Architecture for Collection & Re_Collection Copyright Š 2011 - 2012 Gregory Norton All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author/editor/publisher Gregory Norton (gnorton@risd.edu), except in the case of brief and properly referenced quotations and/or pictures. Just ask, it will make me happy.
ARCHITECTURE FOR COLLECTION & RE_COLLECTION Gregory James Norton Spring 2012 Degree Project submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Architecture, within the Department of Architecture, at the Rhode Island School of Design, located in Providence, Rhode Island. Approved by Master’s Examination Committee:
Primary Advisor - Thomas Gardner, Critic, Department of Architecture
Secondary Advisor - Jason Wood, Critic, Department of Architecture
DP Coordinator - Jonathan Knowles RA, Professor, Department of Architecture
Date conferred: 06/02/12
Dedicated to my Grandfather Fletcher and my Uncle Dana, you live on in our memories.
Architecture provides a way of conceptualizing and constructing on the basis of a combinatorial of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined, while leaving room for any and all assemblies by outside parties in particular ways that could not have been foreseen. A combinatorial definition derived from:
Michel de Certeau
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Italo Calvino
Umberto Eco
CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 01 ABSTRACT 02 INTRODUCTION 03
The BODY PART I 04 Act I 05 Act II 13 PART II 21 PART III The Amnesteca 36
The WRITTEN 51 BIBLIOGRAPHY 64
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Cover - cover (ink) vi de Certeau (ink) Calvino (ink) Eco (ink) xpreface barf (pencil, ink) 03 Eco (ink) 04 church section [wedding] (pencil, ink, photoshop) wedding ritual (pencil, ink, photoshop) 05 G-01 (pencil, ink, photoshop) 06 G-02 (pencil, ink, photoshop) 07 G-03 (pencil, ink, photoshop) 08 G-04 (pencil, ink, photoshop) 09 G-05 (pencil, ink, photoshop) 10,11 - G-06 (pencil, ink, photoshop) 12 G-07 (pencil, ink, photoshop) 13 D-01 (pencil, ink, photoshop) 14 D-02 (pencil, ink, photoshop) 15 D-03 (pencil, ink, photoshop) 16 D-04 (pencil, ink, photoshop) 17 church section [wedding] (pencil, ink, photoshop) wedding ritual (pencil, ink, photoshop) 18 church memory sequence (pencil, ink, photoshop) 19 church section [funeral] (pencil, ink, photoshop) funeral ritual (pencil, ink, photoshop) 20 memory blend (pencil, ink, photoshop) 23 house (pencil, ink, photoshop) 24 house section (pencil, ink, photoshop) 25 house blocks (pencil, ink, photoshop) 27 memory palace (pencil, ink, photoshop) 28 memory palace investigations (pencil, ink, photoshop) 30,31 - memory palace ritual (pencil, ink, photoshop) 33 wintersession recollection (pencil, ink, photoshop) 34 investigation plan (pencil, ink, watercolor, photoshop) 35 investigation section (pencil, ink, watercolor, photoshop) 36 life (pencil, ink, photoshop) 38 iso (sketchup, VRAY, photoshop) 39 locus map (photoshop, Utah GIS layers) 40 launch site (pencil, ink, photoshop)
41 42 43 44,45 46 47 48 49 50 51 -
52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 -
62 63 64 -
launch snapshot (sketchup, VRAY, photoshop, flickr) launch enclosures (pencil, ink, photoshop, flickr) trip (pencil, ink, photoshop) - plan & elevations (pencil, ink, photoshop, google earth) ground floor plan (pencil, ink, photoshop, google earth) upper floors plan (pencil, ink, photoshop, google earth) book model (hard maple, plaster) Amnesteca section (pencil, ink, watercolor, photoshop) Amnesteca (sketchup, trace, pencil, pen, photoshop) museum (pencil, ink, photoshop) archive (pencil, ink, photoshop) void (pencil, ink, photoshop) Smith (ink) Pousseur (ink) McCloud (ink, photoshop) Hooter (ink) system loss (ink) construction loss (ink) Zoidberg (Futurama image) Krulwich (ink) Lehrer (ink) memory loss (ink) the whole shibang (ink) photos Tolzmann (ink) Frink (Simpsons image) Eliade (ink) Verschaffel (ink) Ware (Chris Ware self-portrait) book section (pencil, ink, photoshop) room section (pencil, ink, photoshop) Amnesteca (pencil, ink, photoshop)
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Thanks to my wife Kelly and my parents James and Lona for your infinite support and patience these past three years.
