Thomas Fisher

In my first day at architecture school, my studio professor said that he would teach us how to think like architects, which would demand that we forget all that we thought we knew about the subject. That one comment by that professor, as I later learned, turned out to be prophetic. Many in our profession have real ambivalence about memory of the past, an ambivalence that arises from the way we teach and think, and that reveals a lot about the strength and weakness of architectural education and the field in general.

The strength of our discipline lies in the peculiarly Socratic way in which architects learn and then apply those lessons to the world. At a time when many professionals present themselves as experts, coming to pre-defined problems with solutions, architects try, as did Socrates, to redefine clients’ problems, to expand their considerations, to questions their assumptions. Not until the completion of a project do many clients realize that they have received an education as well as a building. Also, at a time when higher education so often involves the absorbing of information in ever larger classrooms, the one-on-one conversations in the architecture studio between students and professors, aimed at challenging beliefs and revealing what we don’t know, continues a Socratic form of learning all but lost in universities. Few professors in other fields spend so much time with so few students with so little structure to such a great effect.

There is a weakness to this Socratic method, however, which the remark of my first-year professor exposed, had we known enough then to see it. In the Socratic urge to challenge, create, and resolve, many architects try to forget the past, especially their own past before becoming architects or the past of their clients. It is as if, with new buildings should come new people, without memory. Significantly enough, Socrates himself distrusted memory. In Plato’s dialogue "Theaetetus," Socrates argues that memory, which he likens to impressions in soft wax, is "indistinct ... easily confused, and effaced," 1 making it a primary source of error in our thought and action. We do not err, says Socrates, when dealing with visual images or abstract ideas. He demonstrates this by saying that he knows, in looking at his two companions, Theaetetus and Theordorus, that they are not the same person, or in thinking about an abstract idea, like the number twelve, that it is not the number eleven. "The only possibility of erroneous opinion," says Socrates, "is when ... I try to assign the right impression of memory to the right visual impression."2

This distrust of memory has affected the architectural profession as much as Socrates’ form of dialogue. All professionals, of course, share a distrust of memory to some extent, seeking to avoid the errors that come from not remembering something correctly. But architects have an especially difficult time with it since, unlike other professions like medicine and law, we do not have well-documented procedures or cases to rely on for our decisions. In our more heuristic discipline, where trial-and-error and rules-of-thumb count for much more than in most, architects must depend upon their memory as a tool and so need to keep it clean, uncluttered, and free of old ideas. Even when dealing with the certain knowledge that Socrates saw in visual images and abstract ideas, architects tend to store that knowledge in their memory, for personal reference, rather than have a set of images or ideas that everyone in the field shares and agrees upon as true. And yet, because the profession depends upon memory to such an extent, it also seems to be more wary of it, more cognizant of its limitations. My first-year professor did not want us to forget everything, just those things that might undermine the new memories we were going to acquire.

If architects cannot escape memory in the process of designing, neither can the profession avoid it in the interaction with clients and communities. Human beings, organizations, environments -- all come laden with memories and associations of various kinds. While this often makes the design process more difficult, as architects occasionally trigger in clients a painful reminder or unpleasant association with something said or drawn, memory and architecture in most projects remain closely intertwined. As Gaston Bachelard writes, "Memories are motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are." 3 But how, then, does the architect strike a balance between a wariness of memory and a need to embrace it?

I encountered that dilemma repeatedly during the years I worked as an editor at Progressive Architecture. Many architects presented their work to us as acts of pure will and imagination, emphasizing the originality of what they did and downplaying any connection to the past, either theirs or their clients’. When I inquired about such a connection, I usually got a denial, as if resorting to memory represented a sign of weakness, a giving in to nostalgia. The shorthand for this was, "I am not a Post-modernist" even from those who had made their name with that movement. And when architects did acknowledge influences from the past, they usually referred to architectural history, listing the landmarks that had influenced the project, which frequently backfired since the new building rarely ranked anywhere near those mentioned as precursors.

I have also encountered this dilemma in a different form in the schools. Many faculty still emphasize the original and unprecedented in students work and indeed, in their own. As one faculty member said at the beginning of an awards program I participated in, "I won’t recognize anything I’ve seen before." Meanwhile other faculty have begun to emphasize and explore memory as a form of knowledge too long neglected in architecture. Here, memory serves as a suppressed text in design and a potentially subversive activity that aligns well with the Socratic questioning that already goes on in the studios. The schools, however, need to ensure that this ambivalence about memory among the faculty does not itself become divisive. We need to value both forgetting and remembering, and hold them in a dynamic balance pedagogically as much as we do professionally.

