A few thoughts on memory, sound and architecture
Our final lecture was concerned with the difference between the individual and the social/cultural memory, social sites and memory sites, time and architecture. I was already familiar with the concept of a cultural memory, as during my studies in Germany, we read Aleida and Jan Assmann‘s works on the cultural memory (“kulturelles Gedächtnis” – they further distinguish between a communicative, a cultural and a collective memory).
The lecture also made me think of some quite interesting examples in German architecture, that reflect how closely a cultural memory and architectural sites are connected. A rather literal example is the Anna Amalia Library in Weimar, which was destroyed by a fire in 2004 and that I visited a few years earlier. Not only the historical building was damaged, but also hand-written sheet music, historical books and artworks from the 16th century on were lost. The destruction of the memory site (mutable immobile) and the material artefacts (immutable mobiles) coincide in this case.
Another example is the Palast der Republik (Palace of the Republic) in Berlin. Built in the 1970s on the space were the former Stadtschloss was (Berlin City Palace, it was heavily damaged in World War II and finally demolished in the 1950s, as the government had no money to reconstruct it ), the Palace of the Republic was probably not the most aesthetically pleasing building for today’s standards, but it was an important memory site of the former Eastern German Republic. In 2008, the Palace of the Republic was totally demolished to make room for a reconstruction of the Berlin City Palace – which generated a storm of protest and a discussion of why some architectural (and memory sites) are more worthy to rebuild or maintain than others.
I want to end this blog for the present with a more amusing example of the visual bias of architecture, and how sound is often wrongly overlooked. The Kölner Philharmonie (Cologne Concert Hall), which was built in the mid 1980s, was so concerned with the sound in the underground concert hall (it is still considered as one of the most advanced examples of concert hall architecture), that they forgot the consider the people who are walking on top of it, as the ceiling of the Philharmonie is the floor of a public plaza above it. And every time there is a concert in that hall, the plaza has to be closed to pedestrians and cyclists, as otherwise, the reverberations of the steps could be heard in the underground hall.
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