1
ABSTRACT
In order to share conceptual ideas we manifest constructions that attempt to best represent the purest form of our original concept. But within this machine of construction, losses occur and hinder perfect translation for others. Even our own memories suffer unavoidable losses, for every recollection / re-collection of a memory initiates a completely new construct of the past moment (and therefore a less pure construct), with the gaps filled by fictions we have acquired over our own continuing experiences. How then can architecture, as a construction, deal with loss; loss of memory, loss of concept, loss of life? Degree Project consists of three stages: 1. An introverted evaluation and output of personal experiences and memories, rendered without any sort of strict design parameters, which then is post-evaluated for typologies that can translate and bind the project moving forward. 2. Renderings of space within the realm of architectural rendering conventions, that begin to emote feelings of loss and memory through aesthetics, spacial precedents, scale and program. 3. Design of an architecture that can assist the conversation between the living, whose identities change with experience, and the dead, whose identities change through every recollection.
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Michel de Certeau, in The Practice of Everyday Life, talks of sieve-orders; the extra and other that gets inevitably inserted into architecture and, as a result, affects the order imposed by the voyeur architect.
INTRODUCTION
The ‘city’, like a proper name, thus provides a way of conceiving and constructing space on the basis of a finite number of stable, isolatable, and interconnected properties. What de Certeau is observing is a form of architectural entropy1 within the city (with his choice of New York City the pinnacle of context). The finite / isolatable / interconnected properties are constantly being re-ordered by walkers2, leaving the architect in a seemingly helpless position of attempting to freeze in time this ever homogenizing sieve-order in hopes to analyze and anticipate all known and unknown influences. After all, the city’s inhabitants are always ready to take advantage of a mismatch between structure and performance. The architect should expect and embrace these unknown influences and assign general concepts for the walkers; concepts that are efficiently composed and consider the variables (stable / isolatable / interconnected properties) available at the time of design. Architecture is useless without its end-users; for they inject life into the project and without their presence the entire field of architecture lies in a realm of potentiality; a forever frozen and useless representation of a inward concept. In the words of composer Umberto Eco,
1 - Using the cosmological definition, “a hypothetical tendency for the universe to attain a state of maximum homogeneity in which all matter is at a uniform temperature.” 2 - In no way does the term “walker” imply that architects should be above (literally and/or figuratively) any of their peers, just that the term walkers is a succinct and hilarious way to define the end-users of architecture.
“…The author offers the interpreter, the performer, the addressee a work to be completed. He does not know the exact fashion in which his work will be concluded, but he is aware that once completed the work in question will still be his own. It will not be a different work, and, at the end of the interpretative dialogue, a form which is his form, will have been organized, even though it may have been assembled by an outside party in a particular way that he could not have foreseen. The author is the one who proposed a number of possibilities which had already been rationally organized, oriented, and endowed with specifications for proper development.”
Authorship of architecture can then be claimed even if the architecture acts only as a springboard for unknowable potentialities.
Umberto Eco
By amending de Certeau’s statement with some words of Calvino, and some words of Eco, a definition is constructed that begins to encompass the practice of architecture: Architecture provides a way of conceptualizing and constructing on the basis of a combinatorial3 of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined, while leaving room for any and all assemblies by outside parties in particular ways that could not have been foreseen.
3 - Within mathematics, this term deals with the
existence and construction of systems of finite sets whose intersections have specified numerical properties.
