(IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

The paper focuses on memory and genius loci in the city of Glasgow, Scotland, and the city-state of Singapore. It describes a work in progress. Drawing initially on spectral recollections and ficto-critical writing it proceeds to explore work produced from a Design School studio project–which compared both places in order to explore the fragmented nature of ruptured utopian visions within each–and, in its concluding section, seeks to reconcile these unfulfilled ambitions by offering a framework for their application in untypical configurations through objects. The work emerged from a study exploring the nature of high density dwelling in Glasgow, expressed in the form of the Victorian tenement and the mid-20th C tower block. It utilised partial and autobiographical approaches to layered and complex content, drawing on both archive and anecdote in order to reassert the essence of that which has been lost or forgotten, and that which has been recovered or reasserted. Focus shifted to a reflection on contemporary ways of living, with an emphasis placed on the rituals of everyday life and how directly they are intertwined with spatial memories, whether explicit, implied or fading. It asked how we – through uncovering the memory of the assembly of such scenographies – might develop resilient form and construct new memories via the close exploration of two useful, prosaic, but increasingly scarce remnants of the material culture once evident and abundant in the context of NW Europe and SE Asia. Utilitarian, emblematic objects used in the laundering of clothes and fabric in high density housing–the pulley: a mechanical system of blocks, laths, sash-cords and lift-frames found attached to the kitchen ceilings of Victorian tenements in Glasgow, and tek-koh: a bamboo clothes drying pole, socket-mounted on the exterior of early examples of Housing Development Board (HDB) buildings in Singapore.