Local Distinctiveness

Losing Your Place : Particularity

The unusual, the special, the strange, the idiosyncratic, the rare may be important factors in giving a place its sense of itself, but the matrix exerts the binding force. The commonplace defines identity: the locally abundant plants, the specific wall building methods, the precise ingredients for recipes. In one Derbyshire town doctors apparently scribble NH on many of their patients' notes decipherable to them as Normal for Ilkeston.

Georgian houses great and small have a recognizable similarity of form, function and facade, based upon proportional rules. Their differences are in their social declaration (first rate, second rate and third rate houses of Bloomsbury), their tasks (workers houses in Barnsbury, the 10th Earl of Moray's estate in Edinburgh's New Town), their materials (yellow oolitic limestone of Bath, red brick of Nottinghamshire), their relations to the land and each other. So despite the homogenising potential, they serve as wonderful example of richness.

The point here is not to be preoccupied by difference, but by appropriateness to and expressiveness of time and place. While all leaves are doing the same basic job they have developed drip tips, hairs, etc. to accomodate to local conditions, all species produce different kinds of leaves, and every leaf on the same tree is different, the rules dictated by photosynthesis and family do not sacrifice individuation.

Losing Your Place
Local
Distinctiveness
Detail
Authenticity
Patina
References

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