MEMORY AND REMINISCENCE: Traces in the city
Francis Yates' conjectural reconstruction of Giordano Bruno's Memory Wheel
Karolos Michailidis 4238052
Seminar Research Methods_AR3AP010 TU DELFT 2013/14 | Q1/2 | Marc Schoonderbeek
KAROLOS MICHAILIDIS 4238052
Seminar Research Methods AR3AP010
MEMORY AND REMINISCENCE: traces in the city Introduction Adolf Loos writes about his childhood: "Here is the table, a piece of furniture completely crazy and dirty, a table that used to close using an astonishing mechanism. And yet it was our table, our table! And there is also the office desk with a stain that my sister Ermina made, when she was very young, by spilling the inkwell. These are the portraits of my parents! Such terrible frames! However, they were marriage gifts by the employees of my father. And an embroidered slipper where you could hang your watch, childhood work of my sister Irma. Every piece of furniture, everything, every object tells a story, the story of the family. The apartment was never finished, it was growing with us and we were growing with it.”
Any city resident collects in his house traces of memories and experiences, giving the residence the character of an alternating accumulation. This accumulation has created and given shape to the shell (the building, the settlement, the city), in a dynamic rather than static and rigid way. Even if residents are gone, seasons and years pass, the shell stays there to remind us of the people that once "lived" in it. _
Intent The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.” Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
We live in a world of images and stimuli that have trained and drilled our own eyes that have played with our anxieties to produce dreams and fantasies hidden in the unconscious of our soul. These images extracted from our memory, ‘’musee imaginaire’’ as described by Hertzberger which act subconsciously, defining our thoughts, desires and needs to obtain today in front of our eyes meaning and importance and become the medium of reading and scanning our world. Images that reveal truths which we were previously unable to grasp. Sometimes these images are creations and manipulations of nature and sometimes man‐made constructions, where the creator is unknown, wedged in the landscape in the most measured and precise way, standing there witnessing the deep bond between man and his environment. One of the main proposals of this thesis is that memory (autobiographical and collective, each an integral of the other) exists as the foundation upon which meaning is built. Memory sustains our connection to the world. Every aspect of experience becomes enveloped in the process of memory. It forms our identity as individuals, and it brings individuals together to form the identity of social groups. Memory is also the thread that links the lived‐in now with the past and the future: what I remember of my past contributes to who I am now (in this very moment) and in many ways affects what I will do in the future1. And the question that arises is, how can you collect the traces of a neighbourhood, or a whole city, in order to form a commentary and have an impact on the social life of the inhabitants in this instance of time but also cultivate a new ‘memory’ for the future? Is memory trapped in places, stuck in traces, or is constantly recreated directing over and over again the environment of its existence and occurrence? And questioning the statement further: What traces will our architecture generate and leave behind for the future generations?
1 Beaudry, J.J, 2002.’’Meaning Building: Aldo Rossi and the Practice of Memory’’. Master of Science in Architectural Studies. Texas, Austin: University of Texas.
