Architectural Memory

Definition

Architectural memory is the body of remembered buildings and places through which we perceive new architecture, and the process by which buildings enter, shape, and are reshaped by memory. Goldberger's governing formulation, from Vincent Scully, is that "architecture is a conversation between the generations, carried out across time" — a conversation it is impossible to tune out because architecture is omnipresent. Architectural memory is at once personal (Goldberger's own recollections of Passaic and Nutley, New Jersey, and his epiphany before James Gamble Rogers's Gothic and Georgian buildings at Yale) and shared. Shared architectural memory is formed not only by direct experience but by painting (Monet's Rouen Cathedral, Hopper, Wyeth's Christina's World), photography (Julius Shulman's Case Study House #22, Bourke-White on the Chrysler Building), film and television (the establishing shot; North by Northwest; The Fountainhead), and literature (Wharton's The Age of Innocence, James's Washington Square, Sebald's Austerlitz, Lurie's The Nowhere City). Goldberger's warning is that "the familiar has a pernicious power; it can render glory banal" — familiarity breeds indifference, and even magnificent sights (a train running down Passaic's Main Avenue) go unnoticed.

Key Thinkers

• Paul Goldberger — the personal and shared registers of architectural memory.
• Vincent Scully — "architecture is a conversation between the generations"; perception as associative and empathetic. (PAGE NEEDED — see log.)
• Edith Wharton — architecture as destiny in fiction; the "ever continuing" architectural context of The Age of Innocence.
• W. G. Sebald — Austerlitz as a novel organised around architectural memory. (PAGE NEEDED — see log.)
• Alison Lurie — The Nowhere City: architectural memory as the index of a marriage's divergence. (PAGE NEEDED — see log.)

Related Concepts

• memory — the general concept the architectural register specifies.
• place-identity — memory as a constituent of the identity of places.
• sense-of-place — the quality memory helps confer and can erode.
• material-memory — memory carried in the material fabric of buildings.
• site-of-memory — the deliberate institutionalisation of collective memory in place.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• source-notes/goldberger-2009-why-architecture-matters — ch. 5 (pp. 108–130) is the book's treatment of architectural memory across personal, filmic, photographic, and literary registers.

Open Questions

• If architectural memory is largely second-hand — formed by images and novels rather than buildings — is the experience of architecture still distinctively architectural?
• Does digital image saturation accelerate the familiarity that renders glory banal, or renew memory by circulating it more widely?