Place-Text-Memory

By framing The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge as a fictional autobiography for Rainer Marie Rilke, the concepts of memory, identity, and spatial understanding will be interpreted through the subjective lens of the character Malte. In addition to the literary context of Rilke, Aldo Rossi’s Scientific Autobiography provides an architectural foundation to both the virtual and corporeal production of space. The intention of this interdisciplinary union is to consider the use of memory as a device for constructing identity (architectural and personal) by recalling space/events and the fragmented nature that accompanies remembrances. The act of looking back on memory of spaces and events from the perspective of the present, displacing them from chronological and locational contexts, alters the interpretation of those memories.

The integration of Rossi’s use of memory in relation to space is centered around his operational techniques for constructing new architectural designs, where he would often redraw fragments of his past buildings as a collage with new proposals. Consistently mining the architectural catalogue of his mind, this reappropriation of past elements allows the invention of new concepts to unite with the repetition of past shapes; the shifting context therefore alters how the past objects are read and simultaneously the new shapes are deformed by the insertion of his memories. The collision of history and presence in design does not solely lie in the aesthetic or geometric realm, but more abstractly it occupies how the typologies of buildings are defined. Rossi looks beyond the atavistic programs and considers the social and ideological conditions that arise historically based on the buildings function.

Throughout Malte’s excavation of memories, he is continually conditioning himself about the identity of his subject, i.e., himself; expressing that the described events and spaces belong to Malte, and by internalizing and rewriting those memories, he can orient himself to actually be/become Malte Laurids Brigge. The need for Malte to reaffirm his lost sense of identity is effectively disrupted by his inability to orient himself spatially, bodily, or visually.

In The Notebooks, Malte is an outsider, occupying a foreign space and attempting through memory recollection to define/redefine his identity; this process of retracing memories is hindered by disorientation and gaps that manifest when Malte attempts to reassemble his fragmented thoughts.

The instilled distortions of these memories can be resultant of his alienation from modernized Paris, a stark contrast from the Danish countryside of his youth; “Malte is totally defenseless against the shocks of the city, which penetrate right down to the deepest layers of unconscious memory traces.”

The corruptions or distortions of his remembrances are reflected in the architectural spaces connected to the event. “As I recover it in recalling my child-wrought memories, it is no complete building; it is all broken up inside me; here a room, there a room, and here a piece of a hallway that does not connect these two rooms but is preserved, as a fragment, by itself.” Since only certain rooms, elements, and views pertain to the recalled location, the spaces outside this specific viewpoint drift away into the void; any attempt to represent these retraced places through standard architectural methods of

orthographic projection would reveal impossible constructions of space, where seemingly normal buildings are punctured by the gaps of a disjointed memory. “It is as though the picture of this house had fallen into me from an infinite height and had shattered against my very ground.”

Throughout The Notebooks, Malte exists in a state of continual flux, never completely certain of his bodily or spatial boundaries, the fragmentation of his environment can trigger, as it were, the disjointed memories of frightening past experiences. During one of his walks on the Parisian streets he is confronted by a partially demolished apartment building; with one façade of the building removed, it reveals the once lived in apartments, only remnants of their former lives. “The stubborn life of these rooms had not let itself be trampled out. I was still there; it clung to the nails that had been left, it stood on the remaining handbreadth of flooring, it crouched under the corner joints where there was still a little bit of interior.” The compartments of this housing structure, reveal not a totality but only a glimpse, snapshots of their spatial narratives that mirror the fractured homes in Malte’s memories. Instances such as the destructed apartment complex, these “handles of memory” are jolts to his delicate system of perception and force Malte to return and relive moments from his past.

