Memory ‘We may live without her [architecture], and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her. J. Ruskin, 1849, chapter VI, §IT [And for a long time we have been speaking not of history, but of memory. G. C. Argan, 1979, 37 «ain the city, memory begins where history ends, P, Eisenman, introduction to Rossi, 1982, 11 ‘The creation of buildings for commemoration is one— df the oldest purposes of architecture. The expectation that works of architecture can prolong Collective social memory of persons or events beyond the mental recollections of individuals who knew or witnessed them at first hand has been a regular feature of architecture since antiquity, and we have many surviving examples of what may be called ‘intentional monuments’, that is_ works built-¢o-commemorate specific people or events. Yer it has to be said that buildings have been an unreliable means of prolonging memory; all too often the object has survived, but who or what it commemorated hhas been forgotten. For whom was the Roman mausoleum at Glanum built? Even if the name is known, it hardly matters, for we know nothing else about him. And what did the arch at Orange commemorate? A battle, a victory, certainly, but more than that nothing is remembered, Despite the confidence placed in the ~ power of monuments co resist the fragility of human _ memory, their record of success has been mediocre ~The modern interest in ‘memory’ and architecture has been less concerned with intentional monuments than swith the part played by memory in-the perception of all works of archicecture, whether intentional or not. The mthat memory might be a necessary part of the ings has reappeared in at least three _ a she eighteenth century, each time serving a different purpose; itis one of the concepts most “these analogies has frequently been to draw attention “inost particularly led to an assumed connection symptomatic of general changes in architectural thought. Never has this been more so than in its latest phase, whes after modemism’s supposed annihilation of memory, the _ 1970s and 1980s saw a veritable flood of memor ‘putting every corner of the city at risk of inundation, ‘Memory’ as part of the apprehension of architecture is less straightforward than some recent discussions might Jead one to suppose. In the first place, itis far from certain in what sense memory constitutes part of the aesthetic of architecture, and indeed there is some doubt as to whether it even belongs to it at all.' Secondly, the difference between ‘history’ and ‘memory’ isnot alWays | clear: in recent discussions the two often appear synonymous. Thirdly, in each of its three historical phases ‘memory’ has had a different meaning, and it ‘would be quite wrong to assume that Peter Eisenman i= the twentieth century is talking about che same thing 2s John Ruskin in the nineteenth, or Horace Walpole in te righteenth. Fourthly, and finally, part of the reason for the fascination of architects and urbanists with “me particularly in its postmodern phase, has to do with the regularity with which since antiquity philosophers and psychologists have used architecture and cities as _metaphors in their efforts to describe the phenomenos of the mental process of memory. Even if the point of to the unlikeness of memory to a city, the temptation assume that memory and architecture are one of & hhas proved irresistible. To take a single example Sigmund Freud in Civilization and L1s Discant Rome to illustrate the preservation of accumulated — ‘material in the mind, bur went on to stress how ‘ansuited this image was for a comparison with the organist (6-8). This has not inhibited much talk Rome as an ‘eternal city’ and locus of memory Bae buildings and memory was the rediscovery by the historian Frances Yates in her book The Art ofsve) CN, LedounTempe de Mame: Ladoues Tempe of Memory: designed sow) oman Mautoleum, lana, Stem Proven Fane, ¢ 304 Sis deal oy ermtstad wien a secu buling a purpose hace the lwhonver the museum commumarated hos ong snes Bee fogoten Aeance has been egarded ss geri al acter 966) of the classical mnemonic technique of the alace or theatre as a means of memorizing long of the argument in a room, inary building, the articular place within an ima ker could recall the discourse step by step. Although nces Yates's book was widely read in architectural les, and certainly influential, it was no more than account of the history of a particular mnemonic thnique, and itself hardly justified the more far-fetched ms made on its authority for architecture as itself an These and other complications need to shout ‘memory’ as a it of memory {nto account in thinking be taki cgory of architecture. Let us consider the three hist memory’. Its first manifestation as an element in the hetic of architecture, and of the other arts, was an teenth-century development. Its appearance then is generally actributed to its seeming pawer to resist the agmentation caused by the expansion of knowledge, gad the perceived loss of the wholeness of culture and. Givilization, The cultivation of ‘memory’ as an aspect al phases of f the response to works of art held out the hope of some form of reparation.’ Within the specific field of the particular value of ‘memory’ was that architect established the liberty of the subject: whereas hithertothe qualities of architecture had been judged by rules of proportion and so on laid down by authority, the value iccorded to memory gave every individual the freedom to derive their own pleasure from the work. In sa far as the discovery of ‘memory’ had a philosophical origin, it has generally been identified with the account of mental processes put forward by John Locke in his E: ‘Human Understanding (1690), and indeed the perceptual liberty it granted to the individual was consistent with the political freedoms Locke claimed for the citizen in nis other writings. Locke's account of perception was popularized by Joseph Addison in a series of articles on The Pleasures of the Imagination’ published in 1712 in the Spectator (nos 411-21). In the sixth of these articles, Addison proposed that pleasure derives not just from sight and the other senses, but fom the contemplation of what is imaginary — ‘this secondary pleasure of in proceeds from that action of the mind, imagin which compares the ideas arising from the origina objects, with the ideas that we receive from the statue picture, description, or sound thar represents them (no. 416). The power of works of art, suggests Addis derives from the association of ideas that they evoke ‘Our imagination gh leads us unexpectedly into cities or theatres, plains or meadows” far removed from presented to perception; and furthermore ‘when the thus reflects on the scenes that have past in it formed those, which were at first pleasant co behold, appear m so upon reflection, and that the memory heightens dclightfulness of the original’ (no. 417). Addison hi said nothing about the association of ideas, and of memory, in relation to architecture. Apart from litervo) a Tene of Uber Stowe, Buckingham, Enid, ames ibs, 178. The bung raked pei if dormant samana of Anglo Sven ery the art where his theory found its readiest application in cighteenth-century Britain was landscape gardening, Whereas inthe first half of the century, the purpose of garden buildings, ruins and statues tended towards the cocation of specific memories and associations (those at Stowe, for instance, inspited thoughts of British history and constitutional liberty), a marked change took place in the latter part of the century, and there was a shift to an altogether less prescriptive form of association. ‘This change was described by Thomas Whately in his Observations on Modern Gardening (1770) as a move Beray trom ah eriblowiatts 6 an &xpressiveynode of association, in which natural scenery, without any specific referent, would in every individual evoke particular trains of ideas whicly would themselves become the cause of aesthetic pleasure (see pp. 123-24). FO ere sen are In ate cighteenth-centucy British aesthetics, the relation berween three distinct levels of mental activity ~ the direct perception of objects, memory, and imagination = became a major theme. As Lord Kames in his Elements of Criticism put it, ‘The world we inhabit is replete with no less remarkable for their variety than their ‘numbers these... farnish the mind with many perceptions: which, joined with ideas of memory, of imagination, and of reflection, form a complete train that has nor a gap or incerval (vol. 1, 275). Following Kames, the argument developed by Archibald Alison and Richard Payne Knight ‘was that the more extended and varied the train of associated thoughts, the richer the aesthetic sensation. As Alison explained in the Fssays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790), ‘the more that our ideas are increased, or our conceptions extended upon any subject,eur eRe ol paiting ¢ 1750. The ‘seston dad arth aration tho suicatypvleed to have the greater the number of associations we connect with & the stronger is the emotion of sublimity or beauty we receive from it’ (vol. 1, 37) offered a means to ed perception’: it enhanced the range of ideas an object was capable of evoking. Payne Knight all the pleasures of the intellect aris association of ideas, the more the materials of association are multiplied, the more will the these pleasures be enlarged. To a mind richl almost every object of nature or art, that presentsitself to the senses, either excites fresh trains and combinations of ideas, or vivifies or strengthens those which existed before. (143) “Asa theory of aesthetic reception, the association of ideas Teed some fairly severe deawhacks, which at least partly [Explain