Abstract

Why do we often flock to sites where what was there isn’t there anymore, or where there are merely the barest hints left of its former presence? Expanding Carolyn Korsmeyer’s account (from her 2008 JAAC article “Aesthetic Deception: On Encounters with the Past”), this essay explores how concepts of genuineness and age value, as aesthetic properties and features of experience, might work for things that aren’t there anymore. Part of the “genuineness” of built structures is tied to their original location. What we experience at these (now utterly changed or erased, yet genuine) sites is a type of imaginative play engaging the vanished architecture. Even when we are just imagining “the way things used to be,” complete with the structures that used to exist, a large part of what we are imagining is the physicality of actually being there.