A recent post from Rob Shields at Space and Culture asks the question: When we clean up the facades of heritage buildings, sandblasting away soot, are we really erasing their past, so we can put our notion of history in place?
A couple of weeks ago i took these photos...
When I saw this building it made me question its history (when was it last cleaned? Has the Euston Rd always been as polluted as now? Do the different layers of soot tell different stories?). The layered physical histories evident in a building like this, made me ask myself... will there be a digital equivalent once space is infused with electronic information?
If space becomes annotatable, as places shift their meaning through time, how do we navigate, solidify or delete these histories?
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