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KAROLOS MICHAILIDIS 4238052
Seminar Research Methods AR3AP010
Revival of Memory Since the 1980’s, Western societies have developed a fascination with memory. In its many forms, memory has become a marker of global culture: in historiography, psychoanalysis, visual and performing arts and media‐ and particularly in urban studies, public art, landscape design and architecture2. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines memory as ‘’the power or process of reproducing or recalling what has been learned and retained especially through associative mechanisms.’’3 4 Thus a link is established between the past and the present, where time becomes a fundamental aspect for the revival of memory. The gap between yesterday and today, between reminiscence and the present, between the one and the multiple iterations is filled with the memory that lives constantly in the present. Memory is nothing more than the system that bridges this gap. Thus the time that has passed is measured through memory. Memory can be used to compare, to associate, to restore or even to create, using data of the past, new situations and feelings. The oldest and perhaps the best‐known definition of memory was given by Plato, who links and relates memory to the footprint of a signet on sand. What is interesting is to understand the ways in which we perceive the intangible qualities of a space and the traces the space silently and invisibly carries as well as how these translate into personal and emerging experiences. The emotions that accompany a space are essentially what broadcasts its special texture and feeling and thus they become imprinted in memory. Being in a space we experience it intuitively, we feel and perceive the atmosphere around it: this is the poetic quality of everything that surround us, such as pace, materiality, light. The texture as well as the smell of a space also serve as traces. Olfaction, like the other senses, can be cultivated and gain substantial importance in the relationship between a person’s environment and other people. This is because smells are mentally associated with the conditions that caused them, more than anything else, and their description exists precisely in this connection. In this case, memory operates as a ‘stock’ of experiences correlated with certain smells. When an odour is perceived, it activates the memory causing the withdrawal of some parts of this ‘stock’ associated with this similar smell. These intangible attributes of space can be so intense that they strip off every single architectural element off it and completely transform it. Through personal memory, the space is charged with situations or values that accompany it, thus affecting our behaviour. Smells are associated in memory with particular places so that often we identify them with spaces we have been to and with events that have occurred in them and marked them. Another strong feature is related to hearing and sounds. Sounds can also represent images which refer to spatial relationships and contribute to a remote recognition and ‘reading’ of space. Memory can therefore act as the process of the reincarnation of needs, fears, obsessions and experiences. Time might go by, the forms of the building may change, some parts may be altered but memories remain, even if always affected by the irreversible alteration of time. Besides, the architectural space is not only a shape, an empty building serving as a vehicle, but also the vital interrelationship between the building and its creator. By identifying the processes of memory and analysing its effect on human actions we can come a step closer to understand how memory as a process and as a device can affect our criticism but also our production of Architecture.
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Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, Norman Pressman, Emily Thompson, Constance Classen, and David Howes. Sense of the City: An Alternate Approach to Urbanism. Ed. Mirko Zardini. Montréal, QC: Canadian Centre for Architecture‐ Lars Muller, 2005. Print. 3 The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. S.v. "memory." Retrieved October 31 2013 from http://www.thefreedictionary.com/memory 4 Monument comes from the latin ‘monumentum’, “something that reminds”.
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Traces: signs of time, symbols of memory Levi Strauss in The Savage Mind (1966) explains that despite cultural differences, the human mind is the same everywhere, it has the same skills and in their potential all men are intellectually equal. Even the primitive man thought in the same rationalized way the modern man does. In this paper, we will try to define and analyse the desires, dreams, and unconscious products of the human mind that exist behind every aspect of social life while dealing with the idea of trace as a residue of memory. Isn’t Architecture, after all, another aspect of this dimension of social life? The trace, therefore, is seen both in the material and the immaterial realm. It helps us acquire an understanding of the way man creates space, and then appropriates, experiences, and eventually remembers it. Seeking, in other words, the meaning of the trace in the material and immaterial imprint in the practice and maturation of architecture. The trace in terms of its tangible, material status, manifests the physical footprints and reveals the way in which nature inspired the primitive man to encode its principles in shapes and spatial arrangements. It is what we can see, the physical entity, a set of surfaces and objects. Thus we come to question how humans left their mark on their environment and how the trace of this Act carries meanings and values serving as archetypal structures through time. We can still trace these structures and forms today, in their evolved states, in a villager’s mannerisms, in the agonized expressions of a child, even in the architect’s abstract first sketches and scribbles while he searches for new ideas. Going back in time we can see that from the simplest shape on the ground to the most complex geometrical compositions, the material status can be a carrier of meaning. Finally, when exploring the intangible dimension of the trace, the immaterial status, we see that every human activity that takes place in a space, ‘charges’ it and leaves its intangible imprint on it. Thus we summarize its impact in the way the intangible footprint of a human act, or even human thought and memory, in a place can turn this space into a vessel of experiences, biomes, a space of collective memory and a narrative of the history of human societies. A survey, through this scope, could not be complete without examining how the trace of time, memory, and associations of integration in an architectural gesture are linked together. That is because the fundamental meaning of a built, constructed form does not consist primarily in its form, but rather in the forces that are hidden inside and beyond it, whether these are the forces that gave birth to it or the forces that inhabit, bring to life, commemorate and, finally, wear it out.
