dense/diluted places

A place is historically dense insofar as its norms involve present reference to a history sedimented there as people lived and responded to multiple pressures over time. Density is not just a matter of age, but of how the marks and sediments of age are taken up in the contemporary texture of the place. The gate at Perugia, pictured above, bears traces of Etruscan, Roman, and Renaissance reworkings, and still functions today.

Imagine a medieval English church located in a modern city. Under its placid, slightly decayed facade the church bears traces of centuries of usage and the swirls of divided community. Its history shows in the details and in the wearing down of the church floor and steps. This accumulation of use is different from a planned patina. Those grooves in the floor weren't designed to give an effect of history. The members of the parish have choosen not to repair the floor, because for them those signs of traditional use are normatively important, and they become more than accidental features of the place. Part of what the members affirm in their dealings with one another is that they are part of a community that has endured all that history.

Think, on the other hand, of Planet Hollywood, a franchised theme club where one goes to experience the thrill of an energetic ambiance with connections to celebrities. The club could have been built last week, or it could be in an ancient building with signs of age, but this makes little difference to the texture of such a historically diluted place whose grammar will take in the historical traces at most as background decor. Historical dilution and role thinness are related, since it is because modern social roles are less substantial that modern places can choose to ignore the weight of history.

A dense place is is not all present at once, and its presence is less pushy, more gappy and rough. It is not coming at you; it was not aimed at you; it is on its own. You can take it or leave it without affecting its reality and purpose. This is not the case with an attraction such as Planet Hollywood, which has to come at you in order to keep its reality, which is in its attraction, a force that is real only when it is being felt. In such diluted places, too often our inhabitation is reduced to being the consumer, the victim, and perhaps the ironic observer.

Index
Complexity outline