Memory and Architecture

14: Places Within and Without: Memory, the Literary Imagination, and the Project in the Design Studio

chapter fourteen Places Within and Without Memory, the Literary Imagination, and the Project in the Design Studio SHEONA THOMSON This chapter inquires into the relationship between two inhabitable realms—one material, the other immaterial. These realms are the physically constructed spaces of architecture and those spaces that are conjured up in words—the imaginary and psychically charged spaces of literature. In particular, this chapter seeks to underline the potency of the relationship between the spaces constructed by architecture and the spaces constructed by words, and to consider how memory and imagination may be crucially engaged in this partnership at the level of design conceptualization. In doing this I will present some commentary on my own experience of thinking through the relationship of the real, the remembered, and the imagined and some of the sources that have influenced and tempered my thinking. I will then outline a project developed for first-year students at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, that aims to harness and take advantage of this relationship at a number of different levels. The project developed out of this inquiry is called “Memory Palace.” Historically, the use of architecture in literature and, reciprocally, the serving of architecture by literature are enduring. For example, writers have long used architecture as literary allegory, for character definition, to symbolize , and to contextualize. As demonstration of the consistency and richness| 317 possible in the crafting of imaginary worlds out of the residues of memory, one has only to consider Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities,1 manipulating, as it does, the knowledge and experience of the real and extraordinary place of Venice. The villas described by Pliny in his letters have preoccupied architects for centuries as an exercise in architectural reconstruction from a literary text.2 Conversely, architects and theorists since antiquity have exploited the power of literature for speculating upon the possible origins and meanings of architecture. On a more prosaic level, architectural description is impossible without language and text as a medium of communication between professional and layperson. Client-architect dialogue relies on a series of iterations between image and word, between verbal image and pictorial image to confirm understanding.3 This transaction is explicitly drawn into the “Memory Palace” project. I began to seriously examine the connections between architecture and literature when preparing my undergraduate dissertation, which took as one of its subjects the idea of the house as container of memory and intimacy. This particular interest had bloomed from a seed planted much earlier, when as a beginning architecture student I was led into Gaston Bachelard’s discussion of the poetic imagery of dwelling4 through a project called “Abstractions of the House.” Ostensibly, the project was designed to introduce us to concepts of metaphor in architecture, but it also opened up the possibility of designing prompted by poetic images of archetypes of spatial intimacy in texts. This was one of the threads I drew into my fledgling research. In exploring these ideas about dwelling, I began with language, and specifically with words describing intimate space. I sought to shadow what was “kept” in language and, more important, how this meaning, particularly about place, is maintained. Language conditions things and places. It outlines , defines, and secures the essential aspects of things. For instance, the etymology of the word house in the English language reveals a more latent meaning of to hide.5 This etymological footing secretly secures a very essential conception of the house as refuge, as separation. This example highlights the idea that language, while categorical, is also inherently evocative. This wondering about the latency of meaning in language further developed through to a preoccupation with the inevitable and complex connections that language has with memory and imagination. Our use of language, crafted into poetic, literary description plays on, reveals, and extends the nuances of apparent and hidden meaning in the worlds of words. If language 318 | Sheona Thomson conditions things and places, then this revelation of meaning in the world of words could be enlisted in thinking about the shaping of space in architecture. Bachelard’s exegesis on the powerful images crafted in literature provides us with a way of thinking about designing more intentionally with these images in mind. Through his writing Bachelard introduces us to the pleasures of reverie possible through contemplating powerful poetic images. His emphasis on the intimate reflects on the resonance of these images, which he seeks to categorize...