Defining the Traces A definition of every trace is difficult to determine strictly and very definitely as it lies in‐between the sensible and non‐sensible world. The notions of memory and traces can therefore take a variety of different interpretations if approached from different fields and epistemes. I feel that a trace can be approached as being the result of a process, a trail, whether natural or manmade, as the sign of an omitted Act that took place in the past and has now been completed. The trace is not something that necessarily remains: it might be eliminated, might be a reference to something that is not present. The absence of the subject makes the trace of the Act proof of what has occurred. In a way the traces is the impact of memory in the city or the house. It is the way we read and understand memory as a measurement of time and as a mechanism of acceptance. Thus material and immaterial traces are dependent on each other in the creation but also the restoration of memories. The trace of an event or act can be either material (traces of footprints of animals, people, signs of wear and tear) or intangible (experiences, thoughts, memories, time, perception. senses). The distinction between the immaterial trace and the material trace as an image or object is difficult. This paper addresses both at the same time and often considers them as interrelated and interconnected. It is difficult for an immaterial trace to exist without its material origin and, vice versa, the material trace means nothing without its immaterial entity. More specifically, time cannot be experienced without our material world. Time is seen through its effect on people and buildings. Our memories are stored through senses in the city as well as in objects. The smell of a home‐cooked stew, of fresh fish, or of the salty seaside might remind us of an incident and awaken memories but again this happens in a place and through the tangible elements of our surrounding. 5
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Marcel Proust in the epilogue Ruskin’s book: "The seven lamps of architecture"(1849) refers to an observation of his, where the interest in the representation of a tree is not just its description and the image showing its kind, but those basic lines that make visible the adventures of its life, the obstacles it encountered, winds that shook it but managed to defeat them. "What is important," he writes, "is not only the physical image of things, but their path and the trace of their history."
Through the observation of traces, architecture can take different forms and interpretations as well. For example, Image 2 shows a demolished site in Istanbul where the building that once stood there can be ‘read’ by observing the remaining traces on the adjacent building. The image is interesting because it shows an aspect of architecture that is neither a surface nor a space. It lies between the two, like a 2.5D model that can give us a lot of spatial information, enough to have a clear understanding of the spaces and life that once inhabited the building. The change in materials, shapes, and sizes gives as a different point of view on how we can see an architecture of traces, or even how these traces can inform and be reflected in future architecture as a link between the past, the present, and the future.
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Inhabiting Time
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An important component in identifying and understanding the concept of memory and trace is the notion of time. With a material trace, the footprint of time is translated through the aging and signs of decay. Hence, it becomes, in a way, a measuring system. Time decides if an immaterial trace is strong enough to remain, survive, and awaken memories, evoke experiences, sensations, etc. In the human mind time is an intangible, imperceptible reality whose existence is confirmed only through indirect references. The conditions of life and the different modes of construction show how the building is ' destroyed ' or decays, how it is engaged and how it is treated or used afterwards. The destruction, the aging from usage ‘contains’ the intervening period until the state of destruction. This is evident in the objects and buildings that come in direct physical contact with living creatures. The processes that occur during the mutation and evolution of physical matter is crucial, as time is contained in it and, at the same, time contains it. (Note 5) Antony Gompley through his artwork LAND, SEA AND AIR II from 1982 (image 4) has given a distinct and expressive representation of inhabiting time. Each of the figures seems deeply concentrated. One puts the ear to the ground, one gazes out towards the sea, one seems intent to breathe in the atmosphere in its entirety. Nothing happens, has happened, or will ever happen. Nothing but this one thing: Time. Where does this scene take place – in a distant future or in an archaic past? Three figures at the edge of the sea, recently awakened from a prehistoric slumber, or perhaps waiting for the final disappearance which an apocalyptic thinker of our own times has chosen to phrase as a quiet deletion5: “Then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.” [Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses]. ‘’Gomley achieves to inhabit time and manipulate it in some respect by isolating it from space. His work is highly symbolic and deals with memory, both its awakening and its erasure through time. In Gormley’s case the two don’t necessarily exclude each other. He tells us no stories, neither about the birth of consciousness, nor about the death of the subject. Instead, he captures intense states. His art is not about a threatened humanism; rather, he repeatedly recreates a place of intense physical sensation. Rather than developing abstract theories about the world, the phenomenologist approach of Gomley endeavours to make accessible what is already there, in the continuous flow of experience. Phenomenology teaches you nothing new, but instead makes you conscious of what, in a sense, you already know. In a similar vein, Gormley’s works make tangible and conspicuous what is already part of you. They display themselves, but simultaneously they show you who you yourself are6.’’
