How do the Past and Present become one?

“Essential in the critical approach of contemporary regionalist architecture is in addition to confronting the way mainstream buildings are designed, the questioning of the legitimacy of the very thoughts which lead to their design, and through which people use and appreciate these buildings”

In the Critical Regionalism reading from Tzonis and Lefaivre I very quickly came to appreciate their observations on regionalism and their strong opposition to mainstream or universal practices, saying that this standardization of design components and therefore the elimination of values related to climate, the individual, or site makes the relevance of the place practically eliminated. I think this critical approach to regional design brings up one of the largest critiques of New Urbanism, and forces us to constantly question the location of the place by providing unique design solutions. In addition to this rigorous questioning of place this balance of familiarization or defamiliarization brings up another interesting conversation in how do the past and the present become one? This idea of familiarization or architecture as a “memory machine”, significant to romantic regionalism, seems inevitable to me. I find that there’s a beauty in the evocative power of architecture can easily provide a “spatial trigger” for activating a memory, unique to those of our own personal and human experiences. Critical regionalism however distinguishes itself by encouraging us to incorporate these memory’s or sentimental scenes “strangely rather than familiarly”. Frankly I’m not exactly sure how, what, or why it is asking this of me as a designer besides playing this game of mystery or curiosity. I completely appreciate the intent to create a “renewed” sense of place in our time based on a critical approach but I think there’s a really delicate balance between learning from the past and new modern defamiliarization. I’m a firm believer that “building can make us see a few steps ahead that which is actually situated back many centuries”