voussoirs: THE ARCHITECTURE OF MEMORY

Tuesday, 7 April 2026

THE ARCHITECTURE OF MEMORY

The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk was published in Turkish on August 29, 2008, with the English translation released in 2010. The novel is set in Istanbul between 1975 and the early 2000s, chronicling the love story of Kemal and Füsun. The physical museum, based on the book, opened in Istanbul in 2012.

Orhan Pamuk.

Füsun and Kemal.

The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk, (published by Faber and Faber, 2010, with the series released by Netflix February 2026), is really architectural writing presented as a cliché – a nostalgic, passionate, love fixation, so sentimental as to be predictable and almost, at times, embarrassingly laughable with its dreamy, corny, melodramatic “Oh darling” affectionate ideals: such are its stereotypical banalities; its commonplace platitudes; its structured, seemingly artificially exaggerated circumstances that seek to heighten the dramatic effect with a mocking intensity; yet there is substance lingering here in spite of this tired, tried, worn, cutely quaint, saccharine familiarity.

One has to remember that Orhan Pamuk started his studies in architecture:

Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk studied architecture at Istanbul Technical University for three years in the mid-1970s. However, he did not complete the degree and dropped out to pursue a career as a writer, later graduating from the Institute of Journalism at the University of Istanbul.

The book/film series might be a schmaltzy, gooey love story with all of the expected hackneyed situations, phrases, desires, and tensions that such 'Mills and Boon' plots seem to require, but at its core is an architectural theme: the concept of our meaningful relationship to things manifested in experience and memory; how - perhaps a little like souvenirs but with more essential substance rather than any trite ‘I’ve been there’ hallmark - things stimulate and embalm rich and complex memories for one to savour in time, and time again: in this case the nagging, unrelenting bliss of love. In some ways it is unfortunate that this context has been used to embody the concept, but it works by making its point powerfully in spite of the standard, love-struck formula and the hype of its emotions; maybe because of it, for each of us knows a little of some aspect of these extreme and memorable feelings that enable us to relate to the idea, to engage with it; to be it/with it in spite of the fictional fabric/fabrication.

The story involves a handsome, infatuated male, Kemal, who is constantly longing for his beautiful young lover, Füsun, while, at the same time, finding himself struggling through the commitments of engagement celebrations and their family and social expectations, with his betrothed who is a beautiful society woman from a cultured, respected family. The lover, a distant relative through family marriage, comes from a lesser social strata; but, of course, this means nothing, and changes nothing for the smitten suitor, in spite of oft repeated, testing humiliations, warnings, threats, and rebuttals. The commonplace ideal that love is blind and careless, but finally conquers, provides the tension in the tale.

Throughout the book/series, (Netflix), the sad lover repeatedly pockets things to do with Füsun to keep them as props for memory, a collection for recollection, perhaps sensing some future loss, with this yearning experience being indulged in the movie by cuts to fading re-enactments and with explanations in scripted pieces to camera. The finale of the stereotypical plot will not be disclosed here, (no spoilers), other than to note that it completes the story with the cliché structure of the plot that it started with.

In this drama, the ‘architect’ comes to the fore in the real world by actually creating a museum to hold these envisaged memories in the writing, in a display of items and props that reference the story, its strained emotional struggles and its dramatic turns. The many smaller specialist museums in Paris were the stimulus, the inspiration for this unusual idea: yes, the museum is real, an actual reference to a fantasy, an imaginative plot – see https://www.masumiyetmuzesi.org/en. This is an architectural perception/gesture structured to reveal the experience of the relationship that is explored in the novel, in a novel way. It is a remarkable challenge, touching on qualities both unusual and bizarre, where the contextual reality of actual things is constructed out of a plotted narrative in order to recreate the emotive visions of this fiction through this array of related objects, real bits and pieces – the museum exhibits.

Cigarette butts.

Cuneiform script - a different message.

The experiment works. The movie shows various displays in this museum in Istanbul from time to time throughout the series, as the pieces arise in the scripted sequence that finally includes a cameo reference to the author who has a small role as Kemal’s appointed recorder of the story in a clever post-modern touch.

Orhan Pamuk.

The Museum of Innocence (Masumiyet Müzesi) is located in the Çukurcuma neighbourhood of the Beyoğlu district in Istanbul, Turkey. Established by Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, it is housed in a 19th-century wooden house at Çukurcuma Caddesi, Dalgıç Çıkmazı 2, near Taksim and Galata.