5 Birnbaum, Daniel. "Remembering the Future: On Antony Gormley." in: Still Moving: Works 1975‐1976. Yomiuri Shimbun. 1996. Retrieved from: http://www.antonygormley.com/resources/essay‐item/id/106 6
Birnbaum, Daniel. "Remembering the Future: On Antony Gormley." in: Still Moving: Works 1975‐1976. Yomiuri Shimbun. 1996. Retrieved
from: http://www.antonygormley.com/resources/essay‐item/id/106
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In a series of works in concrete, human traces are hidden within the cavities of the large blocks. In IMMERSION (1991) and PASSAGE (1993), man can be glimpsed as a form of absence inside the inhospitable concrete. The scarce traces of the body acquire great intensity through the unlikely fusion of human frailty and the mute brutality of cement7. An ambivalent fascination of a similar kind is kindled by a series of recent works in cast iron, where the human figure is encapsulated by layers so thick as to make his features invisible. The immense mass of these iron works could be thought of as a threat, but strangely enough they create a feeling of confidence. Man is hidden deep inside, preserved for the future. Like a memory of something which has not yet taken place. An inversion of time and place, where the trace becomes a medium of imagining rather than remembering8. Architecture is associated with time, memory, and historical references. For instance, it is impossible to experience and enjoy a built architectural entity without referring to its time dimension (i.e. when it was built) which is directly linked to the kinaesthetic experience of humans. A man without memory becomes the prisoner of a fictitious existence: if he loses his sense of time he is unable to understand his own relationship to outside world. Therefore, time is inherent in memory and functions in the form of an independent, sovereign, and uncontrollable entity. It lacks direct references to its existence in a way that renders its functionality immaterial.
IMAGE 4
Three figures on the moist sand: one standing upright, one crouching, and one kneeling. They form a group, but at the same time each seems enclosed in a silence of its own. Each one alone with its own shadow, waiting immutably. Waiting for what?
