Iconography of Memory

architect Lina Bo Bardy
written by Ruth Verde Zein

 

Opening for visitation a house where no one else lives is to create a pilgrimage shrine and a tourist attraction. Tourists and pilgrims are similar in kind but dissimilar in depth, but since any visitor has mixed expectations, it is not so easy to disentangle them. The pilgrim walks there in search of selfknowledge, of spiritual and intellectual enlightenment. The tourist arrives there based on hearsay and to be distracted. Fortunately, cultural distractions may be very transformative and awaken latencies that only existed in tourists’ deepest dreams.