When Malte is in his apartment and attempting to (re)write one of the stories from his childhood, he is transported back to the mansion of his maternal grandfather Count Brahe in Urnekloster; the specific memory is a dinner scene where Malte is consumed by the dining room, ”its darkening height, with its never quite clarified corners, it sucked all images out of one without giving one

any definite substitute for them.” Because Malte has no memory of this room during the daytime, he is unsure of its exact spatial limits or any connections to external reference points, it exists as a single space enveloped with darkness and uncertainty. As Malte is emptied by the spatial disorientation of the room, he uses his foot to search under the table for the knee of his father, something tangible to reaffirm his presence in reality and an attempt to overcome this referential anxiety; the true horror though had yet to arrive. Christine Brahe, an unexpected dinner guest that had been dead for some time, only added to the uncanny event as Malte was not aware at the time that she was not living. It is this type of fear, “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” , that Malte is constantly facing; the seemingly familiar is disjointed from its context and distorted by the unknown. The fractured spaces and events from his memory propagate this spatial disorientation and effectively alienate Malte from his past self; Malte’s attempt to reclaim his identity by rewriting his childhood memories remains elusive as these distorted memories are equally horrifying in their reenactment.

Malte’s inability to distinguish spatial boundaries is mirrored with his corporeal perspective; “he is fundamentally unsure of the boundaries of his body, the boundaries between himself and the world.” The contours of Malte’s body drift in ownership between himself and his environment, he never has complete assurance that he is whole, or that he even exists at all. At one remembrance from Malte’s youth, he is drawing a knight with crayons but looses the color red under his desk and has to disembark his chair to retrieve it; it is at this

moment when he realizes that “the too-prolonged kneeling posture had numbed my limbs; I could not tell what belonged to me, and what to the chair.” This bodily disorientation is immediately followed by a nightmarish perception of dismemberment; as Malte grasps in the dark for his missing color, he begins to feel a loss of control in his hand as it begins to search autonomously for the red crayon. While still unsure whether his body is his own, his eyes begin to adjust to the darkness under his desk and reveal a thin foreign hand outstretched from the wall and groping the rug alongside him. Malte is disconnected from any firm notions of perception, his touch and sight are distorted through these anxieties of disorientation; he abandons control and is lost without any bodily or spatial reference system to rely on. The combination of spatial disorientation with the confusion of bodily limitation inhibits Malte from associating any stability of space or self with his past events; Malte’s attempt to write a fixed identity or create a pure window of perception are continuously disrupted though the shattering and re-assemblage of memory.

The concepts of fragmentation and memory in reference to the architectural works of Aldo Rossi are most apparent through his use of montage in sketching; “putting, related/unrelated, fragments side by side” changes not only the individual meanings of each fragment but their union itself creates an additional meaning. While Rossi graphically utilized this technique as a method of architectural representation, its textual reading is used as the structural logic for his Scientific Autobiography. In the conceptual drawings of Rossi, building fragments from his memory are often redrawn within thoughts about new

designs; these fragments represent his prior built projects but also the shapes that exist within a collective memory- those embedded images of a typical house, teapot, or tower. Rossi’s use of internal (memory) and historical references, considered part of the neorationalist movement, were in direct opposition to the modernist aesthetic that dominated most architectural dialogues until the 1960’s. Rossi states, “I could ask myself what “the real” signifies in architecture.

For example, might it be a dimensional, functional, stylistic, or technological fact? I could certainly write a treatise based on such facts. But instead I think of a certain lighthouse, of a memory, and of a summer.” Through the continuous repetition in mining his past architectural experiences, Rossi re-appropriates the shapes of his memory and allows them collide with new concepts for each drawing.

Repetition for Rossi, as evidenced through his use of imagery, can additionally be seen more abstractly as a process of investigation of the subjectobject relationship in architecture. “Repeating in order to forget is compelled by that which will not be put to rest: Rossi’s desire for an architectural whole.”

Through repetition Rossi is transcending the typical functional objectivism of design and reaching for this totality, an architecture that is completely united with its subject that could not possibly be represented differently. Just as Malte is strived for a ” purity of language and vision” , Rossi is attempting to find a purity in architecture; the repetitious insertion of pure geometrical and typological shapes represent Rossi’s heuristic for creating an ahistorical oneness of design. “ The compulsion to repeat may manifest a lack of hope, but it seems to me that

to continue to make the same thing over and over in order to arrive at different results is more than an exercise; it is the unique freedom to discover.” Through this process of repetition, Rossi was able to “[ translate] history into his own history” ; the building fragments of his memories, representing a subjective architectural history, are repeatedly made whole again, though never in exactly the same manner, by their presence in new architectural designs. “ In order to be significant, architecture must be forgotten, or must present only an image for reverence which subsequently becomes confounded with memories.”