Address: Firuzağa Mah., Çukurcuma Caddesi, Dalgıç Çıkmazı No: 2, 34425 Istanbul.

Hours: Open Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM (Thursday until 9:00 PM).

Access: It is within walking distance from Taksim Square (12 min) and the Istanbul Modern (10 min).

Special Offer: Visitors with a copy of the book (containing a ticket on the last pages) can get it stamped for entry.

The cynic might ask if this is all a ploy to market the book, but the concept seems stronger than a mere promotional stunt even if it does improve the sales by having the readers collect their own memorabilia in the stamp on the page to continue the author's theme.

The ticket printed in the closing pages of Orhan Pamuk's novel The Museum of Innocence can be stamped at the ticket office in exchange for an invitation to the museum.

If one is unable to visit the museum, sites online allow one to explore the displays and involve oneself in the concept that lies at the core of the novel/movie – see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-J0dgU86js. It seems that Orhan Pamuk has never lost his love of architecture. His exploration of Istanbul in the book of this title – Istanbul: Memories and the City – reveals the experience of living in this city, and highlights his interest in architecture as a shared, memorable intimacy. In The Museum of Innocence, a similar idea is developed using smaller things.

Orhan Pamuk's memoir, ‘Istanbul: Memories and the City,’ was first published in Turkish in 2003 under the title İstanbul: Hatıralar ve Şehir. The English edition, translated by Maureen Freely, was published in 2005 by Faber and Faber and subsequently in 2006 by Vintage.

One might assume that, for this sensitive spirit, architectural training might have been just too fashionably diagrammatic, dogmatic, and directed by stylistic preferences that offended this delicate receptiveness. Journalism allowed Pamuk to involve himself in lived experience and stories that, it appears, he sensed held more meaning than stylised, bespoke displays that reference the designer's intellectual brilliance. Here, in the early 1970’s, one thinks of Robert Venturi and Charles Moore and the growth of Post-Modernism: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 1966, and The Place of Houses, 1974. Attention was being given to more general theoretical matters that ignored the intimate experience of the users.

In The Museum of Innocence, Pamuk, 'Mr. Orhan,' has structured an emotional fantasy in which to explore his interests that seem to see architecture and the tiny bits and pieces of a lived life, with their innocence and lack of pretension, as a vital part of living a rich and meaningful existence. The position stands in stark contrast to Modernism and its subsequent 'isms' that concentrate of the purity of style, the rigour of theory, and stark, bespoke, singular appearances that declare the particular designer’s skill/genius.

One can compare Pamuk’s approach to Peter Read's study of Returning to Nothing: The Meaning of Lost Places (Cambridge University press, 1996), that similarly explores the relationship between experience and ordinary things and places, and their remembered intimacies, where people's lives and connections to place are involved in meaning experienced as memory - in this case, real, feeling, unpretentious people with ordinary, everyday, non-fictional lives.

It is an aspect of architecture that has been forgotten. It has taken a writer who walked away from the formal architectural training to expose the core necessity in things and their ties to experience and memory that hold meaning - which is all we really have: the stories of the lived experience of architecture and its bits and pieces that we are all involved with. Peter Read does for place what Orhan Pamuk does for the little things in life, revealing how sundry incidental belongings structure and hold the substance of experience linked to these intimacies through memory and recollection that fabricate our very selves, our being. One comes to understand how things and places become infused with a complexity, a depth that is truly life enhancing.

This is not the object declaring its special bespoke surprises for the viewer to admire its new, desired, different brilliance presented for acclimation in publication. Here the thing is the catalyst, the prompt to link memories and revive experience as a rich, sustaining relationship, an aspect of architecture that involves things personal and meaningful, life and its living enhancement, rather than having designs seen as stark objects to highlight and praise the skill of the architect as a branding: ‘I live in a Wright house.’ Here, in Pamuk’s world, meaning lies in the object's relevance and participation in a lived occasion, not in its bespoke style or provenance.

