Memory and Architecture: Remembering through the Environment Body

ABSTRACT

In the cinematic sense of perceiving architecture, the environmental elements become way-finders for memorization. What one remembers through the senses makes up a perception of present. I am to investigate an architectural milieu which first conditions the remembering of things through the senses, and secondly which conditions the conscious perception of remembered things into the present world, regardless of its material nature.

Frances Yates - The Art of Memory (1966)

Memory is one of the 5 parts of Rhetoric.

1. memory 2. invention 3. delivery 4. style 5. arrangement.

DEFINITION:

rhetoric:
the art of effective or persuasive speech or writing, especially using figures of speech and other compositional techniques.

language designed to have an effective or persuasive affect on its audience; but is often regarded as lacking in sincerity or meaningful content. because it is usually not understood.

The nature of this technique, as I will expand, explains why the modern definition of rhetoric is cynical.

mnemonic:

device to remember using place and image.

The art of memory practiced by the orator was a technique practiced to enable one to improve memory, as to deliver long speeche from memory with unfailing accuracy.


Yates speaks of two roman figures and one anonymous one.

Cicero: Roman Philosopher and Rhetoric - 100 BC

Marcus Fabius Quintilianus: Roman Rhetoric - 35 AD

Anonymous.

Yates combines three descriptions of the Classical Mnemonic:

1) Cicero's: De oratore - places and images (loci and imagines)

2) Quintilian's: Institutioratoria

3) Anonymous: Ad C. Herennium libri IV

*paying careful attention to Yates chose of words:

Steps in the practice of the Art of Memory:

a)imprint on the memory a series of loci or places.

-act of visually imprinting, stamping, relocating it: a spatial action.
-typical place system used is an Architectural place - one spacious and varied - "the forecourt, the living room, bedrooms, and parlours, not omitting statues and other ornaments with which the rooms are decorated" (Yates).

b)imprint on the memory a series of images.

-place the images in imagination on the places which have been memorized in the building.
-each image is associated with a word, or series of words, in the speech to be memorized.
-the images are most memorable when they are weapons, (stained with blood for example), or abnormal in nature. (says Quintilian)
-upon recital of the speech, each word is remembered in turn, as one imagines walking through the sequence of places in the building, associated with each word.

"The method ensures that the points are remembered in the right order, since the order is fixef by the sequence of places in the building."

Cicero mentions that the inventor of this technique, Simonide, noted that 'sight is the strongest of the senses'. "consequently perceptions recieved by the ears or by reflexion can be most easily retained if they are also conveyed to our minds by the mediation of the eyes.

b) Ad Herennium, anonymous (man who wrote of it could not recall the inventors name, Greek sources)

two types of memory:
natural : born simultaneously with thought.
artifical: can be trained with practice

expands on Cicero and Quintilian.

-memory for "things" in speech (the subject matter)
-memory for "words" in a speech (as the language in which the subject matter is clothed)

this technique is used in the 16thC, etc. Giordano Bruno.
- memory for "things" , place the thing to be memorized on a locus in the memorized building. It must be a big building, and the locus must be in a sequence. So one can start with any locus, and move backwards and forwards from it, recalling the thing, associated with the locus, in proper order of sequence. The same set of loci is important because the same set of loci can be memorized for a different set of things in a speech.

about the locus:

To remember the sequence of speech in proper order, every 5th loci must be given a distinguishing spatial mark. (ex. "mark the fifth locus with a golden hand, and the tenth locus with an acquaitance named Decimus"). The spatial construction becomes more complex, like building a setting in a story.

Try to memories a sequence of locus in a non-busy place, as to not busy and clutter the mind.

"they must not be too brightly lighted for then the images placed on them will glitter and dazzle obscure the images; nor must they be too dark or the shadows will obscure the images." (Ad Herennium)

- intervals between loci should be 30 feet

-if the person memorizing does not know a lot of places, 'fictious places' can be used, as opposed to real places, in the ordinary method.

