a respectful dialogue with the past, both distant and immediate. At the same time that the work defends itself as a unique and complete microcosm, it revives and revitalizes the past. Every true work of art occupies a thick and layered time instead of mere contemporaneity.

         There is yet another dimension in architectural memory. Architectural images, or experiences, have a historicity and ontology of their own. Architecture begins with the establishment of a horizontal plane; consequently, the floor is the “oldest” and most potent element of architecture. The wall is more archaic than the door or the window, and projects a deeper meaning as a consequence. Modernity has suffered from another kind of amnesia as architectural elements and images have become abstracted and detached from their origins and ontological essences. The floor, for instance, has forgotten its origin as leveled earth, and turned into mere constructed horizontal planes. In facts, as Bachelard suggests, human constructions of the technological age have forgotten verticality altogether, and turned into mere horizontality. Today’s skyscrapers consist of stacked horizontality and have lost the sense of verticality, the fundamental ontological difference between below and above, Hell and Heaven. Also the floor and the ceiling have become identical horizontal planes. The window and the door are often mere holes in the wall. I do not have the space here to elaborate on this theme of the historicity of architectural images and the current architectural amnesia resulting from the loss of the historicity of experiences; I merely point at the mental significance of this dimension.

The tenses of art 

I venture to suggest that in its very essence artistic work is oriented towards the past rather than the future. Brodsky seems to support this view as he argues: “There is something clearly atavistic in the process of recollection, if only because such as process never is linear. Also the more one remembers, the closer perhaps one is to dieing.”30

         In any significant experience, temporal layers interact; what is perceived interacts with what is remembered, the novel short-circuits with the archaic. An artistic experience always awakes the forgotten child hidden inside one’s adult persona.

         There are fabricated images in today’s architecture and art that are flat and without an emotional echo, but there are also novel images that resonate with remembrance. The latter are mysterious and familiar, obscure and clear, at the same time. They move us through the remembrances and associations, emotions and empathy that they awaken in us. Artistic novelty can move us only provided it touches something that we already possess in our very being. Every profound artistic work surely grows from memory, not from rootless intellectual invention. Artistic work aspire to bring us back to an undivided and undifferentiated oceanic world. This is the Omega that Teilhard de Chardin writes about, “the point from which the world appears complete and correct”.31

         We are usually conditioned to think that artists and architects ought to be addressing the future readers, viewers, and users of their products. Joseph Brodsky is very determined, indeed, about the poet’s temporal perspective: “When one

Slowness and remembering –speed and forgetting

“There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting… the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory: the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting”, suggests Milan Kundera.25 With the dizzying acceleration of the velocity of time today and the constant speeding up of our experiential reality, we are seriously threatened by a general cultural amnesia. In today’s accelerated life, we can finally only perceive, not remember. In the society of the spectacle we can only marvel, not remember. Speed and transparency weaken remembrance, but they have been fundamental fascinations of modernity since the proclamation of F.T. Marinetti in the Futurist manifesto almost a full century ago: “The world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty; the beauty of speed”,26 and Karl Marx’s prophesy: “Everything that is solid .. melts into the air”. 27 Today, even architecture seeks the sensation of speed, instant seduction and gratification, and turns autistic, as a consequence. The architectural confession of Coop Himmelblau illustrates this aspiration for dramatized architectural action and speed:

         The aesthetics of the architecture of death in white sheets. Death in tiled hospital rooms. The architecture of sudden death on the pavement. Death from a rib-cage pierced by a steering shaft. The path of the bullet through a dealer’s head on 42^nd Street. The aesthetics of the peep-show sex in washable plastic boxes. Of the broken tongues and the dried-up eyes.28

         In my view, however, architecture is inherently a slow and quite, emotionally a low-energy art form in comparison with the dramatic arts of sudden affective impact. Its role is not to create strong foreground figures or feelings, but to establish frames of perception and horizons of understanding. The task of architecture is not to make us weep or laugh, but to sensitize us to be able to enter all emotional states. Architecture is needed to provide the ground and projection screen of remembrance and emotion.

         I believe in an architecture that slows down and focuses human experience instead of speeding up of diffusing it. In my view, architecture has to safeguard memories and protect the authenticity and independence of human experience. Architecture is fundamentally the art form of emancipation, and it makes us understand and remember who we are.