Architecture is a framework for relationships and occasions, but has come to be seen as artful art, with the users understood as pawns, perhaps to decorate the photographs that have all been specially framed to achieve the preferred reading, maybe with a blurred dog or two. Appearance is all that matters, turning observers into approving, amazed spectators, viewing things promoted to be admired alone, as isolated gems that demand changes in lives. The architect is seen to be educating the ignorant masses. One thinks of Mrs. Kaufmann here, who hated Falling Water – a position seen as an inexplicable outrage to the ‘purist’: refer https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2017/12/a-fallingwater-myth-wright-way.html - but why?

‘Mr Orhan,’ as Pamuk is called in the series, knows the difference in the ways that things are seen. Read the book and/or watch the episodes on Netflix, and then visit the museum and understand the matters involved here; experience their mode of operation - such are the elusive subtleties of things emotional, of fine, fragile feelings; and remember this in architecture, its place and detail as architecture, rather than design being merely the ideal of the slick, published image, the grand, ‘look-at-me’ morphed appearance which is worshipped today. We need to heed this change in attention that Pamuk is touching on. It is a sensitivity that modifies our contentment, creating a resonance in memory rather than a surprising, demanding 'look at me' envy with its challenge to forget the past and stride on into the new difference, indifferently – smugly: “Look at me in/with the new . . . ” - (Like the experience today when one expressed concern to the driver of the Range Rover who had parked carelessly close to our car - “Don’t worry; my car is worth more than yours!” ). It’s the “I owe a Hockney!” self-important approach to life.

We need to embrace ordinary innocence, and enliven and respect its potential 'nothingness' that can allude to so much, hold meaning in real depth, not merely present the shallow, grand singularity of the spectacular 'WOW NOW' appearance that only sends one seeking for more - better, bigger, smarter - clouding the reverie that anchors contentment with the repeated disturbance of the turbulence of things bespoke and startlingly different.

Gehry.

Hadid.

To gain some insight into this subject, one might reconsider the now ignored publications such as Steen Eiler Rasmussen’s Experiencing Architecture (MIT Press, 1964), and Trystan Edwards Good and Bad Manners in Architecture (Tiranti, 1946), those ‘old fashioned’ texts that get discarded from libraries to make space for the new coffee table publications and slick monographs. There is much to reconsider here: how architecture, in all of its parts and associated pieces, is the potential framework and fabric of intimate meaning. It needs to be considered as this, not as some remarkable spectacle or arty invention created by a master/maestro or AI. Pamuk’s proposition establishes a new ambition for architecture demanding a different, caring intent. Architecture becomes a memory box that, in Pamuk’s case, has become a museum, with the house being a part of the whole as well.

One could see this collection as something similar to Russel’s Crowe’s little museum of props and costumes that he set up in Nymbodia, (a small settlement in New South Wales, Australia), in order to show visitors the real objects and clothing used for the various films Crowe has acted in, (with the drawcard being The Gladiator), but Pamuk manages to avoid his display becoming a mere curiosity shop. His proposition lingers with its relationships and, ironically, gives the story some substance, a strange reality that anchors everything in place, weirdly confirming the fiction.

The museum highlights another aspect of display: that, by the act of mounting and categorisation, the exhibits are given a standing far beyond anything that might exist in the everyday world; consider the cigarette butts. The museum context declares that these items are special and need to be seen differently. Art galleries have the very same impacts on the works displayed too. This authority gained by the item being exhibited in a unique place does beg the question: is the intensity of the emotional relationship between experienced object and memory artificially enhanced by the presentation in the museum environment? Is Pamuk recreating his fiction architecturally? Maybe, but the point is made: there is a rich and subtle relationship between things and people that current architectural fashions ignore.

NOTE:

One does not need a soppy love story to communicate the subtlety being referenced here. To get an understanding of what Pamuk is writing about and illustrating in the museum through another context, consider something more topical - Israel’s military edict for southern Lebanon to be evacuated#: https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/03/05/israeli-military-calls-for-evacuating-southern-lebanon

What does one do? What does one take? What is left behind to be destroyed? Where does one go? The direction and its intent seems simple, direct, and clear, but what complexities of life remain to be bombed? What memories are lost? What sentiments can be salvaged? Consider the emotions that are induced with the sudden, enforced loss of place and its everyday bits and pieces.

NOTE:

Translation

The title of the book and the museum is somewhat puzzling. The translation is innocence as the overview explains, but how does this fit the context? It seems as though one has to pick and choose a context - naive or guiltless; both? Might the reference be to the emotions of everyday unpretentiousness?

