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House of Si lence by Juhani Pal lasmaa

uhani PallasmaaI

Space, Place, Memory and lmagination: The TemporalDimension of Existential Space

The time perspective in architecture

Architecture is usua[[y seen in futuristic terms; novel buitdings are understood toprobe and project an unforeseen reality, and architectural quality is directly associ-ated with its degree of novelty and uniqueness. Modernity at large has been domin-ated by this futuristic bias. Yet, the appreciation of newness has probably neverbeen as obsessive as in today's cult of spectacular architectural imagery. In ourglobatized world, newness is not only an aesthetic and artistic value, it is a stra-tegic necessity of the cutture of consumption, and consequentty, an inseparableingredient of our surreaI materialist culture.

However, human constructions have also the task to preserve the past, andenable us to experience and grasp the cont inuum of cul ture and tradi t ion. We donot only exist in a spatial and material reality, we also inhabit cultural, mental andtemporaI realities. Our existential and [ived reality is a thick, layered and constantlyoscillating condition. Architecture is essentially an art form of reconciliation andmediat ion, and in addit ion to sett l ing us in space and place, landscapes and buitd-ings articulate our experiences of duration and time between the polarities of pastand future. In fact, along with the entire corpus of literature and the arts, [and-scapes and buitdings constitute the most important externalization of humanmemory. We understand and remember who we are through our construct ions,both material and mental. We atso judge alien and past cultures through the evid-ence provided by the architectural structures they have produced. Buitdings proiectenic narratives.

In addition to practical purposes, architectural structures have a significantexistential and mental task; they domesticate space for human occupation byturning anonymous, uniform and l imit less space into dist inct places of humansignificance, and equally importantly, they make endless time tolerable by givingdurat ion i ts human measure. As Karsten Harr ies, the phi losopher, argues:

Architecture helps to replace meaningless reality with a theatrically, or rather architecturally,

kansformed reatity, which draws us in and, as we surrender to it, grants us an illusion of

meaning . . . we cannot t ive with chaos. Chaos must be transformed into cosmos.'

"Archi tecture is not only about domest icat ing space. l t is a lso a deep defenceagainst the terror oftime", he states in another context. '

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Attogether, environments and bui td ings do not only serve pract icaI and ut i l i -tarian purposes; they also structure our understanding of the wortd. "[The house] isan instrument with which to confront the cosmos". as Gaston Bachelard states.3The abstract and indefinable notion of cosmos is atways present and representedin our immediate landscape. Every landscape and every bui td ing is a condensedworld, a microcosmic representat ion.

Architecture and memory

We al l remember the way archi tectural images were ut i l ized as mnemonic devicesby the orators of antiquity. Actual architectural structures, as we[[ as mere remem-bered architectural images and metaphors serye as significant memory devices inthree different ways: f irst, they materialize and preserve the course of t ime andmake i t v is ib le; second, they concret ize remembrance by containing and project ingmemories; and, th i rd, they st imulate and inspire us to reminisce and imagine,Memory and fantasy, recollection and imagination are related and they have alwaysa si tuat ional and speci f ic content. One who cannot remember can hardly imagine,because memory is the soi l of imaginat ion. Memory is also the ground of sel f 'identity; we are what we remember.

Bui ld ings are storage houses and museums of t ime and si lence. Archi tecturalstructures have the capacity of transforming, speeding up, slowing down and hattingtime. They can also create and protect silence following Kierkegaard's request:"Create s i lence!"+ In the v iew of Max Picard, the phi losopher of s i lence: "Nothinghas changed the nature of man so much as the loss of s i lence."5 "Si lence no longerexists as a world, but only in fragments, as the remains of a world."6 Architecturehas to preserve the memory of the world of silence and to protect the existing frag-ments of this fundamental ontological state. As we enter a Romanesque monasterywe can sti l l experience the benevolent silence of the universe.