There are, however, many forces in the profession at work to make us forget at least those things outside of our narrow professional realm. When editing P/A, for instance, I saw how much architectural photography reinforced the profession’s ambivalence toward memory, typically excluding from the image people or the context in which a building stands -- anything that might place it in time or connect it to what came before. When I talked to photographers about this, I often heard that they and the architects they worked for wanted to convey a timeless quality, which too much context destroyed. That notion of timelessness, indeed, pervades both the profession and discipline, as if it makes our work more lasting or more valuable, a kind of antidote to the increasingly flimsy materials with which we build. Even those who profess an interest in memory tend, oddly enough, to divorce it from time, echoing Bachelard’s dismissal that "To localize a memory in time is merely a matter for the biographer and only corresponds to a sort of external history, for external use, to be communicated to others." 4

Nor did we, as editors, agree among ourselves about the place of memory in architecture. Some of my colleagues saw our role as identifying the newest trend, covering the latest news, finding the most provocative building, with "memory" relegated to the occasional preservation issues that we published. Others, myself included, thought that we could not separate the present and past, imagination and memory, the final building and the process of its creation. In the final years of P/A, the latter view won out and we began talking about the process by which buildings came to be, the connection of a building to the architect’s entire body of work, and the ways in which people inhabiting the buildings thought about them and used them. This brought warnings from some architects well served by the old P/A that we were ruining the magazine -- all of which reinforced in my mind the division within our field about memory, as if it might somehow corrupt our imagination.

Socrates aside, our fears about the effect of memory on the imagination have not been shared by most philosophers, who in arguing for the connection between the two have often used architecture, ironically enough, as a metaphor to make their point. The early Christian philosopher Saint Augustine, for example, saw memory as a kind of warehouse, "the storehouse of images," he called it, from which we draw for our imagination.5 Too long removed from the provisions held in our memory, and the imagination starves. The 18th Century Scottish thinker, David Hume, viewed the mind as a kind of laboratory, with the imagination "mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas" in our memory.6 Hume recognized, in other words, that we cannot imagine anything that we have not already experienced and lodged in our memory, although we can combine these memories in limitless ways to create things never before seen. In the 20th Century, Sigmund Freud envisioned the mind as a kind of landscape. He laid out memory and imagination - which he incorporated into the id and the ego - along an axis, with repression cutting across the landscape at an angle, like some old stone wall easily traversed but too deeply buried to remove.7

The real question is not whether memory matters to our imagination -- that I think is hard to refute -- but whose memory do we draw from when we design? The psychologist William James acknowledged that "memory requires more than mere dating of a fact in the past. It must be dated in my past. In other words, I must think that I directly experienced its occurrence."8 This creates another dilemma for architects, however. Becoming an architect involves the accumulation of memories -- trips to architectural landmarks, visits to the cities of the world -- essential to do this work. But in doing that, architects also potentially isolate themselves from the very people who commission them or who use their buildings, who may have no connection to the images that architects remember. How, then, does one think like an architect without forgetting how non-architects think? And how can architects’ memories connect to the memories of those who they design for or who inhabit their buildings?

This dilemma has, to a certain extent, become universal. The isolation of the architectural culture from the larger world reflects the efforts of other sub-cultures to do the same. The growing interest in memory, indeed, arises in part from the current fascination with cultural identity, in which people, cast adrift in the global wash of international capitalism and Western consumerism, seek bonds with other people through a common past. How much, though, should architects express their own identity culture, and how much should the profession set that aside and represent the identity of other cultures? And how can architects represent the memories of others with many sub-cultures now co-existing in the same geographical areas, sometimes as clients for the same project? Certainly one of the most important questions every architect must now face is not what can I imagine from the material I have been given, but whose memories should I draw from in my imagining. The wrong answer to that question can dramatically reduce the chances of a design being accepted by a community or constructed as designed or of the completed building being cared for and used as intended.

