What makes something iconic and why do we memorialise places?

The way we identify certain places is a deeply complex psychological process. It’s strongly individualistic and is very much reflective of the personal human experiences which are distinct to everyone’s lives. Often it is more obvious to identify places as iconoclasts amongst a plethora of normality, other times it is solely based on the emotive evocation of ourselves in time and place. This entry aims to deconstruct what it means to make places and things iconic and how we as humans inhabit and attach ourselves to them.

To be iconic is a subjective term. To name icons of the world, many may exemplify the great human structures that have withstood time i.e The Pyramids of Giza or Mo’ai of Easter Island. They formulate in our mind as icons for the way that they are delivered to us. Be it through popular culture, education, tourism or personal experience, to be iconic is to be an outstanding exhibition of a certain respect. Icons can formulate in physical space, objects, language or simply by the way people inhabit a space or alternatively the way one inhabits their space. Most dire, icons must deliver us messages of significance, with such emphasis that it makes them extraordinary when focussing on memory. They are the aspects which remain prodded and strong that will always reveal an insightful experience.

We as humans memorialise places for the purpose of dual nature, to both retrospectively reflect and sustain for future outlook. In reference to Hiroshi Uchida, to memorialise is to primarily ‘rescue from oblivion the person who pursued an idea, events or incidents that arose from an idea in question’. This may be a place in question of great significance, may it be triumph, failure, human sacrifice, incident, gain or loss. It is of such significance that it is of consensus to preserve as a lesson in time. More prominently, examples of this may be museums and historical preservation or rather more poetic statements of memory such as the artistic perception of September 11’s Ground Zero, the site of the former World Trade Centre, New York city. These conceptualised notions of memorialised places are preserved echoes of a homogenous progression – reflections of the ongoing human experience.