This definition acts as the driver for the following Degree Project. 3
PART I
August 14, 2010
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Act I Mid-February, 2011
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8.33 mi
6.29 mi
6
1915
2011
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8
9
The world stands out on either side No wider than the heart is wide; Above the world is stretched the sky,— No higher than the soul is high. The heart can push the sea and land Farther away on either hand; The soul can split the sky in two, And let the face of God shine through. But East and West will pinch the heart That can not keep them pushed apart; And he whose soul is flat—the sky Will cave in on him by and by. - Edna St. Vincent Millay excerpt from Renascence
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Act II Mid-Day, August 2nd, 2011
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84 mi
65 mi
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1949
2011
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0.34 mi
0.27 mi
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August 8, 2011
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The more I stay in here The more it’s not so clear The more I stay in here The more I disappear As far as I have gone I knew what side I’m on But now I’m not so sure The line begins to blur - Trent Reznor
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PART II
But perhaps the act of drawing, which is both spontaneous and at its heart an irreducibly physical and emotional act, is closer to the roots of human cognition than we have suspected. - Frank Wilson
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There is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority. No archive without outside. - Jacques Derrida
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Experience accumulates outward from the center, influencing glances towards the past imprinted memories.
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[In the Memory Palace] the subject memorizes the layout of some building, or the arrangement of shops on a street, or any geographical entity which is composed of a number of discrete loci. When desiring to remember a set of items the subject literally ‘walks’ through these loci and commits an item to each one by forming an image between the item and any distinguishing feature of that locus. Retrieval of items is achieved by ‘walking’ through the loci, allowing the latter to activate the desired items. - John O’Keefe & Lynn Nadel
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The Memory Palace’s vertical panes, imprinted with past moments of varying opacity, spins and locks into place, preparing the memory for recollection.
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With one revolution of light the memory is translated into the sensor, which lies in at the center of the labyrinth, where the newly constructed memory is able to be referenced. 31
One must be receptive; receptive to the image at the moment it appears: if there be a philosophy of poetry, it must appear and re-appear through a significant verse, in total adherence to an isolated image; to be exact, in the very ecstasy of the newness of the image. - Gaston Bachelard
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PART III - The Amnesteca
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At my age, any day above ground and vertical is a good day. - Anthony Hopkins (as Burt Munroe in The World’s Fastest Indian)
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The launch acts as a place of gathering before journeying to the Amnesteca, placed 7.5 miles away in the salt flats. Consisting of a simple concrete pad, habitable roof and 2 sided fireplace, the sites at the launch are intended to be minimal and neighborly resting places. Journey with motorcycle, ATV or jeep is needed to reach the Amnesteca. Or, if feeling especially laborious, one can walk the 7.5 miles.
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The Amnesteca contains a workshop and museum on the ground floor. The workshop is where the books are made, which are composed of wood and contain a solid mass of mortar which has been mixed with cremated remains. The open space within the book is sized to fit an iPad in width and depth, and a baseball in height.
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The Depository
The Void
The Archive
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A [Person] dies twice - the first time when [life] leaves [them]; then [they] can be saved if they [are recalled]. The second time finally when [they are forgotten] ... Brodsky & Utkin [ ] are modifications
The Museum
The Archive
The Void 51
The concept, defined as “a general idea derived or inferred from specific instances or occurrences,” is a way to summarize the entirety of a project to someone who most likely does not share the same inherent opinions or experiences as yourself, most especially the experiences gained during the formation of the concept itself. This performance is hard to do. Articulation of concept is the most important step of architecture, for if a concept cannot be shared to others successfully then the architecture will most likely never be truly conceived outside the arena of potential. But what is concept? Barry Smith presents an argument4 concerning concept as follows:
THE WRITTEN 4 - Most of Smith’s arguments in the article rely on the fact that contemporary work in ontology “rests on practices predominant in the field of knowledge representation, where it is assumed as a matter of course that knowledge representation has to do not with reality but rather with concepts conceived as human creations.”