The architectural profession has been, perhaps, too quick to blame the clients or the public in such situations. In fact, drawing from the experiences and memories of the client and those who will use a building need not diminish the quality or imagination of a design. I know of two internationally known architects who have recently designed innovative, imaginative projects for the same public client. However, as I write this, one is under construction and the other has met with some resistance from the client group, largely I think because of the memories each draws from. The architect of the building being constructed has taken many of his design cues from the experiences and identity of the people who will use the building, who he met with on several occasions. The other architect, no less talented, has drawn, instead, mostly from his own experiences, from previous buildings he has designed and from his extensive knowledge of architecture. His design is just as powerful as the other, but it has met with much less favor because, as a person representing the client said to me: that building is about him, not about us.

At P/A, we often received projects at one extreme or the other. On occasion, we would review projects that literally represented the culture of the client: a Native American school that looked like a sacred animal of that band or a Mexican American community center that used the bright color and abstract ornament of Mexican architecture. The less literal the building’s representation, the more likely we would accept it for publication, although we did ask ourselves how much our lack of experience with such cultures affected our decision. At the other extreme, we often received material on buildings that represented the architectural culture, with direct references to particular buildings lodged in our discipline’s collective memory. Such architecture proved easier to judge and to write about, since we shared the memory referred to, but I wondered what meaning those visual "quotes" had for anyone other than an architect. What value did it create? I think the most challenging buildings sought to translate the memories of a people or place into architecture, without either mimicking or mocking them. Significantly, much of this work came from architects in regions that still had a strong cultural or geographical identity and that still seemed to value a collective memory: architects like Brian MacKay-Lyons in Nova Scotia, David Salmela in northern Minnesota, Sam Mockbee in the deep South, Richard Fernau and Laura Hartman in the Bay Area, and John and Patricia Patkau in British Columbia.

Why do the architects in these places value memory in ways that others do not? I think most architects and most communities have come to think of memory as either passive or automatic, something that occurs without our having to work at it, certainly without having to enlist our imagination in it. One reason for this stems from our ignoring a distinction that the ancients made between "natural" and "artificial" memory. The former is what we now think of as memory: the remembering of things we perceive or experience. But the latter -- "artificial" memory -- consists of remembering factual information, a critically important skill in ancient times, with its lack of widespread literacy and a scarcity of books, and one that remains important as part of the oral history of communities even today. Architecture long served as the basis of that artificial memory, evident in the anonymously written Roman treatise on rhetoric, Ad Herennium.9 It gave ordinary people instruction in how to construct a "memory palace," an imaginary building whose elements could help us remember factual information. Every space and object in the memory palace was associated with particular data: a stair, for example, might help one recall important chronological dates in history, or an object on a shelf to remember aspects of a particular technology or cultural ritual.

The author of the Ad Herennium clearly had a Roman building in mind when advising on how to design a memory palace. The imagined structure should contain a series of intercolumnar spaces that are similar, but not identical, and that have a distinguishing mark at least every fifth space, as an aid to memory. The spaces should be deserted, so a not to distract us, and each intercolumnar space should be neither too large, lest it hold too many different things, nor too small, to prevent overcrowding. Within each space, one would then place objects or images associated with a particular memory, much as the Romans placed the booty of war or offerings to the gods within the intercolumnations of a public building or temple. Here, though, the Ad Herennium recommends, not restraint and order, but "similitudes as striking as possible," objects or images of "exceptional beauty or singular ugliness," that are "disfigure(d)" or "stained" or that have "comic effects." The more exaggerated the object, the more easily remembered.

Treatises such as the Ad Herennium remained in use throughout the Roman period and were revived in the late Medieval period. By the mid-1600’s in Europe, however, the use of architecture as a memory device began to fade under the blistering attacks of writers such as Erasmus and Rabelais, perhaps because it stood in competition to the use of books, which was in their interest to promote.10 Artificial memory had begun to be a matter of media, not imagination. By the end of the 19th Century, the use of memory palaces had become obsolete, having been replaced by various numerical and alphabetic memory systems.11 The tradition has remained alive in this century in only a few relatively isolated populations, such as the Pueblo tribes of the American Southwest. As Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko recounts, the Pueblo Indians record the history of their bands not chronologically or in writing, but through the telling of stories of events associated with and recalled by features in their landscapes.12