There are, of course, part icular bui td ing types, such as memorials, tombs andmuseums that are del iberately conceived and bui t t for the purpose of preservingand evoking memories and speci f ic emot ions; bui ld ings can maintain feel ings ofgr ief and ecstasy, melancholy and joy, as wel I as fear and hope. Att bui td ings main-tain our percept ion of temporal durat ion and depth, and they record and suggestcul tural and human narrat ives. We cannot conceive or remember t ime as a merephysicaI d imension; we can only grasp t ime through i ts actual izat ions; the t races,places and events of temporal occurrence. Joseph Brodsky points out another def i -c iency of human memory as he wri tes about the composi te images of c i t ies inhuman memory and finds these cit ies always empty: "[The city of memory] is emptybecause for an imaginat ion i t is easier to conjure archi tecture than humanbeing5."z ls th is the inherent reason why we archi tects tend to th ink of archi tecturemore in terms of i ts mater iaI existence than the t i fe and human si tuat ions thattakeplace in the spaces we have designed?

ArchitecturaI structures facil i tate memory; our understanding of the depth oftime would be decisively weaker, for instance, without the imdge of the pyramids inour minds. The mere image of a pyramid marks and concret izes t ime. We also

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SPACE, PLACE, MEMOFY AND IMAGINATION

remember our own chi tdhood largely through the houses and places that we havel ived in. We have projected and hidden parts of our l ives in l ived landscapes andhouses, exact ly as the orators placed themes of their speeches in the context ofimagined bui td ings. The recol lect ion of p laces and rooms generates the recal lofevents and people.

I was a child of that house, f i l led with the memory of its smells, f itted with the coolness of itshaltways, f i l led with the voices that had given it t i fe. There was even the song of the frogs in thepools; theV came to be with me here,

reminisces Antoine de Saint-Exup6ry, the legendary pi lot and wri ter , af ter havingcrash- landed with his olane in a sand desert in North Afr ica.B

The mental power of fragments

ln his noveI The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke gives a sim-i lar ly moving record of a distant memory of home and sel f , ar is ing f rom fragmentsof the grandfather 's house in the protagonist 's memory:

As I recover it in recall ing my child-wrought memories, it is no comptete building: it is all broken upinside me; here a room, there a room, and here a piece of hatlway that does not connect these tworooms but is preserved, as a fragment, by itself. In this way it is all dispersed within me . . . all thatis stit l in me and witl never cease to be in me. lt is as though the picture of this house had falleninto me from an infinite height and had shattered against my very ground.e

The remembered image ar ises graduatty, p iece by piece, f rom fragments of memoryas a painted Cubist p icture emerges from detached visual mot i fs.

I have wri t ten about my own memories of my grandfather 's humble farmhouse, and pointed out that the memory house of my ear ly chi tdhood is a col tage off ragments, smel ls, condi t ions of t ight , speci f ic feet ings of enclosure and int imacy,but rarely precise and complete v isuaI recol lect ions. My eyes have forgotten whatthey once saw, but my body st i t [ remembers.

Bui td ings and their remains suggest stor ies of human fate, both real and imag-inary. Ruins st imulate us to th ink of l ives that have already disappeared, and toimagine the fate of their deceased occupants. Ruins and eroded sett ings have aspecial evocat ive and emot ionaI power; they force us to reminisce and imagine.lncompleteness and fragmentat ion possess a speciaI evocat ive power. In medievali l tustrat ions and Renaissance paint ings archi tectural set t ings are of ten depicted asa mere edge of a wal l or a window opening, but the isolated fragment suf f ices toconjure up the exper ience of a complete constructed sett ing. This is the secret ofthe art of co[ [age but also some archi tects, such as , |ohn Soane and Alvar Aal tohave taken advantage of th is emot ionaI power of the archi tecturaI f ragment. Ri tke'sdescr ipt ion of the images of l i fe l ived in a demol ished house tr iggered by theremains and stains lef t on the end wal l of the neighbour ing house, is a stunningrecord of the wavs of human memory:

