Memory Palaces within the Space of Architectural Production

Abstract

A model of the space of architectural production is proposed where the building is imagined as a memory palace. In this model, building work is understood to be foreshadowed by an imaginary architecture that both predicts the future physical construction to come and is also made superfluous by this construction work as it comes to be. It is argued that these memory palaces of production remain lodged in the minds of the constructors and designers who planned and executed the detail of a construction. After construction, a building’s details act as a physical route through which individual actors might access their personal memory palaces in the space of production.

Keywords:

• memory palace
• drawing
• construction
• BIM
• mnemonic
• imagination

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Emily Keightly and Michael Pickering, The Mnemonic Imagination: Remembering as Creative Process (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

² Francis A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Pimlico, 1992).

³ Ibid., 17–18.

⁴ Ibid., 17–41.

⁵ Ibid., 90.

⁶ Ibid., 50–51.

⁷ Adrian Forty, “Introduction,” in The Art of Forgetting, ed. Adrian Forty and Susanne Küchler (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 3.

⁸ Giovanni di San Gimagnano, “Summa de exemplis ac similitudinibus rerum,” quoted in Yates, The Art of Memory, 96.

⁹ James Burch and Steve Brown, Rotten Timber Palace Fifteen Years Gone [Film] (Bristol: UWE Film Unit, 2015).

¹⁰ David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 201–04.

¹¹ Ibid., 207.

¹² Cabinet Office, Government Construction Strategy (London: TSO, 2012); Richard Garber, BIM Design: Realizing the Potential of Building Information Modelling (Chichester: Wiley, 2014).

¹³ Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 53.

¹⁴ Zofia Rosińska, “Philosophical Psychology of Memory,” in Memory Work: The Theory and Practice of Memory, ed. Andreas Kitzmann, Conny Mithande, and John Sundholm (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2005), 25–43.

¹⁵ Ibid., 31.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Mayer-Schönberger, Delete.

¹⁸ Rosińska, “Philosophical Psychology of Memory,” 42.