The concept of building typology, those inherent yet elusive qualities that define for example the theater-ness of a theater, is for Rossi based more on the subjective and social viewpoints about a particular type of building over its formulaic functional requirements;”type stood as a totalizing gesture against the modality of the new, aesthetic expressions based on subjective inclinations or on psychological experience. “ The process of using the type of building as a lens to search for this purity of form is enacted through Rossi’s repeated sketching, his remembrance of architectural shapes. It was Rossi’s “imperative to find a method of design and of architectural reasoning that would produce a realist architecture; that is, an architecture that would narrate, not merely describe, the social-historical contents of the times.” This narration of architecture, the self-evident qualities imbued within the design and interpreted by the subject, is for Rossi, more than embedding symbolism in design; it involves establishing a reference system not to a singular piece of architecture, but to the most

quintessential components that define an architectural type. It is the “universal, primeval architectural types that he utilizes to trigger individual memories for each beholder” ; Rossi’s architecture becomes an interface for recalling memories within the subject, where the “intentions and ‘memories’ of the architect and those of the beholder meet midway.” Uniting the subject and object through memory and archetypical forms express Rossi’s pursuit of a pure, totality in architecture; simultaneously historical and ahistorical, it unties autobiography with collective biography to define and narrate new architectural spaces.

Returning to Rilke’s fictional biography of Malte Laurids Brigge, and correspondingly Malte’s pursuit through The Notebooks to write out his identity, the process of self-definition is again impeded by the methodology Malte uses for perceiving his present life and the memories of his childhood, “seeing without being seen” . It is in the moments of self-reflection that Malte experiences his greatest anxieties; seeing himself and questioning his existence are the sources-of and solutions-to his crisis of identity. “I sit here and am nothing. And nevertheless this nothing begins to think and thinks, five flights up, on a grey Parisian afternoon, these thoughts.” Malte takes refuge in his apartment, safe from the glaring eyes of the public, but also hopelessly depressed in his solitude; as he questions his existence in this space, he recalls the traumatic events of his youth.

By re-watching these former memories, Malte hopes blindly for some solace at the overcoming of past fears, but upon reflection he realizes “it is just as difficult as it was before, and it has been useless to grow older.” Since the events of Malte’s youth have slowly submerged in his memory through aging, the anxieties

associated with that past had been attenuated as well; upon the realization of his emptiness in that Parisian apartment, Malte resurfaces the childhood memories only to realize that “all forgotten fears are there again.”

Self-reflection for Malte, that forced confrontation between himself and his perception of self, exposes his fractured identity, and his reliving of these past events only compounds his loss of self. Malte recalls when he finds the key for a closet in a seldom used area of his Ulsgaard house; situated in a space between two guest quarters, the corner room’s closet was a repository of formal dressing attire. While originally just taking the clothes out to gaze at them in the sunlit room, he eventually dawns the costumes and dashes to mirrors in the guest room to view his new self. Malte is initially cognizant of each new identity he brings to the mirror, allowing every mask and costume to overlay an artificial persona over him. Malte’s excitement of transitioning between these roles is crushed when his grandiose movements as a conjuring wizard overturns an adjacent table -- its contents shatter against the floor. Breaking the awareness between Malte and his disguised self, the interruption of this event leaves Malte stunned, for when he gazes back into the mirror he finds someone else glaring back at him.

“I stared at this great, terrifying unknown before me, and it seemed to me appalling to be alone with him. But at that very moment I thought this, the worst befell: I lost all sense, I simply ceased to exist. For one second I had an indescribable, painful and futile longing for myself, then there was only he: there was nothing but he.”