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But most forgettable of al l were the walls themselves. The stubborn l i fe of these rooms had not

tet i tsetf be trampled out. l t was st i l l there; i t clung to the nai ls that had been left there, i t stood

on the remaining hand-breadth of f looring, i t crouched under the corner ioints where there was

sti t t a t i t t le bit of interior. 0ne coutd see that i t was in the paint which, year by year, had stowly

altered: btue into moldy green, green into grey, and yellow into an old, stale rotting white.'o

Spatiality and situationality of memory

Our recol lect ions are s i tuat ionaI and spat ia l ized memories, they are memories

attached to places and events. lt is hard to recall, for instance, a familiar or iconicphotograph as a two-dimensional image on photographic paper; we tend to

remember the depicted object, person or event in its full spatial reality. lt is

obvious, that our existent ia l space is never a two-dimensional p ictor ia l space, i t is

a tived and multi-sensory space saturated and structured by memories and inten-

tions. We keep projecting meanings and signification to everything we encounter, I

have rarely disagreed with the views of Joseph Brodsky, one of my house gods, but

when he argues that after having seen touristic buitdings, such as Westminster

Abbey, the Eiffel Tower, St Basil 's, the Tai Mahal or the Acropolis, "we retain not

their three-dimensional image but their pr inted version", and concludes that"strictty speaking, we remember not a place but our postcard of it",* | have to dis'

agree with the poet. We do not remember the postcard but the real place pictured

in it. A recailed image is always more than the once seen image itself. In my view,

Brodsky presents a rushed argument here, perhaps misguided by Susan Sontag's

ideas of the power of the photographed image in her seminal book 0n

Photography."Pictures, objects, f ragments, insigni f icant th ings, al l serve as condensat ion

centres for our memories. Jarkko Laine, the Finnish poet, writes about the rote of

objects in his memory:

I t ike looking at these things. I don't seek aesthetic pleasure in them . . . nor do I recall their

origins: that is not important. But even so they atl arouse memories, real and imagined. A poem

is a thing that arouses memories of real and imagined things . . . The things in the window ad

like a poem. They are images that do not reftect anything . . . I sing of the things in the window.'3

The signi f icance of objects in our processes of remembering is the main

reason why we like to collect familiar or peculiar obiects around us; they expand

and reinforce the realm of memories, and eventually, of our very sense of setf. Few

of the objects we possess are really needed strictly for uti l i tarian purposes; their

function is sociaI and menta[. "l am what is around me", argues Wallace Stevens,'4

whereas Nde[ Arnaud, another poet, c la ims: " l am the space, where I am." '5 These

condensed formulations by two poets emphasize the intertwining of the wortd and

the self as well as the externalized ground of remembrance and identity.A room can also be indiv idual ized and taken into one's possession byturning

i t into a place of dreaming; the acts of memoriz ing and dreaming are interrelated,

As Bachelard puts it: "The house shetters daydreaming, the house protects the

SPACE, PLACE, MEMORY AND IMAGINATION

dreamer, the house al lows one to dream in peace." '6 A fundamental qual i ty of alandscape, house and room is i ts capaci ty to evoke and contain a feet ing of safety,famit iar i ty and at-homeness and to st imulate fantasies. We are not capabte of deepimaginat ion outdoors in wi td nature; profound imaginat ion ca[[s for the focusingint imacy of a room. For me, the real measure of the quat i ty of a town is whether Ican imagine mysetf fat t ing in love there.