"Masumiyet" in English means innocence. It refers to the state of being free from guilt, sin, or moral wrong, and can also imply purity or naivety.

Common Uses & Contexts:

Innocence (General): The direct translation.
Presumption of innocence: In legal contexts, masumiyet karinesi refers to the presumption of innocence.
The Museum of Innocence: Masumiyet Müzesi is a famous novel by Orhan Pamuk and a museum in Istanbul.
Innocence (TV Series): Masumiyet is also the title of a 2021 Turkish psychological thriller.
Other translations: Depending on the context, it can also mean purity or guiltlessness.

The complexity of the reference is made more clear in the definition:

innocence

/ˈɪnəsn(t)s/

Innocence is the state of being free from moral wrong, sin, guilt, or legal culpability, often implying a lack of worldliness, cunning, or corruption. It signifies purity, naivety, or being unacquainted with evil, commonly associated with youth or a lack of experience. Synonyms include purity, sinlessness, artlessness, ingenuousness, and guiltlessness.

Usage Examples:

Legal: "The defendant maintained his innocence throughout the trial".
Naivety: "She has the charming innocence of a child".
Ignorance of harm: "In my innocence, I assumed the deal was legitimate".
Moral purity: “The poet wrote of lost innocence.”

Key Synonyms and Related Concepts:

Purity/Sinlessness: Moral cleanliness.
Artlessness/Naivety: Lack of guile or worldly knowledge.
Guiltlessness: Absence of legal wrongdoing.
Naturalness: Simplicity.

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ON GARDENING

I am strongly of the opinion that the possession of a quantity of plants, however good the plants may be themselves and however ample their number, does not make a garden; it only makes a collection. Having got the plants, the great thing is to use them with careful selection and definite intention. Merely having them, or having them planted unassorted in garden spaces, is only like having a box of paints from the best colourman, or, to go one step further, it is like having portions of these paints set out upon a palette. This does not constitute a picture; and it seems to me that the duty we owe our gardens and to our own bettering in our gardens is so to use plants that they shall form beautiful pictures; that, while delighting our eyes, they should be always training those eyes to a more exulted criticism; to a state of mind and artistic conscience that will not tolerate bad or careless combination or any sort of misuse of plants, but in which it becomes a point of honour to be always striving for the best. Gertrude Jekyll Colour in the Flower Garden Mitchell Beazley London 1998 – Introduction (first published 1908)

MORE IS LESS

Significantly, in the era of the ‘information revolution’, the same process is now affecting disinformation: whereas in the past it was lack of information and censorship which characterized the denial of democracy by the totalitarian state, the opposite is now the case. Disinformation is achieved by flooding TV viewers with information, with apparently contradictory data. The truth of the facts is censured by over-information, as we have seen from the press and television discussing the Balkans. The globalitarian state, built out of economic-strategic alliances, is no longer old ‘Anastasia’ with her scissors: it is Babel. Now more is less. And in some cases, less than nothing. Deliberate manipulation and unintentional accidents have become indistinguishable.

Paul Virilio Strategy of Deception Verso 2007 p.48

(first published Editions Galilee 1999)

‘That which precedes the event is not necessarily its cause,’ claims the wisdom of the ancients. p.76

As Negroponte has rightly remarked, with the ‘liberation of information’ on the Web, what is most lacking is meaning or, in other words, a context into which Internet users could put the facts and hence distinguish truth from falsehood. On the Web, where, as everyone knows, the terrorist temptation is constant and where depredations of hackers are committed with impunity in a strange state of legal indeterminacy, the difference between (true) information and (false) deception fades a little more each day. In entering the looking-glass worlds of television and home computers, we are in the end left in the position of Kinglake’s old ‘English soldiery’. As they saw it,

insofar as the battlefield presented itself to the bare eyesight of men, it had no entirety, no length, no breadth, no size, no shape and was made up of nothing . . . In such conditions, each separate gathering . . . went on fighting its own little battle in happy and advantageous ignorance of the general state of the action; nay, even very often in ignorance of the fact that any great conflict was raging.

As Albert Camus asserted: ‘When we are all guilty, that will be true democracy.’ p.78

ENCOUNTERING CONRAD

Ryszard Kapuściński The Other Verso London 2018, p. 92

At the end of his book, Kapuściński asks whether, in our encounters with others in the future:

Will we jointly wish to refer to what – as Conrad puts it - ‘speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation – and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts: to the solidarity of dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity – the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.’?*

* J. Conrad, Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’: A Tale of the Sea, New York: W.W.Norton, 1979.

