Familiarity/Unfamiliarity

 “Coming home to a place he'd never been before”—John Denver, Rocky Mountain High  

 

If you can come home to a place you’ve never been before, can you come home to a place so changed that it seems like a place you’ve never been before? In my early years of teaching, I regularly asked my students to draw a map from memory of their “world at 13.” I wanted them to remember a time when they experienced the world naively, before their eyes became professionalized and fitted with architect’s lenses. I chose age 13 because that is about the time when we start to map our own worlds, on foot or bike, instead of being belted into passivity in the back seat. The assignment was directed toward understanding legibility, the elusive quality that makes certain places memorable. Make a drawing like that, from memory, and then you are ready to read Kevin Lynch and grasp how important our perception of place is.

Sometimes the exercise got a bit too close to psychoanalysis, unearthing forbidden destinations or locations of embarrassing incidents. But that was part of the lesson: perhaps it was the events themselves that made places memorable, rather than any move by a clever architect or urban designer. We hope that the places we design make memories but actions and events also make places; that we can’t take full credit should humble us as design professionals. There is an entire body of literature dedicated to the association of memory and place. (If you’re interested, start with The Art of Memory, by Frances Yates. I remember reading it, and I remember that main point, but I’ve forgotten more than I remember. Perhaps I should have paid more attention to where I was while reading…)

When I was 13 I inhabited a vividly legible town in North Jersey, which I could navigate on foot and bike and by doing so I engraved the paths, edges, markers, and nodes into my memory—from home to school, to friends’ houses, to piano lessons, to the library, on bluestone sidewalks, over and over...That kind of legibility depends on persistence--it’s what we are preserving when we protect historic districts—and my home town has changed relatively little in the past decades. Legibility also depends on resistance—to change. I remember one student in my class who came from a rapidly growing Sunbelt city. While sharing her World at 13 map she wistfully admitted that when she would travel home from school on holidays she often couldn’t find her way home because there was so much development. No persistence, no resistance. Her world at 13 was gone, victim of the cycle of creative destruction; she went home to a place she’d never been before.

(I stopped giving the assignment out soon after that, as MapQuest—remember that?—completely undermined the intention. Students couldn’t understand that the whole point was not to make the drawings objectively accurate, but rather subjectively, poetically, true.)

I’ve been thinking about this curious dance between place and memory, between the familiar and the unfamiliar. These days, the familiar has become strange, and the strange familiar, a phenomenon that Sigmund Freud described as the uncanny--which even he said was an odd subject for a psychoanalyst--in a 1919 essay by the same name. He defines the uncanny as “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.”  I write much more about the uncanny in chapter seven of my book, How Drawings Work: a User Friendly Theory, but there I’m talking about the gap between the real and the imagined. Here, that space is between the real and the real. My book came out in 2019, so at the time I thought it interesting that the essay was a hundred years old. Now, though, 1919 means something else. Was he reflecting on his own experiences during the 1918 pandemic? When everything he thought he knew was thrown into doubt? He would lose his own daughter to the flu a year later in 1920.

In our pandemic year, everything takes place in the same place, so it’s no wonder that we struggle to keep track of what day it is. It’s uncanny. A grinding process of dislocation is shredding distinctions among work, home, and school. Enjoyable academic discussions about the benefits of a mixed-use city become uncomfortably personal: I didn’t really intend the “mix of uses” to be my own dining room/classroom, bedroom/office. Can we change scales please? We find ourselves at home in a place we’ve never been before. The familiar has become strange and the strange familiar, and as time passes, that familiarity starts to file off the burrs and blisters of the unfamiliar. Can you remember March 21, the first day of spring when the world was upside down? Do you remember where you were? Do you remember what those two blocks of 16^th Street NW looked like before they became Black Lives Matter Plaza? They’re the same city blocks, but not.