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Ibid ibid
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The city as a living vessel The city is a living organism and a product of time, with which it has a dynamic and unpredictable relationship. Through a complex orchestration of time and space and the transformations that these result in, the city becomes the material history of human societies and the vessel of their collective memory. From this point of view, the city is an artefact of human culture that has crystallized over centuries. The city is regarded as the place where the human species’ collective memory is recorded. It is a place full of memories layered upon each other and presently discernible through their correlation with a specific instance. The city is imbued with traces left by people. Aldo Rossi says that a city is a collective memory of its people and, like memory, it is associated with objects and places. The city is the locus of collective memory. For Rossi the meaning of time continuity is also essential: “Memory is what resists time”. “Through senses memory is created, and through memory comes experience”. According to Aristotle's view, memory is nothing but the process of revocation of the past, using as a medium the senses. It is recorded, as the ability of empirical perception through the senses of a stimulus. More broadly, one could argue, that memory is the experiential relationship of a person with his environment. The city with its buildings, squares, streets, and architecture transforms into a theatre of social and political events. It thus gives time a dimension of space while becoming a mnemonic code of material culture itself. In other words, public space characterized by the architectural material that ‘’dresses’’ it and the people surrounding and overwhelming it, acquires an identity through the users and through time. The buildings interact with the city, they take upon them the historical memory of the city and reflect it back to the citizens as a legacy for the future. The collective memory of the city unfolds in a spatial context as a component of the personal memories of its inhabitants. A piece of the public space, the neighbourhood we grow up in, full of countless human individual and collective moments is simultaneously the neighbourhood that has changed over the years , but also the neighbourhood of which we carry unforgettable memories within us. These personal experiences recalled from an autobiographical memory are continuously transformed through a particular experiential process, from images of things into memories of things. Aside from location, the city is mostly time. Its strength is the absolute sovereignty of memory, that relationship which automatically identifies and links places with experiences. A ‘humble’ faceless interior of a building might mean nothing to a random passer‐by, but for those who once lived there it is a strong emotional burden, an inexhaustible source of memories. Everything new contains something very old, but at the same time it contains notions from something that still does not exist. In conclusion, space is born due to the people who inhabit and experience it. What are those transformations that without altering the basic characteristics of a building, they convert it to an environment that contains and holds meanings and is enriched by the traces of memories of everyday life?
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Memory is always incomplete, always imperfect, always falling into ruin; but material ruins themselves, like other traces, are treasure: our links to what came before, our guide to situating ourselves in a landscape of time. To erase the ruins is to erase the visible public triggers of memory; a city without ruins and traces of age is like a mind without memories. -Rebecca Solnit in her essay, The Ruins of Memory
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Ruins and Remains
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Zooming in from the scale of the city to the scale of one element we can identify that in every idea, every building, every architectural composition there is a centre of gravity, a core that is determined by the character and the significance of the building. This is actually what is revealed in an excavation of an archaeological site. We see remnants of walls, foundations or only traces of excavations on the ground that have been rescued and have come down to us through successive changes and alterations that the original buildings have undergone through the centuries. A kind of fingerprint of what once was there. What survives, however, and lasts through time are not the remnants of corroded materials of a ruined building but mostly the immaterial substance of the synthetic composition, the backbone of the design. It can be observed that what lasts is the core of the building, the "trail of compositional structure." The gradual collapse and demolition of an edifice therefore reveals and leads inevitably to the early stages of its construction. The moment when the first lines were drawn on the ground, the main axes, the contours, the voids and empty spaces. Because, as the human skeleton is what is left of its living existence, expressing a form of death, in the same way the remnant as a ruin expresses the "death" of the building and the life that once flowed in it. Among the subtle traces on the ground we are trying to delineate what does not exist anymore. Through this mental constitution we can recognize shapes, boundaries and contours. At the same time we observe and mentally "Re‐establish" its essence. We do not do this by arbitrary imagination, but we restore it in its hypothetical intact original form, dictated by the ruin itself, in our quest to understand its formal content. Through the gradual deciphering of the ruins, we can understand the functional layout, but also the intact representation of an entire era. The era in which the project was created and which cannot be captured in exactitude, (its cultural, political or social dimension) but rather in fantasy. If we do not go back in time by detecting and interpreting its origins, if we do not try and think in the way people thought, felt and acted, we can never grasp the magnitude of a past architecture.
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The traces, expressing ideas in space, not only last for their material existence, but mainly because of the power of the meaning they contain. It is ideas that withstand and transferred from generation to generation. Each building stands, expresses and represents something. Its form, from the total shape to the smallest detail, is linked to the content and its functioning: the Life which encapsulates within it. Can we, for example, imagine a shell without the living organism that lives, grows and stays protected inside it? The one cannot exist without the other. The shell is shaped to contain life. And the expression of this life (content) in space is the shell (form). Even an empty shell that we see on a beach brings us unconsciously in mind the mollusc that once lived and developed with it. Similar in architecture, the space is manifested through the people who inhabit and experience it. Their needs have created and given shape to the shell (the building, the settlement, the city), in a dynamic way. Even if people are lost, seasons and years pass, the shell stays there to remind the people that once "lived" there. The plan of a prehistoric Greek household can prove and give reason to the aforementioned thoughts. The shape, the living space, is full of movement and rhythm. Observing the rhythm of the shape, we understand the pace of the resident: entering, walking, shifting, where the inhabitant sleeps, rests, pauses... The flat, vertical wall surfaces and their relationships, characterize and inform the feelings of the inhabitant. We then, inhabit the ruin again and bring it back to life, only this "habitation" happens mentally this time.
