Photography and Place-writing of Frank Gohlke

When an idea or a phenomenon becomes widely familiar, it is easy to forget that it came from somewhere, that there is a specific historical moment (of indeterminate duration) before which the thing did not exist.
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Among the few positive things we humans may do that other species don’t is to create Places. We can quibble about the details, but most people who have thought seriously about the matter would recognize a few necessary components in any satisfactory definition: places, like landscapes, do not occur naturally; they are artifacts. A place is not a landscape; places are contained within landscapes. Place is a possibility wherever humans linger, but it’s not inevitable. Sometimes we just occupy space. Places can be created intentionally or as a side effect of other actions with other intentions. Place seems to be more likely to come into being the longer we stay put, but many nomadic cultures roam in landscapes whose minutest features are named, recognized, and given a place in the story of a people and a world.

Place has something to do with memory.

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.