its demise. In the first place, it relied heavily upon Selividual taste and judgment, and largely restricted [esthetic pleasure to those with the benefits of a liberal “plucation, for only they enjoyed a sufficient stock of Semories: as Alison explained in relation to classical Gechitecture, ‘The common people, undoubtedly, feel a Sexy inferior Emotion of Beauty from such objects, to that “which is felt by men of liberal education, because they. fave none of those Associations which modern education. Ssocarly. connects with them’ (vol. 11, 160). An account of she aesthetic which relied so heavily upon the accidents of ‘particular individual's experience lacked conviction a5 feneral theory. The second drawback of the association fof ideas was that it located the aesthetic as lying enticely “ssithin the mental processes of the subject. The pleasures derive from the trains of thought evoked by the object ~ the ideas, as Payne Knight put it, ‘associating themselves in our memories of their own accord” (136), not by the encounter with the object. Within the philosophy of aesthetics developed in Germany, principally by Kant, the aesthetic was concerned with what lay between the apprehension of the object and the emotions felt by the viewing subject. An account of the aesthetic that concerned itself solely with the interior of the mind, and segarded that as beyond conscious control, was of little interest to philosophers in this tradition, and it may be for this reason that ‘memory’ and! ‘association’ occupied no place at all in Kant’ philosophy, nor jn German hinereenth-century philosophical aesthetics, And even {in Britain, ‘memory” and the association of ideas rapidly fost its appeal: as Coleridge, writing in 1817, remarked, “The principle [of association] is too vague for practical guidance ~ Association in philosophy is ike the term stimulus in medicine: explaining everything it explains nothing; and above all leaves itself unexplained” (vol. IT, 222) If the eightcenth-century conceptions of ‘memory and of ‘association of ideas’ may strike us, as they struck Coleridge, as defective, we should not forget that their Principal purpose had been to undermine the authority of Yraditional rules bt orde®, proportion and ornament. On this end had been achieved, they had no further value, and we could afford ro forget about them altogether were it not that they provided the basis for the second phase of architectural ‘memory’, developed in the mid-nineteenth ‘century by John Ruskin, Itwas Ruskin’s achievement to Take up the old, eighteenth-century theory of association, and co urn it into an altogether more durable and robust concept. ‘The Lamp of Memory” was the sixth of The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), and here Ruskin wrote ‘there are but two strong conquerors of the forgetfulness of men, Poetry and Architecuure”. Of the two, architecture was superior, because it presented ‘got only wharsmen have thought and felt, but what their hands have handled, and their strength wrought, “and their eyes beheld” (chapter VI Sil. In-other words, ‘what architecture alone offered was the memory of human work, both manual and mental. The memories triggered by the sight of ancient architecture were not the generalized themes of ancient virtues and liberties, or of recollections of Claudian landscapes, but an exact sense of the nature of the work and conditions of labour under which the buildings had been executed. The differences between Ruskin’s conception of “memory” and that of his cighteenth-century predecessors are considerable. First of all, what is remembered is not an endless chain of mental imaginings, but is exact and determinate: work. Secondly, the memory.is not individual, but social and collective: Tike its literature and its poetry its architecture is one of the means by which a nation constitutes its identity “through shared memories. And thidly, “memory” relates not just ro the past, hut is an obligation that the present hhas towards the furure: when we build let us think that we build for ever. Let it not be for present delight, not for present use alone; ler it be such work as our descendants will thank us fox, and let us think, as we lay stone upon stone, that a time is to come when chose stones will be held Sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the labour and wrought substance of them, ‘See! this our fathers did for as. (chapter VI, $x) Ruskin’s notion of ‘memory’ was closely related to his conception of ‘history’, and nothing would be gained by teying to distinguish between the two. The immediate impact of both within Ruskin's owa time was primasily ‘upon the preservation of ancient buildings. The significance of Ruskin’s argument was to stress that like poetry, architecture belonged not to anyone in particular, fr just to the present, bur to all time; the present