BO O K PRO PO SAL Constanza Larach K. In this book I would like to discuss the role of architecture as form of representation and as a construction of symbols and how heritage acts on this by opening up notions of pastpresent-future. Architecture is always signifying; the form becomes a language. It is not only a physical content but it also expresses an idea behind its features and its totality. The elements that compose a building have a role in communicating their function but also their intentions. Architecture becomes a sign where a building, drawings, plans or any other material form of representation are produced and defined by an idea. Starting from an internal representation as thought and translating it into a physical form, the symbolic aspect comes through, where the built becomes an embodiment of concepts and viewpoints. In the interpretation of this symbolic aspect of architecture, it can be defined as an ideology that either shapes and creates a model of what the world should be or as a myth that could be completely informed by its context and absorbing meanings that come from outside and projected its form. An ideology can be transformed into a myth and the myth into an ideology; because the meaning in architecture is never fixed and is always related to a context that is in constant change, and for that, it is always open for transformation and the symbolic is altered as well. As Roland Barthes mentions, a cultural historical idea can be naturalized and become a universal signifier but this symbolic aspect can be inverted not by purifying the ideological sign, but by dislocating it, changing the object of myth and mythified it one more time1. In this sense, preservation or the definition of a heritage assumes the role of creating history, where the built adopts a new symbolic significance that is entangled with memory and cultural values in a need of identification with a historical narrative and in a demarcation of what is valuable and what is not and how the relationship with this is related in the construction of a future. From the past, in an idealization of it, the idea of what the world ought to be becomes structured. The enhancement of symbols of the past becomes a tool that states a certain power and in the search of an identity through nationalistic historical and global ideals, boundaries are produced, where specificity and the exclusivity of who and what can be part of this representation appears. Preservation has become a weapon that uses the symbolic capacity as a tool that operates through nostalgia, where there is never a real necessity to preserve in a functional sense, it becomes an excess and a luxury, where the importance lies in the representation and materialization of certain ideals. As an emblem, it can be used as a device, where a “heritage� can be preserved, reconstructed or even created if its not there.
1
Foster, Hal. Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics. New York: The New Press, 1998.p 5