| Here is an excerpt of my essay, Housing A Collection; Architectural Mnemonics and the Building of Memory, which explores the role of architecture and place in shaping and holding memory. In it I investigate ways in which unheimlich (literally unhomely) memories and feelings are transmitted through depictions of architecture, using two case studies: W.G. Sebald’s book Austerlitz and Gideon Koppel’s film sleep furiously. Introduction All sorts of buildings are monuments — monument: monere: ‘to remind’. Architecture reminds us of events and people. (Robinson: 1999; 887 and Pallasma in Treib: 2009; 19) We remember the room in which we heard significant news, the station platform where we waited, the eaves under which we sheltered from the rain. Building and housing collections of memories was a tool of Classical rhetoric. Orators would memorise a speech by locating reminders of each topic in imaginary buildings — mnemonics would be propped on a mantelpiece or wound around a banister, and collected again as the orators delivered their speeches, walking through the buildings. (This information comes from Frances Yates’s book, The Art of Memory, first published in 1966. Yates: 2001) To a less contrived extent, this is the exercise we all perform when we remember, and it is illustrated in literature and film. In The Remains of the Day the butler remembers Darlington Hall’s pre-war glory from the perspective of its current decline; and Russian Ark’s single, gliding take remembers a different period of history in each room of the Hermitage Museum that is visited. (Ishiguro, K (1989) The Remains of the Day London: Faber and Russian Ark (2002) dir. Alexander Sokurov, Russia) With physical and psychological walls, architecture darkens, heightens and encloses experiences and resulting memories. Memories may be comfortable to a greater or lesser degree, or in more psychological terminology, they may be heimlich or unheimlich. Heimlich derives from the German word for home, heim, thus housing psychology architectural terms. (Vidler: 1992; x) Architecture represses unheimlich memories into dark recesses, and reifies heimlich memories into idealised sites of nostalgia. |
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