You can watch the thirty-fifth Parlour LAB here!

The intimate space of the house is inextricably bound up with the processes of day-to-day existence. But what happens when that function is removed? How effective is architecture at storing memory? And how can it be remembered, or reimagined?

Cristina described her work examining the demolition books of the Darling Harbour resumptions, exploring the haunting photos of the now-lost buildings and posed the question, “How do people interact with architecture that is lost?” She explores architecture as more than a built object, and crafted plaster models of some of these structures and placed them in the crevices along the Bondi to Bronte walk as part of the Sculpture by the Sea event, exploring how static objects can tell us how architecture shifts and changes over time. Cristina’s takeaway was that gathering a “circle of niceness” and keeping them close allows us to test interesting ideas in joyful ways.

In his presentation, titled ‘Frozen’, Jarrod took “a quick gallop” through five case studies of house museums – Heide II, Kettle’s Yard (Cambridge), Lyon Housemuseum, Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia) and Ravenscar (Christchurch). Each project offered a different approach to the relationship between museology, art and domesticity. Jarrod posited that buildings are not a good medium for storytelling in comparison to objects in a museum collection, but as architects we can curate a particular experience.

It was a rich, fascinating discussion that posed and answered many questions about translating heritage and associated conceptual challenges.