Building Myths, or How to Preserve the Social Content of Architecture

During the rise of historical preservation in the 1970s, Montreal architect and artist Melvin Charney displaced the traditional idea that preservation in architecture consists in the conservation of existing buildings. In his installations of the period, architecture is not located in buildings but in the underlying, unconscious, and presumably universal meaning of architectural figures. His works introduced into conservation practices the radical idea that blending a built image and a narrative may preserve the social content of architecture. In putting back “meaning into the thing itself,” Charney demonstrated the efficiency of mythical speech in the creation of a meaningful architecture. His installations of the 1970s teach us that building myths is essential to the creation and preservation of monuments.