The lived world

We do not l ive in an object ive wor ld of matter and facts, as commonplace narVereal ism tends to assume. The character ist ical ly human mode of existence takesplace in the wor lds of possibi t i t ies, moulded by the human capaci ty of remem-brance, fantasy and imaginat ion. We I ive in mental wor lds, in which the mater ia land the spir i tua[ , as wel l as the exper ienced, remembered and imagined, con-stant ly fuse into each other. As a consequence, the I ived real i ty does not fo l low therules of space and t ime as def ined and measured by the science of physics. I wishto argue that the I ived world is fundamental ly "unscient i f ic" , when measured bythe cr i ter ia of western empir ical science. In fact , the l ived wortd is c loser to thereal i ty of dream than any scient i f ic descr ipt ion. In order to dist inguish the t ivedspace from physicat and geometr icaI space, we can catI i t existent ia l space. Livedexistent ia l space is structured on the basis of meanings, intent ions and valuesref lected upon i t by an indiv idua[, e i ther consciously or unconsciously; existent ia lspace is a unique quat i ty interpreted through the memory and exper ience of theindiv iduat. Every l ived exper ience takes place at the interface of reco[ lect ion andintent ion, percept ion and fantasy, memory and desire. T.S. Et iot br ings forth theimportant pair ing of opposi tes in the end of h is fourth quartet , "L i t t le Gidding":

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning . . . WeshalL not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exptoring wil l be to anive where westarted. And know the place for the first t ime.'7

On the other hand, col tect ive groups or even nat ions, share certain exper i -ences of existent iaI space that const i tute their cot lect ive ident i t ies and sense oftogetherness. We are, perhaps, held together by our shared memories more thanby an innate sense of sol idar i ty. I wish to reca[[ here the famous sociological studyby Maurice Halbwachs that revealed that the ease of mutual communicat ionbetween old Par is ians l iv ing wi th in a dist inct quarter was grounded in their r ich andshared cot lect ive memories.

The l ived space is also the object and context of both the making and exper i -encing of art as well as architecture. Art projects a l ived reality, not mere symbolicrepresentat ions of l i fe. The task of archi tecture, a lso, is " to make vis ib le how theworld touches us", as Merleau-Ponty wrote of the paint ings of Paul C6zanne. 'BWe l ive in the " f lesh of the wor ld", to use a not ion of the phi losopher, and land-scapes and archi tecture structure and art iculate th is existent ia l f lesh giv ing i tspeci f ic hor izons and meanings.

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Experience as exchange

The exper ience of a ptace or space is always a cur ious exchange; as I set t le in aspace, the space sett les in me. I l ive in a c i ty and the ci ty dwel ls in me. We are in aconstant exchange with our set t ings; s imuttaneously we internal ize the sett ing andproject our own bodies, or aspects of our body schemes, on the sett ing. Memoryand actual i ty, percept ion and dream merge. This secret physicat and mentaI inter"twining and ident i f icat ion also takes ptace in al l ar t is t ic exper ience. In , |osephBrodsky's v iew every poem tel ls the reader "Be [ ike me". 'e Here l ies the ethicalpower of a l l authent ic works of ar t ; we internal ize them and integrate them with ourvery sense of self. A fine piece of music, poetry or architecture becomes a part ofmy physical and moral sel f . The Czech wri ter Bohumil Hrabal g ives a v iv id descr ip-t ion of th is bodi ly associat ion in the act of reading:

When I read, I don't reatly read; I pop a beautiful sentence in my mouth and suck it l ike a fruitdrop or I sip it t ike a l iqueur unti l the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing my brain andheart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel. 'o

Remembering is not only a mental event; i t is a lso an act of embodiment andproject ion. Memories are not onty hidden in the secret e lectrochemical processes

of the brain; they are also stored in our skeletons, muscles and skin. At l our sensesand organs think and remember.

