Ancient Intersection of the Via Appia and Via Ardeatina

This is my favorite Piranesi print and I have for some time had a desire to draw some kind of intervention into it, but never really knew where to start. Nonetheless, I have been thinking about how to build my site and I think an interesting departure point would be to take synaesthetic spatial moments that I identified in my synaesthetic memory map, collage them into my concretely identifiable site at 5015 Vernon Blvd, and then intervene into that collage with my program. My conception of this approach comes both from looking at the Piranesi print, in its full implications of ruin, collection, memory, and fiction, and also an excerpt from my thesis book that I wrote about the program.

A house. A subway. A nightclub.

Acting upon the desire to create an architecture born primarily out of the conceptual crossing of synaesthesia and the Method of Loci, the relation between the mental map of the city and the program becomes crucial. Within the Method of Loci, the concept of the mental image of the city suggests a construction that simultaneously exists somewhere between factual reality and imagined abstraction. Turning to Bachelard’s model, his realms of discussion, such as the cellar and the garret, suggest different behaviors of occupation and ways of storing memories occurring in distinct zones within a single construct that houses memory and the creative being’s act of dwelling poetically. Following these two models the act of choosing program becomes one of reaching out into the city, gathering programs and collecting them into a congealed block on a single site.

Thus the chosen program, “the house, the subway, and the nightclub” means to do just that, guided by the found itinerary of the synaesthetic memory map. The house provides the inhabitant with sanctuary and privacy. It is rich with physical sensation but on the domestic scale. The nightclub exists in the realm of public life and its experience presents an intensity of sensation that at times passes into the realm of adversity against the well being of the occupant. The subway mediates between the two offering an in-between experience for reflection on past events and the anticipation of the destination. The spatial joining of these programs presents an anxiety that drives the design as it seeks a resolution of the mental image of the city. In proposing this program, the project confronts the structure of memory and the role played by the synaesthetic union of physical sensation and memory in the union of disparate experiences into a single near-fictional narrative.

In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard 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.

Behind the Method of Loci stands that idea that one can recall specific memories by an imagined walk through the mental image of the city along a specific path. Consequently, it also implies that by walking a different path through the imagined structure, one can create new possibilities. As the inhabitants of “the house, the subway, and the nightclub” dwell in a space modeled as a formalization of the mental image of the city, the program becomes one, in terms of Bachelard, primed for dreaming and creating the new stories in which one dwells poetically.