Knowledge exists in the minds of human subjects. Hence we can have knowledge of things in reality only insofar as they are brought under the conditions which are the presuppositions of their being taken up into our minds. Hence we can have knowledge not of entities as they are in themselves but only of our own concepts.
The concepts that we conceive and share need to be structured upon a baseline framework that consists of an agreed upon set of current5 language and sensory experiences. To take the empirical stance, sensory experiences are the only way we are able to gather knowledge of the physical world and create concepts in the first place, so a baseline is needed in order to create and share as efficiently as possible amongst each other. Sharing a concept should be an opportunity to articulate a large, complex idea without needing to assume specific background knowledge that the audience would require in order to conceive the concept. The representational choice for degree project of comic (in portions) is an attempt to create an environment (much like the architecture of the degree project itself) that is able to share concepts, but intentionally leaves gaps that need to be filled by the audience’s own sea of knowledge. Henri Pousseur, the Belgian composer, used an intentional openness in his pieces (most specifically the electronic piece Scambi) to not only encourage interpretation by the performer, but by the audience:
5 - Smith is quick to remind us of the importance of current, of a time, by acknowledging that along the course of human history many false beliefs were once a part of humanity’s sea of knowledge and these false beliefs should merely be looked upon as misclassified knowledge (eventually resolved of course through the inevitable sieve-ordering of entropy over time). Smith’s historical example is phlogiston (a fire-like substance which was contained within combustible bodies and released during combustion) whereas a contemporary example may end up being the Higgs boson particle.
…It is up to the listener to place himself deliberately in the midst of an inexhaustible network of relationships and to choose for himself, so to speak, his own modes of approach, his reference points and his scale, and to endeavor to use as many dimensions as he possibly can at the same time and thus dynamize, multiply and extend to the utmost degree his perceptual faculties.
Comics can begin to speak to this openness in which Pousseur speaks, for this method of representation offers an upfront way to understand the problems being presented while also needing audience participation to formulate the answers. We should never underestimate the intelligence of the readers of our work. By having the audiences (knowingly or unknowingly) inject their own meaning and potential into the framework laid out by the comic sequencing (by the architecture) there is more flexibility for identifying with concepts that may not have even been intentionally authored. Comics perform this move intentionally via the method of closure. Scott McCloud defines closure within 52
Henri Pousseur
comics as a “phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole. ” Comics have the unique ability to control closure, for by choosing image sequencing the author is able to tap into the reader’s own individual imagination. Comics are a medium where the audience is a willing and conscious collaborator and closure is the agent of change, time and motion. See that space between the panels? That’s what comics aficionados have named the “gutter” … here in the limbo of the gutter, human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea … nothing is seen between the panels but experience tells you something must be there.
Scott McCloud
Comics also have the ability to influence the fine line between concept and the senses, “by de-emphasizing the appearance of the physical world in favor of the idea of form, the cartoon places itself in the world of concepts.” Comics do this deliberately by “cartooning” objects, environments or characters in order to leave their inherent identities vague. This is how Disney has been so successful for by cartooning their characters, whether they are lions, insects, candles, etc they are able to imprint identifiable concepts onto the characters that the viewers can relate to and sympathize with. The backgrounds are detailed, for in their realism they are able create a context for the characters that is rich and leans less towards concept, and more towards a reality, driving the viewer further into the fictions being played out by the characters. This process of concept to comic narrative, or concept to any representational method, is a process of construction; a process that not only reflects authorship of something built but which is the literal, empirical vessel of concept. Construction can be defined as:
7 - For example, requirements taken from a final critique, “01 – Site Plan w/2’ contours, 02 – Site Model with critical site context, 03 – Diagrams of critical site thresholds, 04 – Perspectives, 05 – Detail Models, 06 – 1500 word statement.”
