One of the concepts I'd like to showcase in the Pittsburgh Signs Project is something I call historical succession. I'm not sure why I don't just call it "preservation." Maybe because preservation has connotations of keeping the same things the same. In What Are People For? (p. 193, "Feminisim, the Body, and the Machine") Wendell Berry talks about transformation of things and places, but adds this idea of respect for context:
The well-crafted table or cabinet emodies the memory of (because it embodies respect for) the tree it as made of and the forest in which the tree stood. The work of certain potters embodies the memory that the clay was dug from the earth. Certain farms contain hospitably the remnants and reminders of the forest or prairie that preceded them. It is possible even for towns and cities to remember farms and forests or prairies. All good human work remembers its history. The best writing, even when printed is full of intimations that it is the present version of earlier versions of itself, and that its maker inherited the work and the ways of earlier makers. It thus keeps, even in print, a suggestion of the quality of the handwritten page; it is a palimpsest.Posted by mastr at March 23, 2004 02:21 PMSomething of this undoubetdly carries over into industrial products. The plastic Clorox jug has a shape and loop for the forefinger that recalls the stoneware jug that went before it. But something vital is missing. It embodies no memory of its source or sources in the earth of any human hand involved in its shaping. Or look at a large factory or a powerplant or an airport, and see if you can imagine -- even if you know -- what was there before. In such things the materials of the world have entered a kind of orphanhood.