Confronted with this other-self in the mirror, Malte questions who is in

control and constructing the virtual self-image; the mirror was no longer an ally, it was “incapable of providing the imaginary identity and unity of the body.” The inability to recognize himself, relying on the mirror for his source of identity, Malte has lost his trust in vision; perception is fragmented by this doubt and denotes his loss of the ability to “see holistically.”

Malte’s vision throughout The Notebooks is never the stable platform he requires for viewing past and present occurrences; it’s fractured sensibility for perception is mirrored by Malte’s fragmented memories and identity. “Have I said it before? I am learning to see. Yes, I am beginning. It still goes badly. But I intend to make the most of my time.” Malte is struggling to comprehend his environment in the busy streets of Paris; while attempting to perceive space, his concentration is continually broken as the gaze of other eyes weighs him down.

The break between self-perception and the imagined perception that others project onto him leaves Malte estranged from his sense of vision; it’s apparent that “there is no purity, no oneness of vision, but that the scopic field is always already split” Malte is forced to acknowledge the unreliability of his scopic system, that what he perceives and what his fractured psyche show him have no clear delineation. The mirror re-presented a projection of Malte’s disrupted sense of self; it was a screen that displayed not a singular self image, but a reversal, the perception of oneself -- not simply a reflected image.

Beyond the interaction with the mirror, another viewport Malte encounters is the window; it allows not for self-reflection, but a removal of himself from the environment. A gateway into the rhythms of the city, Malte

allows the sounds of the city to wash over him as he gazes unilaterally at the people below. “Electric street-cars rage ringing through my room. Automobiles run their way over me… A door slams. Someone calls. People are running, overtake each other. A dog barks.” The spectacle distracts Malte from his solitude in the apartment; it is only when everything grows quiet, when that great stillness immerses the city in silence, that his anxieties return. Malte realizes later that the temporary reprieve the window offers is fleeting, and it can only temporarily numb the fear, not extinguish it. “But scarcely had I looked thither when I wished the window had been barricaded, blocked up, like the wall. I knew that things were going on out there in the same indifferent way, that out there, too, there was nothing but my loneliness.” The bifurcated scopic regime, seeing and being seen, is manifested for Malte with the window and mirror, respectively; while reach reshapes his sense of self, Malte’s skewed perception through these screens is driven by his ruptured sense of identity.

Rossi’s perception of the window evokes a similar duality as Malte’s, but its schism is rooted in the biographical differences between architect and subject and not the disrupted identities of a single subject. “In Architecture every window is the window both of the artist and of anybody at all, the window children write about in letters: ‘Tell me what you see from your window.’ In reality a window is an aperture like any other, which perhaps opens out on a simple native village; or it is simply any opening from which one can lean out.” The windows Rossi discusses are for the architect, the prescribed openings that frame the outside environment and act as portals to mediate interior and exterior spaces. The

selection of window locations and their corresponding views are determined by the architect’s intended spatial relationship, but the subject’s inherent biographical differences will construct images in the aperture that could never be foreseen by the designer. Rossi’s mediates the two viewpoints with a Hericlitian perspective, that the image framed by the window is not a static representation, but a shifting collection of objects whose meaning adjusts over time. “ Moreover, the window, like the coffin, presents an incredibly history. Of course, from the point of view of construction, the window and the coffin resemble one another; and the window and the coffin, like the palace, like everything else, anticipate events which have already happened, somewhere, here or some other place.”

Rossi’s union of the window and the coffin, apertures describing the passage of time, is explored within the context of the city and the cemetery in perhaps his most prominent project, the Modena cemetery.

The San Cataldo Cemetery in Modena, Italy signifies for Rossi a culmination of place, text, and memory; he traces the origins of cemetery’s conception back to his recovery from an automobile crash, which occurred while driving through Yugoslavia in 1971. “Lying nearly immobile, I thought of the past, but sometimes I did not think: I merely gazed at the trees and the sky. This presence of things and of my separation from things -- bound up also with the painful awareness of my own bones -- brought me back to my childhood. During the following summer, in my study for the project, perhaps only this image and the pain in my bones remained with me: I saw the skeletal structure of the body as a series of fractures to be reassembled.”

