For the record

What if the places we inhabit have memories?

On July 20th, 1969, journalist John Vidal was on a beach in Gibraltar when he heard the Apollo 11 Moon landing on a stranger’s fading transistor radio. On November 9th, 1989, French horn player Andreas Böhlke was performing at a Berlin concert hall when he learned that the Wall had fallen – and was so distracted he missed his cue twice.

The connection between memory and place has been understood for centuries. As William Whyte, Professor of Social and Architectural History, St John’s College, says, “Roman orators such as Cicero would visualise symbolic objects placed in specific locations within an imaginary house or landscape in order to remember their speeches.

“They articulated the idea of the ‘memory palace’,” says Whyte. “We do the same intuitively everyday – and especially when we ask, ‘Do you remember where you were when….’”

“We grew up together – my own personal history and growth intersected with this particular place’s history.” 

Places are hugely evocative. Dr Venus Bivar, Associate Professor of Environmental History, St Anne’s College, cites a restaurant in Chicago that she used to frequent during her nine years living in the city. “I had first dates there, I had a breakup, and one of my best friends was the bartender. I watched it change, from a pretty modest cafe to a destination restaurant with a fine dining option. We grew up together – my own personal history and growth intersected with this particular place’s history.”

Places don’t just hold our memories; they become part of them. But do they remember too? Bivar suggests that if landscape has a memory, it’s because the people who have lived in that landscape have passed stories down from generation to generation. “You, as an individual, might not have experienced the story that you’re telling, but it’s still a part of you and a part of the place that you inhabit.”

An individual might remember a restaurant, while a community remembers a street and a city remembers through its buildings. Landscapes and cityscapes are vessels for collective memory, akin to a living archive that evolves while telling the stories of the past.

“For example, in London or Berlin, you’ve got neoclassical and gothic and brutalist and modernist and postmodernist architecture and it feels alive for me,” says Bivar. “I love seeing the different stages of history and how each generation understood what the best version of living was.”

“The study of architecture is one of the best ways of understanding what mattered to people.” 

From minimalist boxes to sprawling, ornate homes, buildings hint at the culture of the time and reveal a generation’s priorities. As Whyte says, “When we build, we have to think hard about what we actually want, what we value. The study of architecture is one of the best ways of understanding what mattered to people.”

The ghosts of the past are ever present, from the still bricked-up windows of some old English buildings – a reminder of residents’ efforts to reduce tax bills – to the faded shop names painted on brickwork and the shrapnel scars of the Blitz. The people we have been are still alive if we care to look.

And future generations will infer our stories, from solar farms and anti-terrorist bollards to rooftop drone pads. But we can’t know what narratives they will create in the buildings we’re constructing today.

The Schwarzman Centre is a prime example. “It was explicitly intended to be a modern design that nonetheless evoked the architecture of Oxford’s past – whether in its use of timber or by gesturing back to the Radcliffe Camera in our beautiful dome,” says Whyte. “People have gratifyingly photographed both with enthusiasm. At the same time, though, I know other memories will be made in totally unexpected ways…”

But the unexpected cuts both ways and building the future can sit uneasily with preserving the past.

“At St. Anne’s College, we’ve been trying to retrofit buildings to make them more energy efficient, which is super important for addressing the climate crisis,” says Bivar. “There are many buildings in our college campus that we cannot substantially alter because they’re listed; it’s very frustrating.

“It’s important to hang on to pieces of the past and to have buildings that remind us of our history, our development, but we can’t prize that over having a healthy planet. Indeed, changing materials and retrofitting buildings to make them more in line with what we need environmentally tells a great story about how humans learned from their mistakes.”

But places are not neutral repositories. Some memories are built into our surroundings, others are erased, while some are still awaiting discovery. But who gets to decide what a place remembers?

It isn’t an exact science and, as Bivar says, “History is full of examples of us not getting it right.” She cites the statue of former student and British colonialist Cecil Rhodes at Oxford University’s Oriel College, erected in 1911 to front a building constructed with money left in his will. Rhodes made his fortune through the exploitation of minerals, land, and peoples of southern Africa, and some of his activities led to mass violence and dispossession.

In 2021, Oriel College installed an explanatory plaque beneath the statue explaining the reasons for its presence and providing context. “We all have a responsibility to the past,” says Bivar.

The plaque doesn’t erase history, but it changes the way that past is encountered. Perhaps a living archive means history is not so much preserved as continually reinterpreted.

The Schwarzman Centre is still writing its first chapter. As Whyte says, if it were an animate building, its opening day would have been terrifying. “‘Will they like me?’ it might have asked; ‘Will they come?’ They do and they did – and in answering, the building starts to remember.”