What Time Is This Place? - Kevin Lynch

The Presence of the Past
This image of time is mostly conveyed very directly. Ruins are romanticized.
Historical buildings are preserved as relics of time gone by, even when they are
irrelevant to their context, incapable of communicating their meaning of
existence to the public, or explaining the relevance of cost and time that goes
for preservation and difficulties they generate for new development.
Kevin Lynch suggests here “though the landscape should have the imprint of
human events and seem connected with living persons, the imprints and
connections must eventually fade away and be forgotten, just as human
memories and generations fade”.
What time is this place?
A surviving fragment of the marble map
of imperial Rome indicates the theater of
Pompey.
In the same area of Rome today, there
are traces of the former structure.