Architecture stands in between of all of these circumstances of encounter, but how does it explain itself beyond being a bespoke ‘grand design’ of a potential genius?

ON THE CULTURE OF OTHERS

Herodotus . . . wanted to know them because he understood that to know ourselves we have to know Others, who act as a mirror in which we see ourselves reflected; he knew that to understand ourselves better we have to understand Others, to compare ourselves with them, to measure ourselves against them. As a citizen of the world, he did not believe that we should isolate ourselves from Others, or slam the gates in their faces. Xenophobia, Herodotus implied, is a sickness of people who are scared, suffering an inferiority complex, terrified by the prospect of seeing themselves in the mirror of the culture of Others.

Ryszard Kapuściński The Other Verso London 2018, p. 19

CLEVER PEOPLE SELF-DOUBT

I last met him when Philomena came out back in 2013. Back then, Coogan was a bracing, combative interviewee. He saw every question as a potential ambush and moved to thwart any perceived journalistic angle. Today, though, he seems more comfortable with the process, more at ease with himself. It used to be that he felt he always had to have his guard up. Now he accepts that he can sometimes afford to let it drop. He’s middle aged and a mass of insecurity and contradictions. He suspects that, on balance, that’s not such a terrible thing to be.

“And actually I think acknowledging your own fallibility makes you a better artist and a better person,” he says in a rush. “It’s fairly obvious to me that the real wisdom lies in seeing people’s failings and trying to understand them. Because the alternative is that very childlike, Donald Trump thing of believing that admitting any weakness is fatal. What was it Bukowski said? All the clever people are full of self-doubt and all the stupid people are very confident. That’s the era we’re living in now. That’s the era I don’t want to be a part of. So all you can do is try to go about things differently. Do interesting work and don’t be a cunt.”

Coogan gulps for breath. His eyes widen and then he rocks with laughter. “There you go, that’s my big artistic statement,” he says. “Do interesting work and don’t be a cunt. Took me the best part of an hour. Got there in the end.”

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/jan/04/steve-coogan-interview-stan-and-ollie

HILLS

The hills bespeak a healing power and closeness to unseen help now lost in the security of modern welfare. Those who befriend the silent peaks in a lifetime's work know well their embracing strength. (p.91)

For only once is it given to man to lie in the arms of the eternal forces which give all matter form. (p.98)

Iain R Thomson Isolation Shepherd Birlinn, Edinburgh, 2007

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.

My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth.

Psalm 121 King James Version (KJV)

SPAN

17 August 2012

This blog began as a co-operative concept. While the idea and the stimulus was generated through discussion, the blog has turned out to be an individual enterprise. SPAN stands for ‘Spence and’ in the context of others. As a word, it fitted in nicely with the idea of voussoirs - parts and pieces, complete with keystones, that could ‘span’ the gaps in understanding and communication. The word SPAN also allowed for a shared input into a blog.

Spence Jamieson is an architect and the author of these articles. The blogs show the scope of his interests.

THE IDEA

chapters and verses as architectural commentary:

the wedge to isolate, array and shape ideas; the keystone to highlight core, supporting issues. voussoirs is a concept to start an architectural discussion to span the large gap in the debate on things architectural; a bridging of the void in architectural issues by exploring considered bits and pieces. The state of the profession today is highlighted by silence and self. It is introvert and protective. Educational centres remain isolated within their own constructs, being run primarily as businesses. They put very little back into the community. They indulge themselves in their own interests and exclude contrary and different ideas and ideals. They constantly avoid any challenge on concepts or strategies that might change the plotted course. Rarely does comment ever come from this academic world into the public or any arena. Very few publications help direct the public interest. Rarely do newspapers grasp the issues and explore them. One aspect may be given space in the popular press, but architectural debates and concerns are rarely given attention. The professional institutes are doing much the same as the educational institutions. Private practice is doing likewise, offering, if anything, only its own pushy propaganda to the public. Yet there is a discussion and debate in these silences that needs a larger and more open platform. Discussion is alive and well amongst a few in at least one curry house, but the debate needs to be a broadened. voussoirs is the place for this discussion. It is a site for ideas, comment, articles, and critiques on things architectural and associated issues. It is here that matters can be aired and ideas discussed and debated without fear of the neglect and disdain that institutions and private groups and publishers give to open speaking and differing ideas.