IMAGE 7 Something similar happens with the remnants of stone walls and stained plaster, standing stuck on the partition walls of apartment buildings or adjacent houses and remain there, standing, to remind us of the life of previous times. These traces presented as projections of the intersection of the adjacent buildings, are greatly interesting, considering that for the first time the interior of the building is exposed to the public. The vertical section of the old building now is the centre of interest, instead of the plan, and it's like entering through invisible doors inside the rooms which are now suspended: without floors, no furniture, no people. We observe a paradoxical reversal. The inside becomes outside and inner sides of the rooms of an old house transform into a unified external surface, a facade. In these traces one can read the components that once made up the backbone of the building, or the depth limits of the plot, where the stairwell was and how it was designed... 12
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Scratching and breaking through the layers of a wall or the layers on a street we can reveal and expose the presence of every person that has passed through that space. A surface can be seen as the element that contains the memories, that absorbs the smells and hold entails the traces.
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Conclusion In conclusion, we realize that the topic of memory and its traces is a broad concept that is difficult to determine and grasp its limits defining it with eternal ramifications. So through a continuous process of reading and interpretation, we conclude that the traces have hidden in them a strong structure, as the footprint left is disengaged from anything unnecessary. We can thus understand that the human mind is everywhere the same, just people interpret the same problems in different ways. Therefore, Herzberger by using the term ‘musee imaginaire’, he proposes to use the data that exist within this “museum" to construct the "speech” and compose the agenda of the architect. We therefore need to look back to the past and find the link between the past, the present and the future and use the traces as a source of knowledge and understanding. Otherwise we can never fully understand what exist in the present and imagine what can exist in the future. Understanding the content of the substance and the fragmentation and analysis of these elements from our surroundings is the primary action preceding the architectural expression, which incorporates these elements in a modern way, by giving them a new content and meaning. At the same time, leaving a personal ‘stamp’ or trace does not preclude the immaterial presence of the past since each project should be anchored in the conditions of its time, expressing concerns and hesitations, based on what is pre‐existing and opening a conversation with it. Apart from the geometrical characteristics of distinct signs in a ruin, what is revealed to us is the way of living of the people who built it. Understanding the memory contained in a building and therefore in a place, leads to a more mature architecture. If you disconnect and extract from a building the history of human experiences in it, then it will stand ‘naked’, dead, and meaningless. That important experiential dimension of space, and therefore the dimension of time is lost. The memory that a space carries within is dissolved, cancelling in other words the reciprocal relationship that exists between a historical event and a space. What will be left in a house if you remove the "presence" of the people who once lived there but they are not there anymore? What arises from the position of this thesis is that both material and immaterial traces, often unable to distinguish and separate one another, can be considered as a form of art or architecture themselves. "Historical " should be the "memory" that the architect/designer of the modern city is summoning and recalling, if he intends to address the past as a dynamic and still living entity in which his work integrates harmoniously in the fabric of the city, and not as a collection of inert representational images as dead ‘cells’, neither as a place sterilized of emotional and nostalgic reminiscing routes. Besides, their coexistence with the contemporary gives to the city of today its character and identity. A city of traces of memories that form the linking thread between our past and our future…
