starchitecture and everyday life. The book offers a unique look at how our fast-paced, technology-driven lives have re-shaped travel and tourism. '

Long before Jonathan Lethem, in The Ecstasy of Influence, demolished the concept that originality exists, and long before he celebrated plagiarism and borrowed thoughts, Berel Lang told me that none of his thoughts is new. In his inimitable style of humility and with the gentlest of tones, he dismissed some idea he had formulated-and that I praised-claiming there are no new ideas. A Festschrift to honour Berel Lang must begin for me, then, with this snapshot. To Berel, may your inspiring (recycled?) thoughts and enduring modesty continue to be refracted and collaged for us all.

I am deeply appreciative of the feedback I received while thinking through this article, espe-cially to Reesa Greenberg, Vera Frenkel, Fred Bohrer, Carol Becker, Florence Jacobowitz, and Wendi Rechtsman. My thanks also extend to Dean Otto and Renee van der Stelt at the Walker ...

The destruction of architecture or its re-location elsewhere to avoid demolition is a part of a history of the planet ¶s wastelands. Land/Slide, a vast art installation exhibition challenges how we consider historic buildings that have been transplanted, as it were, to new tangible and intangible, digital, places. The buildings that form the physical springboard for the exhibition were salvaged as a result of their being relocated to the Markham Museum, near Toronto. Land/Slide opens a debate around architectural history and contemporary practices in art, architectural heritage, and urban cultural life. Artists and architects were invited to adaptively reuse and infuse a selected salvaged building with new life while weaving it back into its previous existence. This chapter explores the game-changing strategies presented in this exhibition that challenge how we consider heritage buildings, sustainable architecture, systems of living and the stratifications of architectural history in what I am calling an ecology of heritage in contemporary culture. Ce qui nous retient dans le spectacle des ruines, même quand l ¶érudition prétend leur faire dire l ¶histoire, ou quand l ¶artifice d ¶une mise en son et lumière les transforme en spectacle, c ¶est leur aptitude à faire sentir le temps sans résumer l ¶histoire ni l ¶achever dans l ¶illusion du savoir ou de la beauté, à prendre la forme d ¶une °uvre d ¶art, d ¶un souvenir sans passé (Marc Augé, Le temps en ruines) While reeling from the cataclysmal news of the earthquake in Nepal in April 2015, where the staggering of life peaked to almost 9000 souls, we are at once reduced to a feeling of helplessness coupled with shock by the almost immediate and harrowing media images of physical devastation and ruins of architecture fragmented and pulverized to rubble and dust. Rubble is different from how we consider ruins, for as Marc Augé explains, rubble has no time to become ruins. Once, ruins did have a ³pure, undateable time, which does not figure in our world of images, simulacra, and reconstitutions´. ϭ The pictures of Nepal that flooded social media are testimonies that stand in for lost life in a way that seem ± however awkward and insufficient in communicating the events as they are experienced ± more palpable, more real; these are pictures that convey the absence of any conceivable form of nostalgic and romanticized concept of ruin. Our sensibilities are immediately rattled to see the Maju Deval, _117

• This fascinating insight into the draw of 'starchitecture' and architectural pilgrimages to landmark buildings such as the Taj Mahal, the Sydney Opera House and the Bilbao Guggenheim Since the era of pre-industrial religious pilgrimages, architecture has beckoned travellers. This book charts the relationship, and even the entanglement, between architecture and tourism. It reveals how architecture is always tied to its physical site, yet is transportable in our imagination-and into the virtual spheres of social media and armchair travel. Illustrated with a range of studies of key buildings from history and the present-day, including the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, the Sydney Opera House and the Bilbao Guggenheim, the book engagingly sheds light on topics such as the culture of ruins, the evolution of how tourists capture images of places, the rise of the designer museum, and architecture on television, film and in other media. It asks why architectural monuments and buildings attract and compel us to visit, why we feel the need to understand cities through architectural sites such as museums, historic sites and monuments, and how national identity is galvanised through its architecture and tourism. Sightseeing is, whether virtual or actual, site-seeing.

What is it about architecture, and heritage in particular, that beckons us to travel? And what changes when we are forced into virtual experiences of place? Through an exploration of a discarded modernist monument, Ontario Place in Toronto, this paper considers how we might use virtual tools and new perspectives on travel and tourism to reinvigorate the physical site, and proposes that imagination is precisely what is needed to harness their cultural, historic and social qualities.

What does it mean to create an exhibition about how architecture was used as forensic evidence in a trial that attempted to not only deny atrocities of the Holocaust but to deny historical evidence? Architectural Historian, Robert Jan van Pelt organized such an exhibition titled The Evidence Room at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale. Elements displayed were reconstructed from the architectural plans for Auschwitz. This essay asks what it means to locate the exhibition ex situ and the "evidence" displayed therein that is not the evidence itself but facsimiles of the designed objects and sites.

If Alois Riegl’s claim that an architectural monument –in the original and ancient sense of the term– meant creating a work with the objective of safeguarding the memory of an event, then this paper asks if photographs and specifically digital images of monuments and memorials can sustain memory by creating a memorial itinerary, one that links projects virtually and physically to each other beyond geographic sites. While some memorials are successful at stimulating memory recall, others become empty, monolithic objects, even when presented in the form of a museum. In a culture of excess and visual inundation, photography and particularly social media of the newest memorials bid for our emotional commitment, particularly when our own histories and memories are often removed from the one aiming to be recovered, and perpetuate our overfed and undernourished souls. Can the cultural imaginary recuperate the memory that a memorial aims to represent? In looking at a series of recent memori...

Cities and rivers are 'intimately linked to each other' (p. 3). But there are ways of discussing intimate relations and there are ways not to discuss them; such as some of the language in this book. For example, Chapter 16 (Hornstein), 'Rumi's poetic suggestion that union is a raging river aptly captures the essence of what it means for Aziza Chaouni to consider the quintessential role of the river in the life of Fez, a river that was once considered heterotopic-or negative-space.

The destruction of architecture or its re-location elsewhere to avoid demolition is a part of a history of the planet's wastelands. Land/Slide, a vast art installation exhibition challenges how we consider historic buildings that have been transplanted, as it were, to new tangible and intangible, digital, places. The buildings that form the physical springboard for the exhibition were salvaged as a result of their being relocated to the Markham Museum, near Toronto. Land/Slide opens a debate around architectural history and contemporary practices in art, architectural heritage, and urban cultural life. Artists and architects were invited to adaptively reuse and infuse a selected salvaged building with new life while weaving it back into its previous existence. This chapter explores the game-changing strategies presented in this exhibition that challenge how we consider heritage buildings, sustainable architecture, systems of living and the stratifications of architectural histor...