There can be no true understanding of any idea if discussion and debate are curtailed in favour of a preferred position.

ON COMMUNICATION

. . . there has been a growing feeling of concern to solve what is now commonly called “the problem of communication.” But if one observes efforts to solve this problem, he will notice that different groups who are trying to do this are not actually able to listen to each other. As a result, the very attempt to improve communication leads frequently to yet more confusion, and the consequent sense of frustration inclines people ever further toward aggression and violence, rather than toward mutual understanding and trust.

David Bohm On Dialogue Routledge, Oxon, 1996 (2004) p.2

ON ART & METHOD

Even in relationships with inanimate objects and with nature in general, something very like communication is involved. Consider, for example, the work of an artist. Can it be properly said that the artist is expressing himself, i.e., literally “pushing outward” something that is already formed inside him? Such a description is not in fact generally accurate or adequate. Rather, what usually happens is that the first thing the artist does is only similar in certain ways to what he may have in mind. As in a conversation between two people, he sees the similarity and the difference, and from this perception something further emerges in his next action. Thus, something new is continually created that is common to the artist and the material on which he is working.

David Bohm On Dialogue Routledge, Oxon, 1996 (2004) p.4

THE NECESSITY OF THE INCOMPLETE

The early 50's and 60's is a period that is gaining interest in architectural ideas. Perhaps this is why Princeton chose to republish The Tao of Architecture. It is a beautiful little book that discusses the implications of traditional wisdom in architecture. Given the astonishing lack of direction in current architectural theory, the publication is very timely.

Amos Ih Tiao Chang, The Tao of Architecture, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1956, reprinted 2017.

p.26

Laotzu's idea of formation is heavily concerned with emptiness or non-existence. To him who regards nothing as persistent, what is essentially important in things is the possibility of becoming something, not the opportunity of remaining as something confronting deterioration. Consequently, meaningful incompletion is taken as the most desirable state of tangible being.

p.22

. . . the full meaning of existence is beyond the power of any manifestation. What appears tangible, architectural or natural, is only a means to suggest that which is lacking in appearance and existing in man's intangible understanding and aesthetic feeling.

LIVING IN IMPERMANENCE

Maybe it is a good thing for us to keep a few dreams of a house that we shall live in later, always later, so much later, in fact, that we shall not have time to achieve it. For a house that was final, one that stood in symmetrical relation to the house we were born in, would lead to thoughts – serious, sad thoughts – and not to dreams. It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.

Gaston Bachelard The Poetics of Space

see: THE NECESSITY OF THE INCOMPLETE in the sidebar

THE REAL AND THE IMAGINARY

I prefer, by far, real islands to imaginary islands, just as I prefer prime documents to novelistic remakes. That's because the real is richer than the imagination. The real demands investigation and is an invitation to sensitive knowledge, whereas the imaginary is more often than not just a collection of stereotypes, a soup of clichés offering an infantile kind of satisfaction. Then, a relationship to the real and its resistance requires changes in thought, in ways of being, in ways of saying, it leads to a transformation of the self. Whereas imagination is nothing but compensation. There's even something horribly autistic about sitting in one spot and spinning out invention by the yard. How much more interesting an open and poetic process involving contemplation, study, movement, meditation and composition.

Kenneth White Across The Territories Travels from Orkney to Rangiroa Polygon Edinburgh 2004 p.86

VISION, CIVILIZATION & SPIRIT

The architect who combines in his being the powers of vision, of imagination, of intellect, of sympathy with human need and the power to interpret them in a language vernacular and time - - - is he who shall create poems in stone.

When you look on one of your contemporary 'good copies' of historical remains, ask yourself the question: Not what style, but what civilization is this building? And the absurdity, vulgarity, anachronism and solecism of the modern structure will be revealed to you in a most startling fashion.

It cannot for a moment be doubted that an art work to be alive, to awaken us to life, to inspire us sooner or later with its purpose, must indeed be animate with a soul, must have been breathed upon by the spirit and must breathe in turn that spirit.

