For art historian  Shelley Hornstein, the relationship between memory and place has been a source of fascination for much of her academic career. Hornstein, a professor of architectural history and visual culture in York University’s Department of Visual Arts, has authored a new book on the subject: Losing Site: Architecture, Memory and Place (Ashgate 2011).

Dr. Shelley Hornstein, Professor of Architectural History and Visual Culture, Faculty of Fine Arts, York University

In Losing Site, Dr. Hornstein investigates how architecture shapes our experiences of place and both captures and conjures memory. She explores how architecture exists as a material object and how it registers as a place that we come to remember beyond the physical site itself. Connecting architecture with geography, visual culture and urban studies, she looks at the infinite variations of how architecture maps our physical, mental or emotional space.

The book’s title reflects Professor Hornstein’s understanding of culture, place and memory. “We’ve lost sight of what it means to be in a place, to experience, to know the physicality of a place,” she says. “Losing Site plays with the ideas that bring together site and sight. How does architecture trigger memory?”

From "Losing Site": Image of Dani Karavan, Passages - Homage to Walter Benjamin, 1994, Portbou, Spain. Photo: Shelley Hornstein.

Each chapter explores this concept by providing a different example of the many ways that the physical place of architecture is curated by the architecture in our mental space, or what Dr. Hornstein calls our “imaginary toolbox” that we use when we remember or think of a place, look at a photograph, visit a site and describe it later to someone else.

“Architecture is much broader than we imagine,” Dr. Hornstein says. “It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that architecture is not only about buildings, but also about the construction of our physical landscape and how we relate to it … what our bodies do and mean in those spaces, as well as the mental maps and architectural constructions we build in our minds and the worlds we build visually as we read fiction, for example.”

Dr. Hornstein notes that a hedge separating a garden from a road traces a line that not only divides a space into two places, but creates two new places that did not exist before. “We build, demolish and shape space into architectural places that are meaningful to us,” she says. “When those places disappear, how do we remember them?”

Published as part of the Ashgate Studies in Architecture series, Losing Site has been hailed as “an erudite and extremely thoughtful meditation” (James E. Young, University of Massachusetts Amherst) that “takes us on a dizzying pilgrimage from the Guggenheim to Google Earth, from Toronto to Tel Aviv, showing … how architecture, place, and memory work together in dynamic interplay” (Annmarie Adams, McGill University). The publication is available both in hard copy and as an e-book.

Professor Hornstein’s other books include the edited volumes Capital Culture: A Reader on Modernist Legacies, State Institutions, and the Value(s) of Art (McGill-University Press, 2000); Image and Remembrance: Representation and The Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 2002); and Impossible Images: Contemporary Art after the Holocaust (NYU Press, 2003).

Professor Hornstein’s next project is an international workshop she is organizing to orchestrate a course on the theme “Starlets and Starchitecture: Women, Celebrity and Architecture Across Borders”, to be taught by 10 colleagues in 10 different cities and countries.

And she’s already planning her next book. It will be, Dr. Hornstein says, on the topic of demolition: “an assemblage of case studies that riff on what it means to intentionally demolish architecture.