The embodied memory

I can recal l the hundreds of hoteI rooms around the wor ld, which I have temporar i lyinhabi ted dur ing my f ive decades of t ravel l ing, wi th their furni ture, colour schemesand t ight ing, because I have invested and lef t parts of my body and my mind inthese anonymous and insigni f icant rooms. The protagonist of Marcel Proust 's /nSearch of Lost l ime reconstructs similarly his very identity and location through hisembodied memory:

My body, sti l l too heavy with sleep to move, would endeavour to construe from the pattern of itstiredness the position of its various timbs, in order to deduce therefrom the direction of the wall,the location of the furniture, to piece together and give a name to the house in which it tay. ltsmemory, the composite memory of its ribs, its knees, its shoulder-blades, offered it a wholeseries of rooms in which it had at one time or another slept, white the unseen walls, shift ing andadaptingthemselves to the shape of each successive room that it remembered, whirted it in thedark. . . my body, woutd recall from each room in succession the style ofthe bed, the position ofthe doors, the angte at which the sunlight came in at the windows, whether there was a passage

outside, what I had had in mind when I went to sleep and found there when I awoke."

We are again encounter ing an exper ience that br ings to mind a f ragmentedCubist composi t ion. We are taught to th ink of memory as a cerebral capaci ty, butthe act of memory engages our ent i re body.

SPACE, PLiACE, MEMORY AND IMAGINATION

"Body memory is . . . the natural center of any sensitive account of remember-ing", phitosopher Edward S. Casey argues in his seminal book Memorizing: A Phe-nomenological Study, and concludes: "There is no memory without body memory.""In myview, we coutd say even more; body is not ontythe locus of remembrance, i t isalso the site and medium of al[ creative work, including the work of the architect.

Memory and emotion

In addi t ion to being memory devices, landscapes and bui ld ings are also ampl i f iersof emot ions; they reinforce sensat ions of betonging or al ienat ion, invi tat ion or rejec-tion, tranquil l i ty or despair. A landscape or work of architecture cannot, however,create feelings. Through their authority and aura, they evoke and strengthen our ownemotions and project them back to us as if these feelings of ours had an externalsource. In the Laurentian Library in Florence I confront my own sense of metaphysi-cal melancholy awakened and projected back by Michelangelo 's archi tecture. Theopt imism that I exper ience when approaching the Paimio Sanator ium is my ownsense of hope evoked and strengthened by Alvar Aalto's optimistic architecture. Thehil l of the meditation grove at the Woodland Cemetery in Stockholm, for instance,evokes a state of longing and hope through an image that is an invitation and apromise. This archi tectural image of landscape evokes simultaneously remem-brance and imaginat ion as the composi te painted image of Arnotd Br jckt in 's " ls landof Death". Al l poet ic images are condensat ions and microcosms.

The modernist architecture ofthe Paimio Sanator ium projects

images of hope and heal ing.Alvar Aal to, Paimio TuberculosisSanator ium, Paimio, I929-33

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The Meditat ion Grove on the hi l l is an image of hope and resurrect ion. Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz,

The Woodland cemeterv. Stockholm, 1915/1932

"House, even more than the landscape, is a psychic state", Bachelard sug"gests.23 Indeed, wr i ters, f i [m directors, poets, and painters do not just depict land-scapes or houses as unavoidable geographic and physical set t ings of the eventsof their stor ies; they seek to express, evoke and ampt i f iT human emot ions, mentalstates and memories through purposeful depict ions of set t ings, both naturaI andman-made. "Let us assume a wa[[ : what takes place behind i t?", asks the poet

Jean Tardieu, 'a but we archi tects rarely bother to imagine what happens behind thewal ls we have erected. The wal ls conceived by archi tects are usual ly mere aesthet i -c ized construct ions, and we see our craf t in terms of designing aesthet ic structuresrather than evoking percept ions, feel ings and fantasies.

Art ists seem to grasp the intertwining of p lace and human mind, memory anddesire, much better than we archi tects do, and that is why these other art forms canprovide such st imulat ing inspirat ion for our work as wel l as for archi tectural educa't ion. There are no better lessons of the extraordinary capaci ty of ar t is t ic condensa-t ions in evoking microcosmic images of the wor ld than, say, the short stor ies of

Anton Chekhov and Jorge Luis Borges, or Giorgio Morandi 's minute st i [ [ l i fes con-

sist ing of a few bott les and cups on a table top.

