dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”16 A fundamental quality of a landscape, house and room is its capacity to evoke and contain a feeling of safety, familiarity and at-homeness and to stimulate fantasies. We are not capable of deep imagination outdoors in wild nature; profound imagination calls for the focusing intimacy of a room. For me the real measure of the quality of a town is whether I can imagine myself falling in love there.

The lived world 

We do not live in an objective world of matter and facts, as commonplace naïve realism tends to assume. The characteristically human mode of existence takes place in the worlds of possibilities, moulded by the human capacity of remembrance, fantasy and imagination. We live in mental worlds, in which the material and the spiritual, as well as the experienced, remembered and imagined, constantly fuse into each other. As a consequence, the lived reality does not follow the rules of space and time as defined and measured by the science of physics. I wish to argue that the lived world is fundamentally “unscientific”, when measured by the criteria of western empirical science. In fact, the lived world is closer to the reality of dream than any scientific description. In order to distinguish the lived space from physical and geometrical space, we can call it existential space. Lived existential space is structured on the basis of meanings, intentions and values reflected upon it by an individual, either consciously or unconsciously; existential space is unique quality interpreted through the memory and experience of the individual. Every lived experience takes place at the interface of recollection and intention, perception and fantasy, memory and desire. T.S. Eliot brings forth the important pairing of opposites in the end of his fourth quarter, “Little Gidding”:

         What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning … We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started. And know the place for the first time.17

         On the other hand, collective groups or even nations, share certain experiences of existential space that constitute their collective identities and sense of togetherness. We are, perhaps, held together by our shared memories more than by an innate sense of solidarity. I wish to recall here the famous sociological study by Maurice Halbwachs that revealed that the ease of mutual communication between old Parisians living within a distinct quarter was grounded in their rich and shared collective memories.

         The lived space is also the object and context of both the making and experiencing of art as well as architecture. Art projects a lived reality, not mere symbolic representations of life. The task of architecture, also, is “to make visible how the world touches us”, as Merleau-Ponty wrote of the paintings of Paul Cézanne.18 We live in the “flesh of the world”, to use a notion of the philosopher, and landscapes and architecture structure and articulate this existential flesh giving it specific horizons and meanings.

         But most forgettable of all were the walls themselves. The stubborn life of these rooms had not let itself be trampled out. It was still there; it clung to the nails that had been left there, it stood on the remaining hand-breadth of flooring, it crouched under the corner joints where there was still a little bit of interior. One could see that it was in the paint which, year by year, had slowly altered: blue into moldy green, green into grey, and yellow into an old, stale rotting white.10

Spatiality and situaionality of memory 

Our recollections are situational and spatialized memories, they are memories attached to places and events. It is hard to recall, for instance, a familiar or iconic photograph as a two-dimensional image on photographic paper; we tend to remember the depicted object, person or event in its full spatial reality. It is obvious, that our existential space is never a two-dimensional pictorial space, it is a lived and multi-sensory space saturated and structured by memories and intentions. We keep projecting meanings and signification to everything we encounter, I have rarely disagreed with the views of Joseph Brodsky, one of my house gods, but when he argues that after having seen touristic buildings, such as Westminster Abbey, the Eiffel Tower, St Basil’s, the Taj Mahal or the Acropolis, “we retain not their three-dimensional image but their printed version”, and concludes that “Strictly speaking, we remember not a place but our postcard of it”.11 I have to disagree with the poet. We do not remember the postcard but the real place pictured in it. A recalled image is always more than the once seen image itself. In my view, Brodsky presents a rushed argument here, perhaps misguided by Susan Sontag’s ideas of the power of the photographed image in her seminal book On Photography.12

         Pictures, objects, fragments, insignificant things, all serve as condensation centres for our memories. Jarkko Laine, the Finnish poet, writes about the role of objects in his memory:

         I like looking at these things. I don’t seek aesthetic pleasure in them … nor do I recall their origins: that is not important. But even so they all arouse memories, real and imagined. A poem is a thing that arouses memories of real and imagined things… The things in the window act like a poem. They are images that do not reflect anything … I sing of the things in the window.13

         The significance of objects in our processes of remembering is the main reason why we like to collect familiar or peculiar objects around us; they expand and reinforce the realm of memories, and eventually, of our very sense of self. Few of the objects we possess are really needed strictly for utilitarian purposes; their function is social and mental. “ I am what is around me”, argues Wallace Stevens, 14 whereas Nöel Arnaud, another poet, claims: “ I am the space, where I am.”15 These condensed formulations by two poets emphasize the intertwining of the world and the self as well as the externalized ground of remembrance and identity.

         A room can also in individualized and taken into one’s possession by turning it into a place of dreaming; the acts of memorizing and dreaming are interrelated. As Bachelard puts it: “The house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the

remember our own childhood largely through the houses and places that we have lived in. We have projected and hidden parts of our lives in lived landscapes and houses, exactly as the orators placed themes of their speeches in the context of imagined buildings. The reflection of places and rooms generates the recall of events and people.

         I was a child of that house, filled with the memory of its smells, filled with the coolness of its hallways, filled with the voices that had given it life. There was even the song of the frogs in the pools; they came to the with me here.

reminisces Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the legendary pilot and writer, after having crash-landed with his plane in a sand desert in North Africa.8

The mental power of fragments 

In his novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke gives a similarly moving record of a distant memory of home and self, arising from fragments of the grandfather’s house in the protagonist’s memory:

         As I recover it in recalling my child-wrought memories, it is no complete building: it is all broke up inside me; here a room, there a room, and here a piece of hallway that does not connect these two rooms but is preserved, as a fragment, by itself. In this way it is all dispersed within me … all that is still in me and will never cease to be in me. It is as though the picture of this house had fallen into me from an infinite height and had shattered against my very ground.9

The remembered image arises gradually, piece by piece, from fragments of memory as a painted Cubist picture emerges from detached visual motifs.

