ABSTRACT
For those who have never visited the Louvre in Paris, France or the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, a frozen snapshot of each of those architectural monuments is the first image that comes to mind, rather than any of the paintings in the collections housed within their prodigious walls. The image is likely to be of the building itself, or its location: the architecture and architectural place, therefore, and decidedly not the contents. It follows that if architectural buildings of magisterial scale designed by important international architects are increasingly what tourists desire to see, then it behoves us to investigate at close range the network of narratives and memories created by tourists as they chart their cultural itineraries. What tourists choose to include, remember and dismiss as worthy of a visit on this performative route is what I want to consider as evidence of the creative touristic intervention of curating place.