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SPACE, PLACE, MEMORY AND IMAGINATION

Slowness and remembering - speed and forgetting

"There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forget-t ing . . . the degree of s lowness is direct ly proport ional to the intensi ty of memory:the degree of speed is direct ly proport ional to the intensi ty of forgett ing", suggestsMi lan Kundera. '5 With the dizzying accelerat ion of the veloci ty of t ime today andthe constant speeding up of our exper ient ia l real i ty, we are ser iously threatened bya generaI cul turaI amnesia. In today's acceterated l i fe, we can f ina[ [y only perceive,not remember. In the society of the spectacle we can only marvet, not remember.Speed and transparency weaken remembrance, but they have been fundamentalfascinat ions of moderni ty s ince the proclamat ion of F.T. Marinett i in the Futur istmanifesto almost a fu[ [ century ago: "The wortd 's magnif icence has been enr ichedby a new beauty; the beauty of speed", '6 and l (ar [ Marx 's prophesy: "Everythingthat is sol id . . . melts into the air . " '7Today, even archi tecture seeks the sensat ionofspeed, instant seduct ion and grat i f icat ion, and turns aut ist ic, as a consequence.Ihe archi tecturaI confession of Cooo Himmelblau i l lustrates th is asoirat ion for dra-mat ized archi tectural act ion and soeed:

The aesthetics ofthe architecture ofdeath in white sheets. Death in ti led hospital rooms. Thearchitecture of sudden death on the pavement. Death from a rib-cage pierced by a steering shaft.The path ofthe bulletthrough a dealer's head on 4znd Street. The aesthetics ofthe peep-showsex in washable plastic boxes. 0fthe broken tongues and the dried-up eyes.'8

In myview, however, archi tecture is inherent ly a s low and quiet , emot ional ly alow-energy art form in comparison with the dramatic arts of sudden affectiveimpact. lts rote is not to create strong foreground figures or feelings, but to estab-l ish f rames of percept ion and hor izons of understanding. The task of archi tecture isnot to make us weep or laugh, but to sensi t ize us to be able to enter a[ [ emot ionalstates. Archi tecture is needed to provide the ground and project ion screen ofremembrance and emot ion.

I bel ieve in an archi tecture that s lows down and focuses human exper ienceinstead of speeding up or di f fusing i t . In my view, archi tecture has to safeguardmemories and protect the authent ic i ty and independence of human exper ience.Archi tecture is fundamentat ty the art form of emancipat ion, and i t makes us under-stand and remember who we are.

Architectural amnesia

There are di f ferent k inds of archi tecture in relat ion to memory: one that cannotrecal l or touch upon the past and another that evokes a sense of depth and con-t inui ty. There is also an archi tecture that seeks to remember I i teral ly, l ike the archi-tectural works of Postmodernism, and another that creates a sense of deep t ime,and epic cont inui ty wi thout any direct formaI reference, as the works of Alvar Aal to,Dimitr is Pik ionis and Carlo Scarpa. These are products of a "poet ic chemistry", touse an evocat ive not ion of Bachelard. 'e Every s igni f icant and true work sets i tset f in

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a respectfuI d ia logue with the past, both distant and immediate. At the same t imethat the work defends i tsel f as a unique and complete microcosm, i t revives andrevi ta l izes the past. Every t rue work of ar t occupies a th ick and layered t ime insteadof mere contemporanei ty.

