Designing amnesia and remembering history in the design studio

The paper engages with the question: How can architectural history and the design studio be integrated? The answer depends on how the role of history is defined. Here it is not taken as the study or recording of the facts of what happened in the architectural past, but as an hermeneutical act of interpretation, in which the possibilities contained in the past are drawn out to reveal their creative relevence in the present and future: the past is recollected in processes of repitition, retrieval and reapplication, so that memory becomes a source of creativity. Seen in this way, history does not await integration with the design studio but is already fully present in every design activity. A remembering of the intrinsic presence of historic awareness in the studio opens up possibilities for a new understanding of how design programs work, seeing them as exercises in translation from the past into the present and future. This entails a preservation of the past, and its continuity with the present.