Louis Sullivan

AN UNCHANGING PROFESSION

ARCHITECTURAL PRACTICE

. . . no one can relieve (the architect) from the need to rely on his own discretion, for that discretion is linked to a responsibility which belongs to no one but (the architect). It is the exercise of discretion hampered by considerations of cost, of risk, of exact justice, of conflicting interests, of uncertainty as to facts, of misunderstandings and of diverse individualities and dishonest or incapable agents, which is the chief care and preoccupation of architectural practice. To design a building, to draw and specify every part of it, and to direct its construction and see it completed with no other anxieties and dilemmas than belong to the exercise of those duties, is unknown.

H.B.Creswell The Honeywood Settlement Faber and Faber Limited London 1967 (fourth edition: first edition 1930 Architectural Press) p.128

MENDING WALL

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Robert Frost

CATHEDRALS and SYMBOLISM

Everything is the symbolical representation of an idea. p.28

The same artists, who had to follow a strict rule when treating the history of God, could use all of their imagination when treating the ornamental: whence the blossoming of the grotesque and the original. p.38

In those days religion, drama, and art had the same aim and sought to provoke the same thoughts. They did not pretend to amuse the people; they endeavoured to teach them. p.51

This way of thinking and reasoning takes sometimes a very subtle turn. p.53

Hélène Fouré The French Cathedrals Their Symbolic Significance Bruce Humphries Inc. Publishers, Boston, 1931

THE COMPLIMENT & THE CRITIC 2

ON DEMOLISHING BUILDINGS

Nothing appears to me much more wonderful, than the remorseless way in which the educated ignorance, even of the present day, will sweep away an ancient monument, if its preservation be not absolutely consistent with immediate convenience or economy. Putting aside all antiquarian considerations, and all artistical ones, I wish that people would only consider the steps, and the weight of the following very simple argument. You allow that it is wrong to waste time, that is, your own time; but then it must be still more wrong to waste other people’s; for you have some right to your own time, but none to their’s. Well, then, if it is thus wrong to waste the time of the living, it must be still more wrong to waste the time of the dead; for the living can redeem their time, the dead cannot. But you waste the best of the time of the dead when you destroy the works they have left you; for those works they gave the best of their time, intending them for immortality.

John Ruskin Lectures on Architecture George Routledge & Sons Limited, London p.109

THE COMPLIMENT & THE CRITIC 1

How to avoid insult

But how much of nature have you in your Greek buildings? I will show you, taking for an example the best you have lately built; and, in doing so, I trust that nothing that I say will be thought to have any personal purpose, and that the architect of the building in question will forgive me; for it is just because it is a good example of the style that I think it more fair to use it for an example. If the building were a bad one of the kind, it would not be a fair instance; and I hope, therefore, that in speaking of the institution on the mound, just in progress, I shall be understood as meaning rather a compliment to its architect than otherwise. It is not his fault that we force him to build in the Greek manner.

John Ruskin Lectures on Architecture and Painting George Routledge & Sons Limited; New York: F.P.Dutton & CO - p.64-65

ON EDUCATION

'. . those who are responsible for giving instruction in the theory of architecture should be practising architects. The warning is necessary because, strange though it may seem, English schools of architecture to-day tend to be run by men who either do not practise at all, or whose practices are for them a very subsidiary spare-time occupation. Often a teaching appointment is a means by which a clever student avoids the humiliation of entering an office as a junior assistant, thus depriving himself of the only opportunity he will ever have of learning something of the practical side of his profession from the bottom upwards. There can be no doubt whatever that the teaching of theory has suffered severely as a result of this habit: and this leads me to the conclusion that no man should be permitted to teach until he is recognized by his Faculty as a Master of Theory and Practice. In other words, he should be not only a practising architect but also, what is unfortunately a much rarer specimen, a good architect.'

W.A. Eden, The Process of Architectural Tradition, Macmillian & Co. Ltd, London, 1942, p.p. 86-87

ETHICS

Thus Pugin laid the foundation stones of that strange system which dominates the nineteenth-century art criticism and is immortalised in the Seven Lamps of Architecture: the value of a building depends on the moral worth of its creator; and a building has a moral value independent of, and more important than, its esthetic value. We must not consider this emphasis on morality peculiarly Victorian. Whenever esthetic standards are lost, ethical standards rush in to fill the vacuum; for the interest in esthetics dwindles and vanishes, but the interest in ethics is eternal.

Kenneth Clark The Gothic Revival - An Essay in the History of Taste, (1^st edition Constable 1928); third edition John Murray 1962, reprinted 1974, p.149.

