Presencing Absence: History Memory Rewriting. Liu Kecheng’s Interpretative Architecture

This chapter discusses the spatialised/de-spatialised condition of memory and Liu Kecheng's architectural projects in relation to the Chinese tradition of memory and contemporary Chinese cities. It proposes “rewriting” and “interpretative architecture” as a way to understand the site as a multi-level text containing historical traces, memories and narrative fictions that inform the present layer, as well as interpretative design as an approach disclosing an inventive space through which architectural forms evoke and (re)construct imagination and urban memory. Analysing collective memory and history is not synonymous. The chapter clarifies the monument/document dichotomy, while intertwining with the concepts of oblivion and trace. It assumes as an essential key for architecture the pristine relation between memory as a spatialised locus and images, recalling their link with imagination and its narrative tools. Subsequently, it develops on two parallel levels: advancing major theoretical themes, and untangling them in their relationship with history, memory, site and design through Liu Kecheng's exemplary works. The spatialisation of memory and presencing absence are, therefore, discussed both as reconstructing the legibility of physical traces in the Chinese city and in view of architecture as an active form of writing performed on an already-existing text that requires knowledge and interpretation.