Architecture as archive, time and memory

Rem Koolhaas interviewed by Hans Ulrich Obrist Art Review July 2006

HUO: I saw the historian Eric Hobsbawm yesterday and he was saying that his life was a kind of protest against forgetting. Which I think is really beautiful. I was wondering about memory in relation to the (London) pavilion, because it's also archived, an archive of previous discussions. Could you speak a little bit about Hobsbawm's idea of a protest against forgetting?

RK: In an architect's case it's either involuntary in the sense that you create structures that stay around in the best cases, and sometimes for a very long time, so that they contribute to a sense of history, but also potentially to a sense of depth in terms of time and memory. Or it's much more a kind of journalistic level, but perhaps in the current avalanche of forgetting, journalism also becomes closer to history writing.