         I have written about my own memories of my grandfather’s humble farm house, and pointed out that the memory house of my early childhood is a collage of fragments, smells, conditions of light, specific feelings of enclosure and intimacy, but rarely precise and complete visual recollections. My eyes have forgotten what they once saw, but my body still remembers.

         Buildings and their remains suggest stories of human fate, both real and imaginary. Ruins stimulate us to think of lives that have already disappeared, and to imagine the fate of their deceased occupants. Ruins and eroded setting have a special evocative and emotional power; they force us to reminisce and imagine. Incompleteness and fragmentation possess a special evocative power. In medieval illustrations and Renaissance paintings architecture settings are often depicted as a mere edge of a wall or a window opening, but the isolated fragment suffices to conjure up the experience of a complete constructed setting. This is the secret of the art of collage but also some architects, such as John Soane and Alvar Aalto have taken advantage of this emotional power of the architectural fragment. Rilke’s description of the images of life lived in a demolished house triggered by the remains and stains left on the end wall of the neighbouring house, is a stunning record of the ways of human memory:

Altogether, environments and buildings do not only serve practical and utilitarian purposes; they also structure our understanding of the world. “[The house] is an instrument with which to confront the cosmos”, as Gaston Bachelard states.3 The abstract and indefinable notion of cosmos is always present and represented in our immediate landscape. Every landscape and every building is a condensed world, a microcosmic representation.

Architecture and memory 

We all remember the way architectural images were utilized as mnemonic devices by the orators of antiquity. Actual architectural structures, as well as mere remembered architectural images and metaphors serve as significant memory devices in three different way: first, they materialize and preserve the course of time and make it visible; second, they concretize remembrance by containing and projecting memories; and, third, they stimulate and inspire us to reminisce and imagine. Memory and fantasy, recollection and imagination are related and they have always a situational and specific content. One who cannot remember can hardly imagine, because memory is the soil of imagination. Memory is also the ground of self-identity; we are what we remember.

         Buildings are storage houses and museums of time and silence. Architectural structures have the capacity of transforming, speeding up, slowing down and halting time. They can also create and protect silence following Kierkegaard’s request: “Create silence!”4 In the view of Max Picard, the philosopher of silence: “Nothing has changed the nature of man so much as the loss of silence.”5 “Silence no longer exists as a world, but only in fragments, as the remains of a world.”6 Architecture has to preserve the memory of the world of silence and to protect the existing fragments of this fundamental ontological state. As we enter a Romanesque monastery we can still experience the benevolent silence of the universe.

         There are, of course, particular building types, such as memorials, tombs and museums that are deliberately conceived and built for the purpose of preserving and evoking memories and specific emotions; buildings can maintain feelings of grief and ecstasy, melancholy and joy, as well as fear and hope. All buildings maintain our perception of temporal duration and depth, and they record and suggest cultural and human narratives. We cannot conceive or remember time as a mere physical dimension; we can only grasp time through its actualizations; the traces, places and events of temporal occurrence. Joseph Brodsky points out another deficiency of human memory as he writes about the composite images of cities in human memory and finds these cities always empty: “[The city of memory] is empty because for an imagination it is easier to conjure architecture than human beings.”7 Is this the inherent reason why we architects tend to think of architecture more in terms of its material existence than the life and human situations that take place in the spaces we have designed?

         Architectural structures facilitate memory; our understanding of the depth of time would be decisively weaker, for instance, without the image of the pyramids in our minds. The mere image of a pyramid marks and concretizes time. We also

2007

Juhani Pallasmaa 

Space, Place, Memory and Imagination: The Temporal Dimension of Existential Space

The time perspective in architecture

Architecture is usually seen in futuristic terms; novel buildings are understood to probe and project an unforeseen reality, and architectural quality is directly associated with its degree of novelty and uniqueness. Modernity at large has been dominated by this futuristic bias. Yet, the appreciation of newness has probably never been as obsessive as in today’s cult of spectacular architectural imagery. In our globalized world, newness is not only an aesthetic and artistic value, it is strategic necessity of the culture of consumption, and consequently, an inseparable ingredient of our surreal materialist culture.

         However, human constructions have also the task to preserve the past, and enable us to experience and grasp the continuum of culture and tradition. We do not only exist in a spatial and material reality, we also inhabit cultural, mental and temporal realities. Our existential and lived reality is a thick, layered and constantly oscillating condition. Architecture is essential an art form of reconciliation and mediation, and in addition to settling us in space and place, landscapes and buildings articulate our experiences of duration and time between the polarities of past and future. In fact, along with the entire corpus of literature and the arts, landscapes and buildings constitute the most important externalization of human memory. We understand and remember who we are through our constructions, both material and mental. We also judge alien and past cultures through the evidence provided by the architectural structures they have produced. Buildings project epic narratives.

         In addition to practical purposes, architectural structures have a significant existential and mental task; they domesticate space for human occupation by turning anonymous, uniform and limitless space into distinct places of human significance, and equally importantly, they make endless time tolerable by giving duration its human measure. As Karsten Harries, the philosopher, argues:

         Architecture helps to replace meaningless reality with a theatrically, or rather architecturally, transformed reality, which draws us in and, as we surrender to it, grants us an illusion of meaning … we cannot live with chaos. Chaos must be transformed into cosmos.1

“Architecture is not only about domesticating space. It is also a deep defence against the terror of time”, he states in another context.2