Inhabiting the memory : the ineffable contamination

Abstract

Apropos the sculpture "House" by British artist Rachel Whiteread, Shelley Hornstein argues that architecture is something that is taken too lightly most of the time. Nevertheless, architecture accompanies our lives step for step. This accompaniment is independent of the intrinsic value of the objects in which we live. They are there and are part of our trajectory. The houses we live in are "living" witnesses to our emotions and lack thereof, our dreams and our nightmares. Houses, as witnesses, are essentially interior universes. Impregnable. Impregnable universes in which well-being and discomfort live side by side, and in which an uncomfortable feeling of strangeness can easily install itself. This uncanny strangeness, lives in our collective memory, contaminating it. House, the house that is not a house by Rachel Whiteread, and Die Familia Schneider, an installation by German artist Gregor Schneider, reveal that contamination. Whilst it is true that our habitation related memory essentially lives off a cliche of happiness, it is no less true that in its recesses, in habitation, a less clean and clear tremble survives. The depth of architecture, its weightiness, is impregnated with humanity. This is a text about the relationship between memory and habitation, and how that relationship contaminates the understanding of architecture when it is lived in.