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BIBLIOGRAPHY 1) Marot, Sébastien. Sub‐urbanism and the art of memory. London: Architectural Association, 2003. Print. 2) Bloomer, Kent C., and Charles Willard Moore. Body, memory, and architecture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. Print. 3) Huyssen, Andreas. Present pasts: urban palimpsests and the politics of memory. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003. Print. 4) Rossi, Aldo, and Peter Eisenman. The architecture of the city. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982. Print. 5) Zardini, Mirko. Sense of the city: An Alternate Approach to Urbanism. Montréal: Centre canadien d'architecture ;, 2005. Print. 6) Wölfflin, Heinrich. Prolegomena to a psychology of architecture. Cambridge, Mass.: [Dept. of Architecture, M.I.T.], 1976. Print. 7) Worringer, Wilhelm. Abstraction and empathy;. Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1967. Print. SECONDARY BIBLIOGRAPHY 8) Avermaete, Tom, Klaske Havik, and Hans Teerds. Architectural positions: architecture, modernity, and the public sphere. Amsterdam: SUN Publishers, 2009. Print. 9) Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Translated by William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1974 10) Grosz, E. A.. "Chaos. Cosmos, Territory, Architecture." In Chaos, territory, art: Deleuze and the framing of the earth. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. 1‐24. 11) Hertzberger, Herman. Space and the architect: lessons in architecture 2. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2000. 12) Pamuk, Orhan, and Maureen Freely. The museum of innocence. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. Print. 13) Pamuk, Orhan, and Maureen Freely. Istanbul: memories and the city. New York: Knopf, 2005. Print. 14) Schulz, Christian. Genius loci: towards a phenomenology of architecture. New York: Rizzoli, 19801979. 15) Tarkovskiĭ, Andreĭ Arsen′evich. Sculpting in time. London: Bodley Head, 19861985. 16) Yates, Frances A. (1966). The Art of Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ARTICLES Bloomer, Kent. “Memory and the Poetics of Architectural Time.” Crit 18 (Spring 1987): 23‐30 Birnbaum, Daniel. "Remembering the Future: On Antony Gormley." in: Still Moving: Works 1975‐1976. Yomiuri Shimbun. 1996. Retrieved from: http://www.antonygormley.com/resources/essay‐item/id/106 Moneo, Rafael. “Aldo Rossi: The Idea of Architecture and the Modena Cemetery.” Oppositions 5 (1976): 1‐30. Tafuri, Manfredo. “L'ephemere Est Eternal, Aldo Rossi a Venezia.” Domus 602 (January 1980): 7‐11. 15
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Beaudry, J.J, 2002.’’Meaning Building: Aldo Rossi and the Practice of Memory’’. Master of Science in Architectural Studies. Texas, Austin: University of Texas. Kleinman, Adam . "Le Corbusier's Kaleidoscope: Looking at the Architect's Sense of Place." Artinfo. http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/929824/le‐corbusiers‐kaleidoscope‐looking‐at‐the‐architects‐ sense‐of/page/0/1 (accessed November 25, 2013). Saieh, Nico. "Multiplicity and Memory: Talking About Architecture with Peter Zumthor" 02 Nov 2010. ArchDaily. Accessed 25 Sep 2013. http://www.archdaily.com/85656 Bonder, Julian. (2009). On Memory, Trauma, Public Space, Monuments, and Memorials. Places, 21(1), 62. Retrieved from: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/4g8812kv Shapira, Elana. "Adolf Loos And The Fashioning Of “the Other”: Memory, Fashion, And Interiors." Interiors: Design, Architecture and Culture 2, no. 2 (2011): 213‐237. Trigg, Dylan. "Introduction." In The memory of place: a phenomenology of the uncanny. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012. 1‐42. Beare, John I.. On Memory and Reminiscence. Adelaide: University of Adelaide Library, 2000. COVER PAGE Kent Bloomer, “Memory and the Poetics of Architectural Time,” Crit 18 (Spring 1987): 30. Retrieved from: http://ianjwpollard.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/frail‐things‐in‐eternal‐places/
