The Atlas as a Figure of Memory and the Adaptive Reuse of Architectural Heritage

Abstract

The paper addresses the atlas as a figure of memory and its realization in various artistic and art historical experiments, like Warburg’s Mnemosyne or later in Gerhart Richter’s Atlas and Hanne Darboven’s Cultural History. The hypothesis is that the memory of the atlas differs from the memory of the museum because they presuppose different conceptions of the past. The objectives are two-fold: first, the paper shows how the atlas generates a performative type of memory as the viewer can follow different courses in the reconstruction of the past; second, the paper investigates the role that the atlas can play in architectural design, more specifically in the adaptive reuse of existing buildings. From this perspective, paintings of religious interiors (from Renaissance to seventeenth-century Dutch) have a specific potential, namely their regeneration as spaces of reflection and the cultivation of attention.