Memory Fragment

Architecture must fully engage the preconscious, conscious, and subconscious.  Architecture must seek to frame experience by engaging one’s sense memory through spatial and material fragments in order to connect space with the layers of consciousness.

This first in the Fragment dialogue series, Memory is about how architects employ objects to imbue meaning into a space.  These objects, or more specifically fragments thereof, are extracted from context through a discussion on field and legibility, so meaning may be ascribed.  This meaning is then interwoven through architectural form to allude to memory events.

Fragment is an episodic publication of Studio Twenty Seven Architecture.  Each issue is dedicated to a singular idea, project, or element associated with the Art of Architecture published to foster future dialogues on architecture.

Click here to purchase from Amazon.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollections,
longer than knowing even wonders.

William Faulkner, Light in August, (1932), pg. 104

Todd Ray, AIA, Principal
Studio Twenty Seven Architecture

Architecture must fully engage the preconscious, conscious, and subconscious. Architecture must seek to frame experience by engaging one’s sense memory through spatial and material fragments in order to connect space with the layers of consciousness.

The first act in the visual study of an object is to extract it from its context. In its abstraction, the object rises to the foreground and loses its full contextual meaning. This initial separation is necessary for the intellectual study of its individual qualities, as its qualities within a field are reestablished during the creative act of reassembly.

This is a method for seeing the difference between a tree (figure) and the forest (field); an object positioned against a field can be identified and critiqued as it relates to a surface or background fabric. The reverse can also occur. This distinction permits each object to first attain unique meanings and then to be subtly changed in order to experiment with new conditions. Each may be changed; each may be dissected. The dissection of the object leads to the discussion of fragments: the legible object may fissure to allow the existence of a fragment; a fragment | field relationship is established.

The legibility of the object occurs when it can be fully distinguished from the background. This is
figure | ground or figure | field identification: analysis of an object or figure set against the space, surface or ground within or upon which it resides. The essence of this method is to visualize patterns and identify differences — the uniqueness within the fabric; the variations in spatial conditions.

1. Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter outline a two-dimensional method of analyzing objects in three dimensional spaces, as a means to differentiate the two. Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge, Ma.: MIT Press, 1978)

A fragment is legible if it can be understood as a comprehensible portion of some greater object. The fragment carries an apportioned meaning from the original object. Fragments can also be legible relative to the balance of an absent volume. Within this condition the fragment is multi-referential; it has gesture reference. The comprehension of a volume, which is distinct in its three dimensional form, is of identifiable material.

Our minds identify element consistency through associative memory. The memory of passage collects the fragments and threads their reappearances into meaning. Much like Ariadne finding her way through the labyrinth, this thread of meaning interprets spatial intent and guides experience. Thus the architect imbues each fragment with referential, sequential, and mnemonic associations the participant can use to understand their place. Though architecture is thought of as material — concrete — it can also be understood as sequential events or cinematic frames of situation. The challenge is to construct a phenomenological essence of space to contend with the political, social and cultural ramifications of our time.

At left, Bernard Tschumi illustrates how a fragment, full of meaning, may redefine the interpretation and ultimately the meaning of the space. Tschumi equates the question of fragment legibility to written language: “The text instead is composed of fragments that relate only loosely to one another. These fragments … are all to be considered not only within the reality of ‘ideas’ but also within the reality of the reader’s spatial experience: a silent reality that cannot be put on paper.” 2 Meaning is thus conveyed through the composition of fragments.

2. Bernard Tschumi, “The Pleasure of Architecture” in Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996) pg. 83

Fragments of architecture (bits of walls, of rooms, of streets, of ideas) are all one actually sees. These fragments are like beginnings with ends. There is always a split between fragment which are real and fragments which are virtual, between experience and concept, memory and fantasy. These splits have no existence other than being the passage from one fragment to another. They are relays rather than signs. They are traces. They are ‘in-between’.

Bernard Tschumi, Questions of Space:
Lectures on Architecture, (1990) pg. 58

Though the first step in identifying an object is to remove it from its context, it is contextualization that defines how an object — or fragment — is to be interpreted. A fragment in isolation is but a word. A fragment within a context becomes a full thought. These thoughts when strung together, create a full perception of meaning. Much like a word is within a sentence, or a frame defines the view of a picture, the spatial context of a fragment determines how the mind creates meaning and references. The meaning of a fragment can, therefore, be modified by its context.

The legibility of architectural fragments is akin to reading. Fragments are distributed through a space as text is on a page. As text is read, thoughts emerge and engage memory and emotion. A writer employs text to set mood, narrate plot and foreshadow future experience.

As with words in text, fragments in architecture alter experience by engaging memory. In the above quote, the subject is fragmented by an imagined – remembered – visual disruption. The act of recollection may be perceived as subtle or as distinct and fully evident. An architectural fragment that references previous or current experiences allows for a new lived interpretation.

Woman Walking Downstairs, Eadweard J. Muybridge, 1887

Fragments are vehicles of allusion. They are referential, referential to the object they are perceived to be a part of, referential to the conditions from which they have sprung. It is the multiplicity of meanings which gives an architectural space richness; the texture of memory.

Pierre von Meiss challenges the designer to contend with degrees of explicit delineation and inversely, the degrees of implicit space. Space may be modulated by varied delineations created by objects or fragments. Fragments define the edges or boundaries limiting spatial perception.

4. Pierre Von Meiss, Elements of Architecture: From Form to Place (London: E. & F.N. Spon, 1998) pg. 101

Architecture is an assembly created from fragments of form, memory, and conditions each gathered from the physical and metaphysical realms of our existence. “Thus a piece of architecture is not ‘architectural’ because … it fulfils some utilitarian function, but because it sets in motion the operations of … the unconscious.” Fragments grasp the subconscious, enriching the mental engagement of the subject to the constructed world.

The arrangement of fragments to achieve the reverberation of memory ambiguity is not limited to the manipulation of form. The process may apply to phenomenal conditions related to a multiplicity of fragment aspects; in lieu of form, it may be a textural reference or a more haptic condition of memory. The light reflection off the glass harkens to water within the Venetian canal when romance warmed the souls of the two lovers. “The architecture of pleasure lies where concept and experience of space abruptly coincide, where architectural fragments collide and merge in delight…” Some memory constructs the architect anticipates; others the architect may only leave to chance and serendipity.

6.Bernard Tschumi, “The Pleasure of Architecture” in Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996) pg. 96

7. ibid. 92