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NOTES 1) The art of memory (Latin: ars memoriae) is any of a number of a loosely associated mnemonic principles and techniques used to organize memory impressions, improve recall, and assist in the combination and 'invention' of ideas. An alternative and frequently used term is "Ars Memorativa" which is also often translated as "art of memory" although its more literal meaning is "Memorative Art". It is sometimes referred to as mnemotechnics. It is an 'art' in the Aristotelian sense, which is to say a method or set of prescriptions that adds order and discipline to the pragmatic, natural activities of human beings. Techniques commonly employed in the art include the association of emotionally striking memory images within visualized locations, the chaining or association of groups of images, the association of images with schematic graphics or notae("signs, markings, figures" in Latin), and the association of text with images. Any or all of these techniques were often used in combination with the contemplation or study of architecture, books, sculpture and painting, which were seen by practitioners of the art of memory as externalizations of internal memory images and/or organization. (Art of memory. (2013, November 29). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 12:46, January 31, 2014, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Art_of_memory&oldid=583730317) 2) The importance of affect or emotion in the art of memory is frequently discussed. The role of emotion in the art can be divided into two major groupings: the first is the role of emotion in the process of seating or fixing images in the memory, the second is the way in which the recollection of a memory image can evoke an emotional response. One of the earliest sources discussing the art, the Ad Herennium emphasizes the importance of using emotionally striking imagery to ensure that the images will be retained in memory: "We ought, then, to set up images of a kind that can adhere longest in memory. And we shall do so if we establish similitudes as striking as possible; if we set up images that are not many or vague but active; if we assign to them exceptional beauty or singular ugliness; if we ornament some of them, as with crowns or purple cloaks, so that the similitude may be more distinct to us; or if we somehow disfigure them, as by introducing one stained with blood or soiled with mud and smeared with red paint, so that its form is more striking, or by assigning certain comic effects to our images, for that, too, will ensure our remembering them more readily.
On the other hand, the image associated with an emotion will call up the emotion when recollected. Carruthers discusses this in the context of the way in which the trained medieval memory was thought to be intimately related with the development of prudence or moral judgement. "Since each phantasm is a combination not only of the neutral form of the perception, but of our response to it (intentio) concerning whether it is helpful or hurtful, the phantasm by its very nature evokes emotion. This is how the phantasm and the memory which stores it helps to cause or bring into being moral excellence and ethical judgement." ( Art of memory. (2013, November 29). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 12:03, December 11, 2013, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Art_of_memory&oldid=583730317)
3) Giordano Bruno developed an art, science and philosophy which was Hermetic in nature. In the introduction to the translated version of Bruno’s work, On the Composition of Images, Signs & Ideas, translator Dick Higgins states writes in the introduction: “Bruno argues for the unity of all the arts in a way that suggests 19th Century ideas about synesthesia or 20th Century ones about intermedia. . . the convergence of poetry, prose and visual art, is of interest today also, and it is noteworthy that Bruno provides a historic paradigm for this.” (http://hannahelizabethgriffiths.wordpress.com/2010/03/16/the‐mnemonic‐works‐of‐giardano‐ bruno/) 17
KAROLOS MICHAILIDIS 4238052
Seminar Research Methods AR3AP010
4) Frances Yates expounded the first results of her research on Bruno's art of memory in a seminar at the Warburg Institute in 1952. She showed her reconstruction of the wheel described in the De Umbris Idearum, Bruno’s first mnemonic work published in Paris in 1582. (http://warburg.sas.ac.uk/library/digital‐collections/giordano‐bruno/yates‐brunos‐mnemonics/) 5) The Japanese, for instance, see a special beauty in the old, the aged. They are attracted by the grey shade of a tree on a cliff, or a flattened stone, even the tattered appearance of a photograph showing the edges that have been touched by many spectators. All these signs of age are called Sabi which literally means rust (‘’the love of the old, the faded, and the unobtrusive, a quality found in the verse Scent of chrysanthemums’’). So Sabi is a normal oxidation, the stamp of time. It could therefore be said that the Japanese are trying to tame time as the material of art.
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