Architectural amnesia 

There are different kinds of architecture in relation to memory: one that cannot recall or touch upon the past and another that evokes a sense of depth and continuity. There is also an architecture that seeks to remember literally, like the architectural works of Postmodernism, and another that creates a sense of deep time, and epic continuity without any direct format reference, as the works of Alvar Aalto, Dimitris Pikionis and Carlo Scarpa. These are products of a “poetic chemistry”, to use an evocative notion of Bachelard. 29 Every significant and true work sets itself in 

The Meditation Grove on the hill is an image of hope and resurrection. Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz, The Woodland Cemetery, Stockholm, 1915/1932

         “House, even more than the landscape, is a psychic state”, Bachelard suggests.23 Indeed, writers, film directors, poets, and painters do not just depict landscapes or houses as unavoidable geographic and physical setting of the events of their stories; they seek to express, evoke and amplify human emotions mental states and memories through purposeful depictions of settings, both natural and man-made. “Let we architects rarely bother to imagine what happens behind the walls we have erected. The walls conceived by architects are usually mere aestheticized constructions, and we see our craft in terms of designing aesthetic structures rather than evoking perceptions, feelings and fantasies.

         Artists seem to grasp the intertwining of place and human mind, memory and desire, much better than we architects do, and that is why these other art forms can provide such stimulating inspiration for our work as well as for architectural education. There are no better lessons of the extraordinary capacity of artistic condensations in evoking microcosmic images of the world than, say, the short stories of Anton Chekhov and Jorge Luis Borges, or Giogio Morandi’s minute still lifes consisting of a few bottles and cups on a table top.

“Body memory is … the natural center of any sensitive account of remembering”, philosopher Edward S. Casey argues in his seminal book Memorizing: A Phenomenological Study, and concludes: “There is no memory without body memory.”22 In my view, we could say even more; body is not only the locus of remembrance, it is also the site and medium of all creative work, including the work of the architect.

Memory and emotion

In addition to being memory devices, landscapes and buildings are also amplifiers of emotions; they reinforce sensations of belonging or alienation, invitation or rejection, tranquility or despair. A landscape or work of architecture cannot, however, create feelings. Through their authority and aura, they evoke and strengthen our own emotions and project them back to us as if these feelings of ours had an external source. In the Laurentian Library in Florence I confront my own sense of metaphysical melancholy awakened and projected back by Michelangelo’s architecture. The optimism that I experience when approaching the Paimio Sanatorium is my own sense of hope evoked and strengthened by Alvar Aalto’s optimistic architecture. The hill of the meditation grove at the Woodland Cemetery in Stockholm, for instance, evokes a state of longing and hope through an image that is an invitation and a promise. This architectural image of landscape evokes simultaneously remembrance and imagination as the composite painted image of Arnold Böcklin’s “Island of Death”. All poetic images are condensations and microcosms.

The modernist architecture of the Paimio Sanatorium projects images of hope and healing. Alvar Aalto, Paimio Tuberculosis Sanatorium, Paimio, 1929-33

Experience as exchange

The experience of a place or space is always a curious exchange; as I settle in a space, the space settles in me. I live in a city and the city dwells in me. We are in a constant exchange with our settings; simultaneously we internalized the setting and project our own bodies, or aspects of our body schemes, on the setting. Memory and actuality, perception and dream merge. This secret physical and mental intertwining and identification also takes place in all artistic experience. In Joseph Brodsky’s view every poem tells the reader “Be like me”. Here lies the ethical power of all authentic works of art; we internalized them and integrate them with our very sense of sel. A fine piece of music, poetry or architecture becomes a part of my physical and moral self. The Czech writer Bohumil Hrabail gives a vivid description of this bodily association in the act of reading:

         When I read, I don’t really read; I pop a beautiful sentence in my mouth and such it like a fruit drop or I sip it like a liqueur until the though dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing my brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.20

         Remembering is not only a mental event; it is also an act of embodiment and projection. Memories are not only hidden in the secret electrochemical processes of the brain; they are also stored in our skeletons, muscles and skin. All our sense and organs think and remember.

The embodied memory

I can recall the hundreds of hotel rooms around the world, which I have temporarily inhabited during my five decades of travelling, with their furniture, colour schemes and lighting, because I have invested and left parts of my body and my mind in these anonymous and insignificant rooms. The protagonist of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time reconstructs similarly his very identity and location through his embodied memory:

         My body, still too heavy with sleep to move, would endeavor to construe from the pattern of its tiredness the position of its various limbs, in order to deduce therefrom the direction of the wall, the location of the furniture, to piece together and give a name to the house in which it lay. Its memory, the composite memory of its ribs, its knees, its shoulder-blades, offers it a whole series of rooms in which it had at one time or another slept, while the unseen walls, shifting and adapting themselves to the shape of each successive room that it remembered, whirled it in the dark … my body, would recall from each room in succession the style of the bed, the position of the doors, the angle at which the sunlight came in at the windows, whether there was a passage outside, what I had had in mind when I went to sleep and found there when I awoke.21

         We are again encountering an experience that brings to mind a fragmented Cubist composition. We are taught to think of memory as a cerebral capacity, but the act of memory engages our entire body.