November 20, 2006

A Statement on the Synaesthetic Crossing of Memory and Physical Senses in Architecture

A landscape exists as the overlaying of comparatively momentary inhabitations that accumulate over time. As they rise and fall, these inhabitations imbed traces in the topography that become enigmatic clues as the amnesis of time overtakes the topographical memory. While physical sensuality of place may inform a deep understanding of the moment and uncover these clues, it is not sufficient to interpret these amnesic traces and place the moment within a greater context time. To find this understanding, one projects his own memories, suggesting distant places and experiences, upon the void of forgetfulness, and the clues become receptors for the dialog of experience and time, opening their enigmatic qualities. Thus assuming that landscape is understood through input gathered by the senses, and it is apparent that memory is also essential to that understanding, memory becomes another sense. Within this framework, an opportunity for synaesthetic experience, the crossing of senses, is opened to the inhabitant of place in that the physical sensations recall memories of other places and events, creating a blurred experience of inhabitation that exists as a near-fictional narrative between the physicality of the present moment, and the suggestion of experiences beyond.

Following the Method of Loci, which links memory to the landscape, urban or otherwise, one uses a mental map to place memories in specific sites.1 The Act of Walking, which imparts upon the Body an understanding of place and becomes the method for uncovering the intimate knowledge of the city that informs the creation of the mental map. Through the Act of Walking and the creation of the mental map for the Method of Loci where one will find the site for the architectural synaesthesia of physical sense and memory.

An ancient Greek text of unknown authorship, the Ad C. Herennium, suggests that the best sites for storing memory in the Method of Loci are “deserted, solitary, unfrequented buildings” and in the context of New York City, these sites will not be found in the city’s abandoned ruins because while their physicality may be faded, their memory has not as they have become contested icons of New York’s industrial past.2 Rather, the Act of Walking reveals these sites in the forgotten, overlooked in-between spaces in the city fabric. In their spatial amnesia, they are primed for the projection of memory.

To propose architecture for an in-between site that connects it the larger experience of the city, and a larger territory for the Method of Loci, one looks to the daily narratives of the essentially New York City in-between experience: the subway system. One walks from an event or place to the subway station and the Act of Walking is extended into the subterranean system. At the end of the ride, one then walks to the next event or destination. The ride, the space and time between events, largely detaches one from the city and becomes a timeline loaded with the possibility of reflection upon the memories of the previous place or anticipation of the near future. A synaesthetic memory map documents this experience by creating a timeline of the present experience of subway ride in terms of the sensual experiences of the ride. Similar maps are created for the events before and after the ride and are overlaid upon the sensory map of the ride. When similar sensations bridge the layers of experience, multiple spaces are recalled and synaesthesia occurs through this cross of physical sensation and memory. The combination of the present space with the remembered space proposes the creation of new conditions that, while not yet realized, are characteristic of the city.

The suggestion of program for this in-between space follows the suggestion of Bachelard, who writes:

The house we were born in is more than an embodiment of home, it is also an embodiment of dreams, each one of its nooks and corner was a resting-place for daydreaming…If we give their function of shelter for dreams to all these places of retreat, we may say…that there exists for each one of use an oneiric house, a house of dream-memory, that is lost in the shadow of a beyond of the real past.3

Thus the program starts with the house, but as a site within the Method of Loci’s mental map of the city, the house must remain connected to the event and the in-between experience. The house becomes the Loci, the event becomes the sensually visceral destination, such as a nightclub, and the in-between experience is found in the subway. Yet while these three programs can string together in a clear narrative, their overlapping suggests spatial conditions at odds with each other. The critical detail of the design becomes the joint between programs, or the party wall, where the disparate programs push against each other, allowing the sensations of one program to bridge to the next. In the physicality of this detail, one finds the synaesthetic spaces of inhabitation that link physical sensuality and memory.

With the mindset of a detective, enigmatic sensual clues are uncovered within the synaesthetic memory map and as the clues slowly reveal themselves, a narrative of spatial experience begins to unravel in a way that will ultimately reveal the physical resolution of the program. Through a mastery of the technique of memory mapping, beginning with drawings of his own memoirs, one learns a new way to exam a site in the context of city and design architecture for it. Importantly, these fragmentary clues posses an inherent amnesis, “which freed from theories and fictions of official histories, can spur a greater fulfillment of our potential.”4 To understand place through the clues of physical experience we project our memories and to project into this blurred realm of synaesthetic experiences is also to dream and to create.



1. Lindsey, Bruce. “Topographic Memory.” Re-Envisioning Landscape Architecture. Ed. Catherine Spellman. Actar, Barcelona, 2003. p. 42-43.
2.Lindsey, Bruce. “Topographic Memory.” Re-Envisioning Landscape Architecture. Ed. Catherine Spellman. Actar, Barcelona, 2003. p. 43.
3.Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Beacon Press, Boston, Mass. 1964. p. 15.
4.Suárez-Araúz, Nicomedes. Amnesis Art: The Art of the Lost Object. Lascaux Publishers, New York, 1988. p. 30.