Turning "sites of remembrance" into "sites of imagination": The case of Hideyoshi's great Buddha

From the seventeenth until the nineteenth century, the Great Buddha Hall (Daibutsuden) of Hōkōji temple was one of the top attractions of a visit to the capital. The site has now almost disappeared, but its varied visual footprint testifies to the agency of its audiences, both local and foreign. The analysis of these visual sources yields information about the embodied experience of visiting the site and the strategies of dealing with its loss. These issues are relevant for present-day landscape conservation policies in the context of the availability of digital technology. If developed with attention to the specificity of historical sources, immersive digital apps have the potential to insert a new layer of interaction at the intersection between memory and architecture, thereby enabling users to re-engage with historical sites.