1. 2.
a. The act or process of constructing. b. The art, trade, or work of building. a. A structure, such as a building, framework, or model. b. Something fashioned or devised systematically. c. An artistic composition using various materials; an assemblage or a collage.
In design school we are always actively pursuing new abilities and techniques that enable us to construct well, within every facet of the given definition of construction, with critiques being the opportunities to have these individual journeys of concept to construction shared and streamlined. There is usually a standard ontology of construction “deliverables” within architectural academia and architectural practice (which are tried and true representations of architectural space making)7 that help to most efficiently drive discussion of the architecture being presented. But even these ontologies are limited: We can never know reality in its purest form; we can only interpret it through our senses and experiences. Therefore, everyone has their own perspective of reality. An ontology is a formal specification of a perspective.
owlseek.com
Like language, we are constructing things that share a “formal specification of a perspective” in an attempt to most efficiently share concepts. Efficiency is interesting to treat as a ratio, like thermal efficiency, 53
which states that the useful output of a machine can never equal the useful input of a machine because inefficiencies within the system will always create energy losses. Like the unavoidable sieve-ordering of life, there is an unavoidable rise of entropy in this system of conceptual translation.
Ein
= Energy In
Eout
= Energy Out
Let us substitute energy for concept and system with construction (keeping the definition of construction in mind at all times):
Cin
= Concept In
Cout
= Concept Out
Concept out can never match concept in; the best we can do is gain a larger toolbox of techniques that enable us to create constructions that best limit the losses that occur in our processes, while best representing the original concepts we have in our head. The losses can be an infinite number of things, but some big losses can be targeted. The biggest loss in efficiency occurs in the unavoidable nature of idea sharing, which starts with our own empirical observations and research of reality, the archiving of these items into memories in our heads, then conceptualizing these ideas within empirical constructions for a target audience. What occurs is a translation of a perspective of a perspective of a perspective, who’s process alone breeds inevitable losses. Architecture is especially vulnerable to losses for there are so many abstract (and direct) concepts within a project to attempt to represent within the end constructions, and any losses along the way can greatly impede successful translation of your perspective.8 Again, articulately 54
8 - This is an extremely biased quote of course (speaking as an aspiring architect), whereas the same could be said of a pianist about to perform for thousands, a sprinter about to take off from the blocks, or a teacher about to give a lesson to a class of kindergartners.
sharing architectural concept is the hardest step of architecture. But what other losses are there? Here within the academic rigor of an accredited architecture school, among such a diversity of students, general language barriers exist and many projects that should demand critical attention are lost in a trying exchange between student and critic. Also, some students fail to complete the constructions highly suggested by the instructor and face a bias before the conversation even begins. These would all constitute as losses, and negatively contribute to the success of conceptual output. However, there does seem to be somewhat of equilibrium of output amongst students, for those that seem to know that they are limited in their spoken constructions make many physical constructions, knowing that these will provide this architectural baseline of critique versus their spoken or written statement of concept. This also goes for students who feel that their concept is so difficult to grasp outside of their head, hoping that a high volume of work will speak better than their spoken word will be able to. Many students, knowing that they are good speakers, can get by with less physical constructions and can share concepts more eloquently via spoken methods, with minimal “losses” during the process. Most students are in the middle of these two extremes and their concepts are best presented by a mutual coupling of spoken and physical constructions. Prof. Charles Landesman (no picture found)
So, as a critic, observer, spectator, tourist, etc, when presented with constructions not created by ourselves, we are left to then interpret conceptual meaning using our own inherent experience. I may try and perceive what kind of object this is before me by observing those of its characteristics which function as reliable signs of the species. Similarly, I may try to remember what happened on some occasion by examining objective sources of information, such as letters or photographs, which provide evidence as to what really did happen, These might lead me to remember just as premises may lead one to accept a conclusion.
