unit-code
UG14 continued its studies into how societies remember and forget through the built environment. This year we focused on nostalgia – a particular manifestation of social memory which contributes to the collective identity. Nostalgia is comforting. In times of crisis, its psychological benefits for people’s wellbeing are undeniable; they act as a stabilising force in times of transition, uncertainty and change. But nostalgia is also dangerous. Throughout the world, we have witnessed how it has become a political tool to spread misinformation. It is the seed for powerful ideologies, a yearning for a different idealised time that only really exists in people’s imaginations.
The contradiction between two forms of nostalgia – the reflective and the restorative – formed the basis of this year’s investigations, in which we considered the benefits and dangers to the individual and collective psyche. UG14 explored how nostalgia can be utilised positively for the adaptive reuse of buildings while still being representative and relevant to a modern social identity.
We visited Serbia and explored Novi Beograd, a planned socialist city built with utopian ideals under communist rule in the latter half of the 20th century. On the trip, we experienced the cultural phenomenon of ‘Yugo-nostalgia’ – a longing for an era of unity and multiculturalism before the dissolution of the Yugoslav states. We toured the brutalist architecture built upon these principles – cultural establishments that radiated this yearning for the past – and the many spomeniks that memorialise events of World War II. We learned how this architecture fitted within the contemporary context of this polarised country and challenged ourselves to re-imagine existing spaces as stages to newly-found events.
Today, in a world where economic factors require the changing of attitudes on a global scale and architecture is increasingly created in a vacuum through the selective synthesis of past data, we emphasise the importance of context and poetry in design, over the reproduction of a version of the ‘truth’. UG14 analyses what is left of the past, to decide how individual memories can fit within a wider societal framework for the future.