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I used to be against rebuilds or even restorations, but for reasons I don't understand I no longer am. I think my change of mind has to do with ageing, and a changing personal idea of what authenticity is, and my personal conception of time. These things seem to change as you age. When you are in a place, at that moment, perceiving it, knowing you and it exist, and knowing the time, you are really just remembering something that has already gone, if it even existed - something so ephemeral and transitory as to be meaningless in the wider scheme of things. Even the digital camera is just looking back in time and recording a time that is already history by time you read it.
Everything crumbles and decays and rots and disappears in the long run. Our entire planet is doomed to become nothing eventually, no trace, no memory, nothing. We don't even know that ultimately everything is reformed, that matter is necessarily reconfigured from one form or state to another. It may not be. Everything is literally futile, in the long term. That doesn't mean that matter and time and meaning don't exist, they obviously do, but I think in terms of whether a building is authentic, it needs to be considered alongside far more profound trends towards ultimate destruction and futility. We can re-create a structure, and know it will be destoyed again. Future generations may rebuild again, but they may not.
Personally, I believe that the built-form is and can only ever be subservient to collective human will and wishes, rather than the other way round: we build what we want, destroy what we want, recreate what we want, change what we want, remember and forget willfully as well as naturally. If no idea is independent of others, as all exist in a framework of ideas, then no memory of a current or previous built-form is context-free. Thus we are haunted by memories of previous compositions. Nothing on the site of the Customs House exists without being a memory that jars with another memory.
If a structure exists in the minds and hearts and memories, it exists. Many old buildings contain very little that is actually old, given the rigours of repair, mainetance and refurbishment. When I am in a building, I sometimes imagine the hidden structure, the wires, the joists, the mechanics that are hidden from view. I cannot look at a slick internal finish to an office without thinking that just 1 cm away is a chaos of ugliness and colour and botch and confusion. The same on a plane or a train, and - giving a bit of ammunition to here to any trolls from afar who like to pick up tit bits of personal info to use against people - I sometimes think it of people as well. I imagine the brain, the internal organs, all just there, underneath the surface, hidden from view by skin and clothes. So in a meeting, sometimes I wonder about the presence of invisible things that are all around. My point is that what you see is not the only thing that is there, that there is much more around, and that appearance is gigantically deceptive. And everything you see is changing, already a memory, and ultimately doomed to become nothing.
So, having laid out my own thoughts about reality, I hope I have explained why I have no problem with rebuilding buildings that were accidentally or otherwise demolished, as faithfully as imagination and records and materials and craft will allow. The very fact that people wish them to exist indicates that they do still exist. They need to be realised, re-realised, physically.
Everything crumbles and decays and rots and disappears in the long run. Our entire planet is doomed to become nothing eventually, no trace, no memory, nothing. We don't even know that ultimately everything is reformed, that matter is necessarily reconfigured from one form or state to another. It may not be. Everything is literally futile, in the long term. That doesn't mean that matter and time and meaning don't exist, they obviously do, but I think in terms of whether a building is authentic, it needs to be considered alongside far more profound trends towards ultimate destruction and futility. We can re-create a structure, and know it will be destoyed again. Future generations may rebuild again, but they may not.
Personally, I believe that the built-form is and can only ever be subservient to collective human will and wishes, rather than the other way round: we build what we want, destroy what we want, recreate what we want, change what we want, remember and forget willfully as well as naturally. If no idea is independent of others, as all exist in a framework of ideas, then no memory of a current or previous built-form is context-free. Thus we are haunted by memories of previous compositions. Nothing on the site of the Customs House exists without being a memory that jars with another memory.
If a structure exists in the minds and hearts and memories, it exists. Many old buildings contain very little that is actually old, given the rigours of repair, mainetance and refurbishment. When I am in a building, I sometimes imagine the hidden structure, the wires, the joists, the mechanics that are hidden from view. I cannot look at a slick internal finish to an office without thinking that just 1 cm away is a chaos of ugliness and colour and botch and confusion. The same on a plane or a train, and - giving a bit of ammunition to here to any trolls from afar who like to pick up tit bits of personal info to use against people - I sometimes think it of people as well. I imagine the brain, the internal organs, all just there, underneath the surface, hidden from view by skin and clothes. So in a meeting, sometimes I wonder about the presence of invisible things that are all around. My point is that what you see is not the only thing that is there, that there is much more around, and that appearance is gigantically deceptive. And everything you see is changing, already a memory, and ultimately doomed to become nothing.
So, having laid out my own thoughts about reality, I hope I have explained why I have no problem with rebuilding buildings that were accidentally or otherwise demolished, as faithfully as imagination and records and materials and craft will allow. The very fact that people wish them to exist indicates that they do still exist. They need to be realised, re-realised, physically.