-architectural immaterial qualities are introduced like in a 'stage set'

about the images:
-images for things. (makes images to remind of a an argument, a notion, or a 'thing', used for a debate, or in philosophy discourse)

-images for words. (makes images to remind of every single word, used in reciting from a poem, for example)

*when choosing images and loci, chose abnormal, funny, or grotesque ones.

"When we see in every day life things that are petty, ordinary, and banal, we generally fail to remember them, because the mind is not being stirred by anything novel or marvellous. But if we see or hear something exceptionally base, dishonourable, unusual, great, unbelievable, or ridiculous, that we are likely to remember for a long time. incidents of our childhood we often remember best. A sunrise, the sun's course, a sunset, are marvellous to no one because they occur daily. But a solar eclipse is a source of wonder. Let art, then, imitate nature, find what she desires, and follow as she directs. " (Ad Herennium)


-set up image agents, to activate the images : ornament them, disfigure them, blood, soil, etc. comic effect.

"the things we eaily remember when they are real are commonly also remembered when they are figments."(Ad Herennium)

This reminds me of the categorisation of gendres in literature and film : drama, comedy, horror - defined by their extremities as marks on our memory.

set up a scene with all these things in the space, and the narrative of this sequence runs parallel with the narrative of the 'things' or 'words' to memorize.

this tells me a spatialized fabric is imaginationed, derived from the reality of the speech, but memorized using a completely different reality (that of the places in the memorized, imagined building).

The definition of rhetoric is perhaps cynical : (language designed to have an effective or persuasive affect on its audience; but is often regarded as lacking in sincerity or meaningful content), because it is unsincere in the very nature of how one memories it. The imagined spatialization of input for memory is different that the oral output for memory.
After years of practice, this technique, as a part of the 5 parts of rhetoric, becomes an art in itself: the Art of Memory. It travels through European tradition. After the industrial and technological revolution we have prosthesis to document event in physical form. (e.i. Photographs) Documentation is not, in its material artifact form, memory. Materially, artifact remains in constant form, one moment to the next. The true memory of artifact lies in the immaterial reality one forms of it. The physical reality of the artifact is translated to an imagined reality. This is practiced with the classical Art of Memory.

The pencil is the simpliest technology that allows us to translate events of one physical reality to an imagined reality, and back to a physical reality. The photograph takes a picture, but it is act of taking the picture, and the memory of being at the site taking the picture, which allows translation of the photograph from a physical reality to the imagined reality.

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The landscape architect, Luis Barragan, uses a modernized version of the classical Art of Memory, as a design tool in the process for planning and building the project : Jardines del Pedregal de San Angel. (the garden of the stony place).

landscape architect: Luis Barragan
project: Jardines del Pedregal de San Angel.

-Ancient Lava Fields south of Mexico City, 1945-1953

-865 acre residential subdivision

"garden of the stone place" : object + place = memory of the "thing" to be remembered (Cicero's De oratore)
-art of memory. associating a fantastical object with a site. the spatialisation of memory.
-names the thing: object + a site. places an object with the loci to form semiotic meaning.
-how we remember? act of taking the photo: framing something? using light? angle? lense type? shutter speed? when? who is taking the photo? how do we develop it? what do we do with the photo? layer it, enhance it? collage it, cut it? frame it? burn in?

for the Rhetoric, Cicero and Quintilian, there is a desire to remember things or words in a speech.

in Barragan, there is a desire to remember the gardens. The translation from physical "things" in the garden to imagined images put on imagined locus, Barragan reproduces the "things" them back into physical reality through photographs. The imagined things in the photographs are of a different reality, even thought the physical photograph appears to be of the imaginary and physical world alike.

Barragans photography is the spatialisation of the present. his style of photography is his technique of thinking about spatialisation.

New way of translating, and taking photographs:

the photographs:

The photos of the gardens first appeared in real estate advertisements for the residential development.

they served to speed the physical transformation of the site whose image they perserve.

The gardens were altered and destroyed in integrity, within years of its realisation. It is the photographs of the gardens that they are remembered by.

-in 1944 Barragan met and hired Armando Salas Portugal who previously exhibited photographs of Barragan's garden.

- Salas was to first make "objective" photos under different atmospoheric conditions
studied composition and lighting.

