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p g-b writes:  The point being that many modern structures, even quite substantial ones, dont seem to last very long. I suspect that such places as Trostre park dont have much of a narrative per see because no one takes them seriously as places in the first place. Unlike town centres which do get invested with a depth of cultural pattina, shopping centres are more or less non-places to begin with and no one cares what happens to them
 
    I'm not sure how widespread this is, but in Sheffield the plan for the town centre is to turn it into a shopping centre in p-g-b's terms, in the sense that the plans presented recently include the erasure of parts of the existing street plan and of later C19th / EC20th buildings and their replacement with virtual copies of 1950s/1960's rectangular block buildings (albeit created using new building techniques with glass and steel framing).  Quite apart from the issues surrounding the destruction of Grade II listed buildings and a conservation area, the intention appears to be to create an area that can be redeveloped every 20 or 30 years, more of less from scratch, so eradicating any sense of place and substituting instead an environment in which consumption is the only ethos.  Not being familiar with discourses in architecture, I am left wondering whether this is explicit on the part of architects / planners or whether it is represented as 'pragmatic' by the development / finance industries.
 
Chris Cumberpatch
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From: [log in to unmask] href="mailto:[log in to unmask]">lineone
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Sent: Monday, December 19, 2005 12:55 PM
Subject: Re: [CHA] Contemporary Archaeology in Practice

FAIRCLOUGH, Graham wrote:
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Dear All or Any

I would not claim to know all of what lies behind Cornelius’s comments, but the ‘right’ to read meaning into something (especially in the form of words, tricky things that they are) passes almost immediately away from the creator to the consumer, and one thing that I take out of C’s second point is a thought about ‘our’  response to change and to future archaeologies (the creation and passing on of the legibility of a future past). Is it possible to remove something from a site's ‘narrative’, official or not, once it has been put there (eg by recording)?  Physical material survival is not the same as survival within a narrative (ask any religion, especially at this time of year). How do you preserve ephemerality?

Ive been thinking quite a bit about ephemerality recently, especially along the lines of the marx/engels/berman quote "all that is solid melts into air" - Having done a study of our local out of town shopping centre for the first CHAT Ive been following its quite rapid evolution, as many of the features I talked about have already been destroyed. The point being that many modern structures, even quite substantial ones, dont seem to last very long. I suspect that such places as Trostre park dont have much of a narrative per see because no one takes them seriously as places in the first place. Unlike town centres which do get invested with a depth of cultural pattina, shopping centres are more or less non-places to begin with and no one cares what happens to them

p g-b