Brian Jones and I discussed for sometime the idea, coming from Bachelard, of making drawings of the memories associated with the houses we lived in as children. I didn't get a chance to realize this during the semester, but nonetheless kept thinking about it. Here is an assignment that I wrote for myself for this mini-project. I plan on completing it, among other things (see my schedule) during the break.

December 20, 2006

Self-Assignment: The Jointed Memory Chest

“Wardrobes with their shelves, desks with their drawers, and chests with their false bottoms are veritable organs of the secret psychological life. Indeed, without these “objects” and a few others in equally high favor, our intimate life would lack a model of intimacy. They are hybrid objects, subject objects. Like us, through us and for us, they have a quality of intimacy…But words carry with them obligations. Only an indigent soul would put just anything in a wardrobe. To put just anything, just any way, in just any piece of furniture, is the mark of unusual weakness in the function of inhabiting. In the wardrobe there exists a center of order that protects the entire house against uncurbed disorder.” 1

-Gaston Bachelard



Protagonist: 1. The main character in a drama or other literary work
Antagonist: 1. One who opposes: adversary. 2. The principal character in opposition to the protagonist of a narrative or drama. 3. A muscle that counteracts the action of another muscle, the agonist.
Agonist: 1. A contracting muscle that is counteracted by the antagonist. From the Greek agon, meaning contest.


Develop a narrative establishing one’s interaction with the space of the childhood bedroom through the influence of an antagonist and formalize a “jointed memory chest” whose operation sensually recalls memoirs of inhabiting the space.

Choose three or four moments of spatial and personal experience with the room and develop a lexicon of word pairings that describe these moments. Then through layered drawings that begin with the existing conditions of the bedroom and become increasingly abstract, apply the lexicon to develop the physicality and functionality of the “jointed memory chest.”


1. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Beacon Press, Boston, Mass. 1964. 78-79