MODERNITY

The everyday is covered by a surface: that of modernity. News stories and the turbulent affectations of art, fashion, and event veil without ever eradicating the everyday blahs. Images, the cinema and television divert the everyday by at times offering up to its own spectacle, or sometimes the spectacle of the distinctly noneveryday; violence, death, catastrophe, the lives of kings and stars – those who we are led to believe defy everydayness. Modernity and everydayness constitute a deep structure that a critical analysis can work to uncover.

Henri Lefebvre, The Everyday and Everydayness, in Stephen Harris and Deborah Berke, Architecture of the Everyday, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1997, p.37.

NAMING

The simplest act of substitution is to put the name of a maker in the place of his or her work, which amounts to a paraphrase in itself. . . . All paraphrase sets aside the original: To put the name in place of the painting is to remove it from immediate consciousness; to narrate the life of an individual is an act profoundly different from looking into a painting and one that cannot be conducted simultaneously with it. To substitute a temporal narrative, already present in a name, for the physical work of art is to give up those features of the thing that were transient and unrepeatable, bound to a moment that is irrevocably ended; the unique insistence is, for the moment at least, sacrificed on the altar of continuity.

Thomas Crow, The Intelligence of Art, The University of North Carolina Press, 1999, p.1.

ON BRANDING

Branding is now the art of getting people to think what something might be rather than what it necessarily is. It's about the manipulation of the virtual reality in which so many live. The manipulators include anyone with an interest in what we might think of them - not just big companies with products to sell but political parties with votes to win, design gurus with clients to attract - anyone, in other words, acting in some kind of market. They all have an interest in controlling their appearance to make us believe it is the reality.

John Humphrys Beyond Words How Language Reveals The Way We Live Now Hodder and Stoughton. Great Britain 2006, p. 86-87

see:

http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/faking-provenance-misuse-of-meaning.html

PRECONCEPTION

Leone Huntsman Sand in Our Souls The Beach in Australian History Melbourne University Press 2001, p.16:

Thus first impressions were filtered through existing preconceptions, starkly revealed in Sir Joseph Banks's description of the people seen from Captain James Cook's Endeavour when it first touched on the Australian continent in 1770:

In the morn we . . . [discerned] 5 people who appeared through our glasses to be enormously black: so far did the prejudices which we had built on Dampier's account influence us that we fancied we could see their Colour when we could scarce distinguish whether or not they were men.

Here Banks refers to William Dampier's unfavourable accounts of the West Australian aboriginal people in published accounts of his landings in 1688 and 1699, and reveals his own awareness of the extent to which perception was influenced by expectation.

see: http://voussoirs.blogspot.com.au/2014/04/seeing-what-we-believe-idyllic-visions.html

THE MUSE - GETTING IT RIGHT

"It can be in the morning, any old time, I wake up with an idea and it starts following you around.

"You go, 'Ah that's good' because you know when it's going to work, it's going to be fruitful.

"Other times you'll get the edge of an idea and maybe it fades away or there's just no way it can be made to serve, you know?

"Then you just, it takes its time and you work on it and if necessary you work on it more than once. I'm known to work on it two or three times before you get it right."

Les Murray

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-02/les-murray-latest-volume-reflects-on-bunyah/6816714

http://www.lesmurray.org/

JARGON

The world seems to find it necessary to use more and more jargon in general reporting and conversation. It is especially noticed in accounts and discussions on the arts. The ABC TV arts programme presented on 7 January 2017 at 6:15pm had more jargon than usual; indeed, had more unusual expressions than previously encountered, ones that had not been heard before:

"unpicking the tapestry" of one's life;

and

looking at "the fan deck of what you do."

These reminded one of other popular fashionable expressions:

“to unpack an issue,” meaning to analyse it in some detail;

and

“to segue,” meaning to shift to a new topic or activity.

This last term is a favourite of radio announcers. The Italian word is often misspelt as ‘segway’ because of the similar phonetic sounding that is more commonly understood as Segway, the brand of a human transporter.

The parallel is interesting, as the idea of being ‘transported’ is common to both words, but it seems to hold little interest to the radio voices that appear just too cleverly happy with the use of this different, interesting expression.

Tuesday, 7 April 2026

THE ARCHITECTURE OF MEMORY

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