There is yet another dimension in archi tectural memory. Archi tecturaI images,or exper iences, have a histor ic i ty and ontology of their own. Archi tecture beginswith the establ ishment of a hor izontal p lane; consequentty, the f loor is the "oldest"and most potent element of archi tecture. The wa[[ is more archaic than the door or

the window, and projects a deeper meaning as a consequence. Moderni ty has suf-fered from another k ind of amnesia as archi tectural e lements and images havebecome abstracted and detached from their or ig ins and ontologicaI essences. Thef loor, for instance, has forgotten i ts or ig in as level led earth, and turned into mereconstructed hor izontal p lanes. In fact , as Bachelard suggests, human construct ionsof the technological age have forgotten verticality altogether, and turned into merehorizontality. Today's skyscrapers consist of stacked horizontality and have lost thesense of vert ical i ty, the fundamentaI ontologicaI d i f ference between below andabove, Het l and Heaven. Also, the f loor and the cei l ing have become ident icat hor i -zontaI o lanes. The window and the door are of ten mere hotes in the wal l . I do nothave the space here to elaborate on this theme of the histor ic i ty of archi tecturalimages and the current archi tecturaI amnesia resul t ing f rom the loss of the historic i ty of exper iences; I merety point at the mental s igni f icance of th is dimension.

The tenses of art

I venture to suggest that in its very essence artistic work is oriented towards thepast rather than the future. Brodsky seems to support th is v iew as he argues:"There is something ctear ly atavist ic in the process of recol lect ion, i f only becausesuch a process never is l inear. Also the more one remembers, the ctoser perhaps

one is to dieing." :"ln any signi f icant exper ience, temporal layers interact ; what is perceived inter '

acts wi th what is remembered, the noveI short-c i rcui ts wi th the archaic. An art ist icexper ience always awakes the forgotten chi td hidden inside one's adul t persona.

There are fabr icated images in today's archi tecture and art that are f lat andwithout an emot ional echo, but there are also novel images that resonate wi thremembrance. The lat ter are myster ious and fami l iar , obscure and clear, at thesame t ime. They move us through the remembrances and associat ions, emot ionsand empathy that they awaken in us. Artistic novelty can move us only provided it

touches something that we already possess in our very being. Every profound art is-tic work surely grows from memory, not from rootless intellectual invention. Aftistic

works aspire to br ing us back to an undiv ided and undi f ferent iated oceanic wor ld,This is the Omega that Tei lhard de Chardin wr i tes about, " the point f rom which theworld appears complete and correct" .3 '

We are usual ty condi t ioned to th ink that art ists and archi tects ought to beaddressing the future readers, v iewers, and users of their products. Joseph Brodskyis very determined, indeed, about the poet 's temporal perspect ive: "When one

MEMORY AND IMAGINATION

Looking through a window is a profound archi tectural encounter rather than a v isual design of the window i tsel fCaspar David Fr iedr ich, "Frau am Fenster" , 1822

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writes, one's most immediate audience is not one's own contemporaries, let aloneposterity, but one's predecessors.'32 "No real writer ever wanted to be contempor-ary", Jorge Luis Borges argues in the same vain.33 This view opens another essentialperspective on the significance and role of remembrance; a[[ creative work is co[-laboration with the past and with the wisdom of tradition. "Every true novelistlistens for that suprapersonal wisdom [the wisdom of the nove[], which explainswhy great novels are always a littte more intelligent than their authors. Novelistswho are more intel t igent than their books should go into another l ine of work",Milan Kundera argues.3a The same observation is equatly true of architecture; greatbuitdings are fruits of the wisdom of architecture, they are products of a collabora-tion, often unconscious, with our great predecessors as much as they are works oftheir individuaI creators. Only works that are in vitaI and respectfuI diatogue withtheir past possess the mental capacity to survive time and stimulate viewers, [is-teners, readers, and occupants in the future.

NOTES

1 Karsten Harries, "Thoughts on a Non-ArbitraryArchitecture" in David Seamon (ed.), Dwelling,Seeing and Designing: Toward a Phenomenological Ecology, Albany, NY: State University ofNew York Prcss, 7993, p. 47.

2 Karsten Hanies, "Building and the Terror of Time", Perspecta: The Yale Architectural lournal79,1982. As quoted in David Harvey, Ihe Condition of Postmodernify, Cambridge: Blackwell,1992, p.206.

