I have been thinking a lot about Bachelard where he states, “Through dreams the various dwelling places in our lives co-penetrate and retain the treasures of former days.” I am interested in a particular experience of architecture/landscape in which perception of a space is colored by the recollection of other spaces, created an extended ground of memory. Possibly, this could relate to another idea I have about the experience of seemingly separate spaces that “push” against each other. Considering two spaces, challenging each other for influence, the occupant can directly understand the space he or she is in, but also has an understanding of an extended space, including the second space, which is conceived by the play between occupying the first space, feeling the push of the second space, and then imagining the quality of the second space through the extended ground of memory. The idea of one space pushing against the other relates to sketch problem in which the occupant of the “sanctuary” could understand the space of the courtyard by the sounds that transcend the physical barrier I proposed between the two.
A year or two ago I found a new recording entitled “Chants, Hymns, Dances” which is an album of improvisations on the music of Gurdjieff (an Armenian ‘mystic’ of questionable legitimacy who had his followers dance as a sort of meditation) for piano (Vassilis Tsabropoulos) and cello (Anja Lechner). Regardless of Gurdjieff’s intentions, the modern improvisations are gorgeous pieces of music, but the real point is that the album was recorded with technical perfection in a church in Germany, and when I listen to it on a good stereo, I can hear the space of the church. That is to say, by hearing the way the music reverberates in the space I have an understanding of the church that is constructed from memories of spaces with similar acoustic qualities.

So for self-assignment:

1. Finish my documentation of the detail. As I am currently drawing out the detail, it is starting to take on a more developed intention than when I first built it. In parallel to drawing, I am going to write a narrative for it, which parallels occupying the space and simultaneous thinking of another space, in a sense blending the two together. The drawing is starting to get at this too.

2. The next drawing I want to work on takes my photographic project, the one I showed in the presentation, “April is the cruelest month,” and map the narrative of the photographs into a larger landscape. (All the photographs were taken on the same day within several hours of each other.) I then want to take my documented narrative of the Brion Cemetery, my photographs and sketches, and map them into a landscape, and then investigate a way, through drawing, two merge the two in parallel to create a map of a “new landscape.”

3. Take a stab at sitting down and writing a precis.

4. Begin to consider site and program. As I think about it more, I see myself choosing two seemingly oppositional programs and merging them to see how they push against each other.