Two otherwise unconnected recent experiences have triggered similar thoughts. Last Saturday I visited my old school for the first time in what must have been seven or eight years. From the instant I walked through the gate I was walking around in a dream-like trance. I practically lived on that campus between the ages of seven and eighteen, but have since moved away, busy with new and more exotic things. The sudden influx of a torrent of memories was moving. After the forensics session ended, I strolled around campus for two hours, reminding myself the life I had there. This felt so disconnected to my current life as to appear foreign, a life that belonged to someone else, yet I was privy to all its details and depth. I found some doors unlocked and wandered through buildings that I had forgotten but used to be my roaming grounds when I had only been around for a single digit of years.

This sudden surge of memories that had been put aside and forsaken was joyful. Not only because the memories themselves were, for the most part, joyful, but also because an unrecalled world that had been mine was revealed to me again in all its intricacy and completeness. I had once lived that, now I live something else; I have had at least two distinct periods so far. I saw life as long and full of richness, and so I felt relaxed.

On Monday (my birthday) I visited a site at Koryschades, a small village in a mountainous area (Evrytania, “the Switzerland of Greece”) of central Greece. Although I had never been there before, the trip elicited a strong déjà vu, probably due to some childhood holiday to a similar area. However, the enjoyment of the place was intensified because of the association to germane cultural references, like music and folk art motifs, to which I was exposed off-site. The congruity of those academically accumulated references to the physical environment made for a profound experience. The drama suggested by the landscape had something to do with this too, I assume, because my similar experience of placing cultural references back into their origin in New York was not as strong.

There is potential in exploiting the strong emotions generated by the memory of place in art and architecture. I am reminded in particular of the manga worlds of Taiyo Matsumoto and the set for the opening ceremony for the 2004 Paralympic Games in Athens, which featured a thick-trunked, afro-canopied tree on a grass mound (which I thought looked very Japanese), but also of the strangely familiar utopias that are Star Wars locations. To be evocative, these constructed worlds need to elicit associations to the known but also be strange, dramatic, and “other.”