- second to make "abstract" subjective photos shot at close range, in black and white; with little information about the architecture as a whole and more about a vivid fragment of it; much like we do in the art of memory when remembering "things" or "words" in a speech.

materials:

walls: concrete or local stone

gates: rough-wood, thin iron

uneven stairs from hardened lava: geographic, organic

-rocks and trees

-water shoots

-impressions of garden: Salas constructs how he wants us to remember the gardens.

from the outside:

after constructing an imaginary reality of the gardens based on the photographs, when one visits the gardens, the imaginary reality becomes the physical reality, regardless of the physicality of the space. The imagined spatialisation constructed as memory becomes the reality of the physical experience of the gardens.

-photographs are marked with image agents like the Art of Memory Anonymous description,
(set up image agents, to activate the images : ornament them, disfigure them, blood, soil, etc. comic effect.):

-washed with strong light and crisp shadows, cropped forms

-striking oblique perspectives, bird's eye or worm's eye view, dramatic lighting and atmospheric condition

Photos are a device to consciously deconstruct loci, in order to make a structure of loci to remember. (inspired by lecture yesturday of A Taxonomy of the Imagination - Perry Kulper

"Past Knowing : Photography, Preservation, and Decay at the Gardens of El Pedregal." / Keith L. Eggener

Review: "Past Knowing : Photography, Preservation, and Decay at the Gardens of El Pedregal." / Keith L. Eggener, by Christopher Vernon.


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(re)SEARCH:

-the translation of one physical reality impression to an imagined reality. It is then recalled to the present, and reformed. It is an impression of the thing, but can never be the thing in original form because that in original form does not exist in this present.

-out of time-based human perception, only present exists. we are conscious of memories in this present. And are in constant transform, constant trans reality, in every sequential present. Unfolding like the frames of a film.Before any material documentation device (painting and photography in particular),

Bergson was discussing movement, perception and imagination in 1913.

Henri Bergson - Matter and Memory (1913)

"The senses, left to themselves, present us to the real movement, between two real halts, as a solid and undivided whole.

The division is the work of our imagination, of which indeed the office is to fix the moving images of our ordinary experience, like the instantaneous flash which illuminates a stormy landscape by night."

The way Bergson thinks of movement in the early 20thC, is analoguous to the way one thinks of photographs, and as a stream of photographs, stop-frame animation. The space between each frame in animation is "filled" in with our perception, so the images appear flowing continuously seamless.

(re)SEARCH:

If perception, in stop-frame animation, fills in the 'space' between each frame, these small fragments have a quality of spatiality. These fragments of space, as temporal as they could be, are still space; and allow each of us to see, or perceive the frames of reality differently. This means everyone's reality is different, although between these spaces in constructed perceptions, our worlds may appear to be the same. In our memories we house these loci; and 'mark' them, in the As Herrenium description of the Art of Memory, with peculiarly conditioned images important to us. The condition AKA architecture of the images we chose to remember, is what sets one's constructed perception apart from one's other. Which means, architecture has a direct influence on our memory and perception of spatiality.

re(SEARCH) of overall seminar discussion:

Where is the conscious housed? It's occupancy perhaps is a non-physical occupancy which cannot exist outside of the frame of perception and time/ its occupancy perhaps cannot exist without a perceptive construction of its miniscul, fragments of space between its frames of perception..like the filling in our perception manifests in the viewing of stop-frame animation?

references


Primary Sources:

• The Art of Memory / by Frances Yates ; Ark Press, 1966
• Matter and memory / by Henri Bergson ; cauth. by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer [pseud.] (1913)
• "The Thing", Architecture from the Outside - Essays on Virtual and Real Space. / by Elizabeth Grosz, MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England, 2001.

Secondary Sources:

• Memory and Architecture / Eleni Bastea, ed. ; University of New Mexico Press, 2004.
• "Past Knowing : Photography, Preservation, and Decay at the Gardens of El Pedregal." / Keith L. Eggener.
•Review: "Past Knowing : Photography, Preservation, and Decay at the Gardens of El Pedregal." / Keith L. Eggener, by Christopher Vernon.