3 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1969, p. 46.4 As quoted in Max Picard, The World of Silence, Washington, DC: Begnery Gateway, 1988, p.

z3r. Kierkegaard writes: "The present state ofthe wortd and the whote of l i fe is diseased. l f Iwere a doctor and were asked for my advice, I should say: Create Si lence! Bring men tosi lence."

5 ln Max Picard, The World of Silence, p.227.6 ln Max Picard, Ihe World of Silence, p.2L2.

Z foseph Brodsky, "A Place as Good as Any" in On Grief and Reason, New York: Farrar, Strausand Giroux, 1997,p.43.

8 Antoine de Saint-Exup6ry, Wind, Sand and Stars, London: Penguin Books, r99r, p. 39.9 Rainer Maria Ritke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, M.O. Herter Norton, trans.; New

York and London: W.W. Norton &Co., t992, pp. 30-31.10 Ritke, Ihe Notebooks ofMalte Laurids Brigge,pp.47-48.77 loseph Brodsky, "APlaceas Good asAny" in On Grief and Reason,p.37.12 Susan Sontag, On Photography, Harmondworth: Penguin Books, 1986.tj Jarkko Laine, "Tikusta asiaa" in Parnasso 6, t982, pp.323-24.74 Waltace Stevens, "Theory" in The Collected Poems, New York: Vintage Books, r99o, p. 85.t5 Nodl Arnaud, as q uoted in Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. t37.t6 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p.6.77 T.S. Etiot, FourQuartets, San Diego: HarcourtBraceJovanovich Publishers, ry7\pp.58-59.18 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "C6zanne's Doubt" in Sense and Non'Sense, Evanston, lL: North'

western University Press, 1964, p. t9.79 Joseph Brodsky, On Grief and Reason, p. zo6.20 Bohumil Hrabat, Ioo Loud a Soli tude. San Diego, CA: Harcoutt lnc., 1990, p. 1.27 Marcet Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Swann's Way, C.K. Scott Moncrieff & Terence Kilmartin,

trans.; London: The Random House, 1992, pp.4-5.

SPACE, PIACE, MEMORY AND IMAGINATION

22 Edward S. Casey, Memorizing: A Phenomenological Sfudy, Btoomington, lN: Indiana Univer-sity Press, 2ooo, p. r48, t72.

23 Bachelard, The Poetics ofSpace,p.7z.24 As quoted in Georges Perec, Tiloja ja avaruuksia, Esp6ces d'espaces, original title; Helsinki:

Loki-Kir lat, t992, p. 7 2.25 Milan Kundera, Slowness, NewYork: HarperCotl ins Pubtishers, 1966, p. 39.26 AsquotedinThomMayne,"Statemenl" inPeterPran,LigangQui:DUTPress,2006,p.4.27 "Al l f ixed, fast-frozen relat ions, with their train of ancient and venerable pre. iudices and opin-

ions, are swept away, al l newformed ones become antiquated before they can ossif i7. Al[ thatis sol id melts into air, al l that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face . . . therealcondit ions of their l ives and their relat ions with their fel low men."

28 Coop Himmelblau, "Die Fascination der Stadt" in Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny,Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999, p.76.

29 Gaston Bachela"d, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, Dallas, TX: ThePegasus Foundation, ry83, p.46.

30 Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1986, p. 3o.31 As quoted in Timo Vatjakka (ed.), Juhana Blomstedt: muodon arvo, Helsinki: Painatuskeskus,

1995.j2 Joseph Brodsky, "Letterto Horace" in On Griefand Reason,p.43g.

33 As quoted in Norman Thomas di Giovanni ef a/. (eds), Borges on Writing,Hopewell: The EccoPress, t994, p.53.

34 Mi lanKundera,TheArtof the /VovelNewYork:HarperCol l insPubl isherslnc. ,2ooo,p. 158.

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