Memory Launderette
This abstract looks at memory and genius loci in the city of Glasgow, Scotland and the city-state of Singapore. It draws initially on spectral recollections and ficto-critical writing, then explores work produced from a shared Art School, Interior Design studio project. It compares both places in order to explore the fragmented nature of ruptured utopian visions on each and seeks to reconcile these in the final part of the paper.
The first section explores the logic behind the shaping of each place. Utilising partial and autobiographical approaches to layered and complex content it draws on both archive and anecdote in order to reassert the essence of that which has been lost.
Focus then shifts to a reflection on contemporary ways of living through student’s studio projects. These explore rooms and recipes; objects and materials; patterns and decoration; conversion and demolition in customised, compartmentalised and high-density dwellings. Project emphasis placed on the rituals of everyday life and how directly they are intertwined with spatial memories, whether explicit, implied or fading. It asks how we – through uncovering the memory of the assembly of such scenographies – might develop resilient form and construct new memories.
Finally it looks at two useful, prosaic, but increasingly scarce remnants of the material culture of each of these places, 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 the tek-koh: a bamboo clothes drying pole, socket mounted on the exterior of older Housing Development Board (HDB) buildings in Singapore. Both harness rising thermal currents of air, one on the inside and the other on the outside of their respective host-residences. SpaceKraft proposes new representations of each.
Thomai Pnevmonidou and Patrick Macklin, co-authors as SpaceKraft.