So even though we may be unfamiliar with the ‘species’ that is presented to us, we are able to draw conclusions from not only the empirical observations occurring in real-time, but from the large palette of experience we individually hold. But what exactly are we drawing from to do this? We are drawing from our archive of memories. Selected definitions of memory are: 1. 2. 3. 4. 6. 8. 9.
the ability of the mind to store and recall past sensations, thoughts, knowledge, etc: he can do it from memory the sum of everything retained by the mind a particular recollection of an event, person, etc the time over which recollection extends: within his memory the state of being remembered, as after death the tendency for a material, system, etc, to show effects that depend on its past treatment or history the ability of a material, etc, to return to a former state after a constraint has been removed
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Memories are our individual toolboxes for any sort of discourse, for we need to actively reference how to speak, how to write, how to dress, how to drive, how to set the alarm, how to remember in order to make do. Robert Krulwich, co-host of WNYC’s Radiolab, goes even deeper to say: “Really what I am is a string of memories. That is as close to describing the real me as I can find. I own those memories, and they define me.” Looking specifically at definition #2, (the sum of everything retained by the mind), this definition of self is a succinct and powerful way to define who we are and what we are made up of. This string of memories is essentially the internal architecture that enables us to observe, think, and share effectively. Because our own “strings” are hung in similar fashions (via external frameworks like language, laws and other agreed upon concepts of discourse) we can share memories with others. So how might this memory machine work?
Robert Krulwich
Ein = Experience In COout = Construction Out
We have experience, which essentially is the stuff we grab onto as time goes by, that gets committed to our memories. From there, anything that we choose to share needs to be re-collected within our brains and shared through a construction method. But every construction, every story that we share, becomes a bit more fictionalized the more we reference it for each recollection of memory is literally a re-collection of the stuff, with gaps filled in by our expanding archive of ongoing experiences. We are utilizing the act of closure to perceive the wholeness of the memory. In that same Radiolab podcast Jonah Lehrer, a science writer, explains that: One of the ironies of (contemporary memory) research is the more you remember something, in a sense, the less accurate it becomes … the more it becomes about you and the more it becomes less about what actually happened.
So what happens when someone dies, and their identity lies completely within the potential of recollection? Does it mean that they disappear faster the more that they are recalled? Or does it mean that they become 56
Jonah Lehrer
more a part of us, as we unwittingly and selfishly assimilate them into our own experiences? We can attempt to interpret the relationship between Life and Death within this framework, for over our life we create memories through experiences and through our body (our construction vessel) we are able to share them. Once Death occurs, our identities are completely released to others and our identity is at the mercy of all those who choose to recall our conceptual exchanges with them. Death, thought of in this manner, is a very unselfish act for you are releasing yourself completely over to all who knew you. So should our ongoing experience, these moments that influence recollection, be quantified as losses or gains in the system? The diagram needs to be amended:
Ein = Experience In COout = Construction Out
10 - For the argument it is best to assume an increase in size to mean an increase in density, for our brains don’t expand as we learn and experience more and more (at least as adults).
Experience is acquired in many different ways, so it would make sense to show the inputs being varied but all still entering the same memory space. Experience is treated as a gain and increases the size10 of the system, for experience that is retained translates to memory that is usable to share concepts. So in that sense, the construction machine needs to be more integrated within the memory machine, and not just remain an output, for concepts are things constructed within the memory then outputted outside the body. Another amendment is needed: Ein = Experience In Cin = Concept In Cout = Concept Out
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Experience input remains the same but the dispersion into the system should not be diagrammed linearly, for when visualizing the term recollection (re-collecting) there is a sense of assembling pieces together again. The beginning of the construction process needs to be within the threshold of memory, for we need to creatively assemble memories in order to build concepts, and then use construction methods to share them. The end that outputs concept is outside of the archive of memory, which makes sense because any conceptual output is going to take some sort of ontological form, with some sort of physical strain required to make the constructed form. This output, this construction stuff, is what we claim authorship over. The process of constructional exchange with others is what makes life so goddamn awesome; we are constantly moving through other people’s realized concepts of reality that have been adopted as current standards, and we have the opportunity to contribute to this empirical sea of concepts ourselves by creating things born from our own pool of experiences. One of the greatest conceptual types that has attempted to regulate these countless exchanges and potentials, while acting as an archive for memories and experience, is the library.