The skeletal framework would act as the primary imagery to distinguish a city of the living from Rossi’s city of the dead -- the cemetery; his fractured bones had to be reassembled before he could move again, just as Malte feels he must reconfigure his shattered past before he can continue with the present. The skeleton, while representative of death, in life it acts as the schema for the rest of the body; therefore, providing only this framework for person is to render an incomplete body. Rossi represents the buildings at San Cataldo Cemetery with this aesthetic of incompleteness, almost abandonment of the space; it was here that he “began to build Modena up as bone structure, a city of bone, built of bone, housing bone. This kind of death was the end of his youth.”

In addition to Rossi’s biographical fragmentation of death through his bone structure, the buildings of the cemetery are references to exhumed archetypes from his memory -- fragments of past spatial experiences. “I have referred to the Roman tomb of the baker, an abandoned factory, an empty house; I also saw death in the sense of ‘no one lives here anymore’ and hence as regret.”

The empty house from Rossi’s memory, the scaffolding of a once lively home, becomes a structure housing skeletal remains in the cemetery. This ossuary triggers the familiar memory of an Italian house; yet purged of its residents and meaning, it becomes a “house of death, without a roof or window frames or interior floors. It is stripped of everything except its enduring masonry bones.”

By expelling its contents and leaving only the rough framework of a house, the ossuary truly renders “ the house ‘un-homely,’ the shift from the familiar to the strange and eerie.” The ossuary, performing as the house for the dead, is

central to the entire cemetery’s function as the city of the dead; it exemplifies the merging of a autobiographical intention, death and bones, with a collective biography of the subject, the house ‘unhomely’. “Early in 1979 I saw the first wing of the cemetery at Modena being filled with the dead, and these corpses with their yellowish-white photographs, their names, the plastic flowers offered out of family and public sympathy, gave the place its unique significance. But then after many polemics it went back to being the great house of the dead where the architecture was a scarcely perceptible background for the specialist.”

Rossi’s construction of this background architecture, the framing of space that rests eternally unfinished, was his method of “[resolving] the youthful problem of death through representation.” The San Cataldo Cemetery’s representation is that of totality; mediating between the world of the living and the city of the dead, its archetypical and biographical concepts embed and unite Rossi’s memory with the collective memory.

Inevitably, Malte’s search for an objective scopic system, a purity in vision, to conquer his past memories and reclaim the future for himself, is a blind quest hindered by his consistent self-betrayal -- bodily, visual, and spatial disorientation. His internalization of memories with the notion of achieving emotional growth at some later time is destroyed by the continual interruptions to his perception.

“And still it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again… Not till they have turned to blood within us, to glance and gesture,

nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves” Malte’s only consistent system is his self-conditioning, the mantra that waiting will make the pain subside; “And when I wrote my drama, how I went astray” The remembrances of his youth, when not marred by the horrors of dismemberment or disorientation, when it is just Malte and himself, they still betray him; Malte’s inability to confront his identity head on leaves him shattered with every self-reflective thought -- evasion defines his fear.

The use of memory, catharsis for Malte and creation for Rossi, relies on their process of internalization, the ‘turning into blood’ of the memories; Rossi mined the past to generate forms which trigger an event in the collective memory, and Malte was forced to confront his past upon perceiving such ‘handles of memory.’ Malte’s fractured identity and memory are manifested through his anxieties in the city, that is his loss of bodily boundaries, loss of spatial orientation, and loss of controlled vision; Rossi’s fractured bones are abstractly spatialized into his city of the dead, populated by archetypical buildings from his memory. Just as Rilke projects his thoughts onto Malte, Rossi projects his thoughts onto his architectural creations; by recognizing the subjective nature of memories and perception, the (auto)biography becomes a design methodology for the self and for architecture.

“the novel just comes to the end of a dead end”

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