Donlyn Lyndon and the late Charles Moore recall this Roman tradition in their book Chambers for a Memory Palace.13 They argue that by creating certain archetypal spaces -- axial spaces, columnar spaces, spaces that climb hills or sit under great roofs -- architects can make a more memorable environment. Lyndon and Moore organized the book in the form of a memory palace, with each of its chapters or "chambers" associated with a particular theme. They also bolstered their argument with ethics: "Places that are memorable are necessary to the good conduct of our lives,"14 they claim, recalling Saint Thomas Aquinas’s belief that systems of memory "were a part of ethics," as the historian Jonathan Spence observes, with "memory images in bodily form ... preventing ‘subtle and spiritual things’ falling away from the soul."15

Lyndon and Moore’s reference to memory palaces is not trivial, however. As we saw in the Ad Herennium the more empty a space and the more unusual an object in a memory palace, the more likely we will remember them along with the associated information or ideas. Lyndon and Moore take this the next step and propose "that architecture must be considered this way." 16 They suggest, in short, that architects should design physical space as they would a memory palace, conceiving of the built environment as a mnemonic or memory aid. While few architects think of their buildings this way, the mnemonic tradition in architecture does remain. Architectural education, for example, has kept alive a version of the memory palace method, teaching students to image three-dimensional spaces, to judge the appropriate placement of objects within them, and to associate both spaces and objects with meaning. The magazines also echo that tradition by publishing photographs that often present the most idiosyncratic buildings in the most dramatic and you could say memorable way.

Lyndon and Moore’s book, however, raises a question about the time frame in which memory occurs. These authors acknowledge that the memorable spaces they have in mind stem from their own experience traveling around the globe. But even though they found these spatial qualities "present in architecture throughout the world,"17 can a specific set of spaces or forms be universally memorable, as Lyndon and Moore claim? Or is memory something that every individual brings to a place, making it memorable regardless of its physical features? The writer John Brinkerhoff Jackson makes the latter argument. "It is my own belief that a sense of place is something that we ourselves create in the course of time. It is the result of habit or custom (not) ... an unusual composition of spaces and forms."18

Time is the critical issue here. Lyndon and Moore’s argument appears true for those who have no long-term relationship with a place, such as a tourists looking for the photo opportunity or architects on the grand tour. But as Jackson observes, involvement with places over time can make even the most mundane space a part of our memory because of the events that have transpired there. While the making of memorable spaces by architects will continue to matter, especially to those who seek to attract attention or visitors, we should not forget the imaginative ability of ordinary people to make the most unremarkable space memorable over time. Our duty, as architects, lies in our accommodating the memory and imagination of others, in making space that is not so personal or so inflexible that it leaves out the possibility of others appropriating it for themselves.

During the last years of P/A, we planned to send architectural writers to randomly selected places on the map to write about the ordinary places, people, and events they found there. We ended up doing relatively little of this, but I still think such an exercise would begin to address some of the issues J.B. Jackson raises about seeing architecture in time and the memory of architecture in relation to the events occurring there. Until we understand how places contribute to the memories of ordinary people and how our own pre-architectural memories play a role in this, we will remain, I believe, an isolated and misunderstood profession. Architecture deals with time as well as space, with memory as well as form, and the more expansive we are with the former, the better the latter will become.

References

1. Plato, "Theaetetus," Dialogues of Plato, Great Books of the Western World, Chicago, 1952, Volume 7, p. 540.
2. Ibid.
3. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, translator, Maria Jolas, Beacon Press, Boston, 1969, p. 9.
4. Ibid.
5. St. Augustine, Confessions, Harvard Classics, New York, 1909, pp. 174 - 183.
6. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Harvard Classics, New York, 1909, p. 343.
7. Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Great Books of the Western World, Chicago, 1952, Volume 54, p. 839.
8. William James, The Principles of Psychology, Great Books of the Western World, Chicago, 1952, Volume 53, p. 425.
9. Frances Yates, The Art of Memory, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1966, pp. 5 - 21.
10. Jonathan Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, Faber & Faber, London, 1988, p. 12.
11. Henry Fuller, The Art of Memory, National Publishing Company, St. Paul, 1898, pp. 58-97.
12. Leslie Marmon Silko, "Landscape, History & the Pueblo Imagination," Antaeus, Autumn, 1986.
13.Donlyn Lyndon and Charles W. Moore, Chambers for a Memory Palace, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1994.
14. Ibid. p. xii.
15. Spence, p. 13.
16. Lyndon and Moore, p. xiii.
17. Ibid.
18. John Brinkerhoff Jackson, A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1994, p. 151.

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