The Providence Athenaeum
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Boston Public Library
Providence Public Library
11 - Of course, books are constantly being digitized and in this transfer to a more readily available (and potentially lossless) medium, written and photographic memories have the potential to live forever.
Don Heinrich Tolzmann 12 - Frictionless-sharing is a term most currently associated with Facebook, in which Facebook essentially acts as an auto-curator for your daily internet flaneurings (with your consent), sharing information to your friends without needing to author these updates yourself. Facebook is helping to thread your “string of memories!” 13 - Columbarium: 1. a sepulchral vault or other structure with recesses in the walls to receive the ashes of the dead. 2. any one of these recesses.
C. Jacob
Fundamentally speaking, a library gives actual material presence to potential knowledge . A library houses constructed concepts, in a form whose degradation is limited to the actual materials that constitute the book11. Libraries, as spaces and places, have been needed to preserve and share information, at both public and private levels ever since it was found that written narrative, as a construct, is essential for human progression. “As the memory banks of humankind, libraries collect and make accessible the historical record … the significance of library history relates directly to the origins of the history of civilization and culture, and understanding its role in this context contributes not only to an awareness of the one of the oldest institutions in existence, but the one that has preserved and transmitted the wisdom and knowledge of the ages.”
Of course, the library’s importance as place is shifting within the current current, due to 24/7 information availability, portable devices that can house most texts and the comfortability of competing spaces such as coffee shops and bookstores. But most of those concerns about the advance of technology and frictionlesssharing12 of information are mostly outside the scope here; for this degree project’s “librariness” is characterized as being a place for recollection; recollection that needs physical things to act as enzymes for recalling memory. When thinking of a library program objectively, as a space for housing collective memory and potential experience, the library’s definition is perfectly suitable when being applied to a place that is archiving the Dead: 1. 2. 3. 6.
a room or set of rooms where books and other literary materials are kept a collection of literary materials, films, CDs, children’s toys, etc, kept for borrowing or reference the building or institution that houses such a collection: a public library a collection of specific items for reference or checking against: a library of genetic material
In this case, having the library act as columbarium13 and an archive for housing individualized memory constructions, the place is quite literally both a collection of ‘materials for borrowing or reference’ and for ‘genetic material.’ Libraries are places where a number of threads come together in a single knot. These threads relate to the externalization, organization, control and use of the collective, cultural memory, including the memory of scientific and spiritual traditions, the different disciplines and literary genres. Through this all-inclusive social memory, which may sometimes be restrictive and imposed, individual memories plot their own paths.
Degree Project acts as a place that is able to house not only a physical remnant of the body, but can act as container for strings of memory (via physical constructs) for those who are gone. The process of recollection needs to plot its own path, and because the identity of the person who is gone lies solely within the realm of memory/concept, the only way for a proper dialogue to take place is by giving the users
(no picture found)
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control over the constructs that can best represent the concept of a person at that current moment. By providing the proper atmosphere to have this dialogue, both spatially and tangibly, the hope is that the ‘losses’ inherent in the act of recollection are left totally to the control of the users within the architecture, not limited or influenced too much by the architecture but complements the mindsets and conditions being brought to the architecture by its users. The activity of reading, maybe even more than attending a spectacle, effectuates a rupture in the time flow and an escape of “normal time.”
This dialogue between the person and the object acting as the conduit to memory is much like the act of reading. Reading, at least retaining what is read, requires an intense focus and specific physical setting that enables one to fully engage into the written and/or visual. This visual information is taken in, compared against all the experience you have about the words and their sequence (or the pictures and their context) and then is conceptualized internally to create the scenes, moods and experiences being shared to you. The translation and absorption of any written or visual information to one’s ‘identity’ is very remarkable and quite beautiful when picturing the entire translation process as a whole. Libraries not only house these experience conduits, but contain architectural spaces that best complement the process itself.
Mircea Eliade
Bart Verschaffel’s insights into the act of reading begin to bridge what happens when we read and how the exchange between empirical observation and memory morph into recollection, which begins to hint at potential spaces that may result. For instance: One ‘sinks’ into a book like one ‘sinks into thoughts’. Contrary to thinking or feeling however, reading is not an informal activity, something that just ‘happens’ even while performing other activities. Reading is more like praying: a ritualized activity, relating to specific gestures and specific objects. It creates a situation, and that situation ‘takes place,’ it occupies and organizes space. The reader turns inward via the external medium of the book: the book opens up an ‘elsewhere’, where his attention dwells. Reading transforms a person; it makes one forget oneself and where one is, it affects the readers’ consciousness and brings him in another ‘state of mind.’
Bart Verschaffel
Christopher Ware sums up how such an experience can translate with comic reading: When you read a text - an novel, like everybody would read - you basically, for all intents and purposes, go blind. You quit looking at the words on the page. [...] You get completely into your own imagination. And comics kind of toe the line between that [interior reading experience and the outward experience of “looking”], where you still have your own eyes open and you’re still looking at pictures, but you’re also reading somewhat. You’re reading words and reading pictures. So there’s sort of this strange thing that can happen in comics, where your own memories and imagination can be called up, but at the same time you’re sort of having sort of a visual experience.
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Christopher Ware
The goal of this project is to create a spacial environment that assists this process of recollection, a process of instantaneous introspection and extrospection, specifically using material objects that are controlled by visitors (objects that can be ‘read’, literally or figuratively). These objects are paired with a tangible mass that contains a portion of the cremated remains of the person being actively recalled, hoping to give a barrierless, empirical connection to the Dead. By giving the users control over objects that best supplement specific memories and providing spaces that complement the recollection process, the amount of memory “loss” is limited and almost completely controlled by the users themselves. All of these components will then provide the users of the architecture the best possible attempt at realizing the purest current identity of those who are gone, and hopefully can give the users a push into this “other state of mind” where identities can meet. But what is this place called? The Greek word Bibliotheca can be broken down into a combination of bibl (book) and theca (storage place, depository). Theca is more of use for it hints at the potential of archive as well as the depository aspect of the objectified memories. Amamnesis, primarily meaning “recollection” in Greek, is defined as:
14 - Plato’s character Socrates suggests in a dialogue with Nero that: The soul is immortal, and repeatedly incarnated; knowledge is actually in the soul from eternity, but each time the soul is incarnated its knowledge is forgotten in the shock of birth. What one perceives to be learning, then, is actually the recovery of what one has forgotten. (Once it has been brought back it is true belief, to be turned into genuine knowledge by understanding.) And thus Socrates (and Plato) sees himself, not as a teacher, but as a midwife, aiding with the birth of knowledge that was already there in the student. 15 - It has its origin in Jesus’ words at the Last Supper, “Do this in memory of me” (Luke 22:19, 1 Corinthians 11:24-25).
1. 2. 3. 5.
the recollection or remembrance of the past; reminiscence. Platonism14. recollection of the Ideas, which the soul had known in a previous existence, especially by means of reasoning. the medical history of a patient. a prayer in a Eucharistic service, recalling the Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension of Christ15.
All of these definitions can abstractly apply to the potential purpose of this place, and the completeness of the definitions (the root “recollection”, the philosophical inquiry of “repeated incarnation” and “recovery of what one has forgotten”, the mortal identity/history of the person, and the religious moment of reference) gives the place an umbrella context that can be taken in many directions by its end-users, very much in step with the over-arching definition of architecture being used for this project. So in combing theca and amamnesis we are left with the word Amamnestheca. Shortening up the word a bit, we are left with Amnesteca, which at its core is a perfect as a placeholder name for the program proposed in Degree Project for it is defined as “a storage place for recollection of the past.”
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