has only ~a life interest in it, and its obligation is to protect it for posterity. Ruskin asserts:Menery it is again no question of expediency or feeling whether we shall preserve the buildings of past rime or not. We have no right whatever to touch them, — _They are not ours. They belong partly to those who built chem, and partly to all che generations of mankind who are to Follow us. (chapter VI, §xx) ‘The most immediate influence of Ruskin’s notion of memory was not so much upon new architecture, but upon the development of a conservation movement in Britain, through William Morris and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, founded in 1877. (Roskin’s impact npon Morris was not limited to architectural thinking alone though, and Morris was to develop ‘memory’ also as a substantial clement of his political thought.) In Ruskin’s later writings on architecture, St Mark's Rest and The Bible of Amiens (1883), ‘memory" continued to be important, but in a different, more generalized sense. In these books, certain buildings provide access to the entire extent of human history, mythology and religions not so much the embodiment of memory, they are the ‘means of triggering human memory, and of relating i to understanding, ‘An interesting refinement of Ruskin’s ideas about the ‘memorial significance of ancient buildings was to appear a little fater in an essay by the Anstrian art historian Alois, Ricgl. Written in 1903 as part of an Austro-Hungarian _government proposal for the protection of old buildings, — Riegl set out to question what exactly people valued in ~ them. In doing so, he distinguished between “ value’, that is to say the evidence the work presented of a particular historical moment, and ‘age-value’, or a generalized sense of the passage of time, and concluded that as far as the majority were concerned, it was age- value that they sought in ancient buildings. By the rime Riegl was writing his essay, memory" was already under attack. Nietasche’s famous assault _on memory and celebration-of forgetfulness in his essay _ “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History" appeared in — A874 Hiete Nietzsche asserted ‘i is possible to live almost _without memory .,, but itis altogether impossible to live —— at all without forgetting” (62). Whether or not directly acknowledged, Nietzsche's insistence upon the erasure of history, and of memory, was to be one of the most recurrent themes of modernist architecture; and of ‘modernist painting and sculpture. Within the discourse of modem architecture, smemory” was rarely mentioned modernists did nor even negate memory, they simply ignored it. For modern remarkable was, as Walker Benjarnin put it, that it was architecture ~ as for modern art - everything that.took: away from the immanence of the work, that lay outside the immediate encounter with it, was to be resisted, and. foremost among those properties that threatened the work was memory. Characteristic of this thinking is Geoffrey Scott's The Architecture of Humanism (1914), a work which drew heavily upon the German tradition of philosophical aesthetics. In his attack upon “The Romantic Fallacy", Scott writes that ‘romanticism is not favourable to plastic form. Romanticism is too much) concerned with the vague and the remembered to find its natural expression in the wholly concrete’ (39) The emphasis and value of literature, the medium of romanticism, lie chiefly in the significance, the meaning and the associations of the sounds which constitute its direct ‘material. Architecture, conversely, is an art which chiefly affects us by direct appeal. Its emphasis and its value lie chiefly in material and in that abstract disposition of material which we call form fandamentally, the language of the two arts is distinct and even opposite. (60-61) But if within the plastic arts of painting, sculpture and architecture memory was rejected, in one form of ‘modernist art ~ literature ~ it was paramount. Indeed, for some critics of moderns literature, ‘memory’ was mock, being the facuhy-most particularly engaged im ‘the acts of both writing and of reading. Nowhere was this more evident than in Marcel Proust's A la Recherche du temps perdu ~ though what made this book so ‘as much a ‘work of forgetting’, ‘in which remembrance is the woof and forgetting is the warp’ (204). Proust's awareness that without forgetting there can be no memory, and thar the interest of memory lies in its _ ialectic with forgetting, is important, and is his point of ‘contact with the other great early rwenticth-century student of memory, Sigmund Freud. But Proust is an anchor partic-ularly interesting in the context of memory and architecture, for he had been an enthusiastic reader of Ruskin, particularly of Ruskin’s architectural writing, and, indeed had translated The Bible of Amiens into French, Proust fully understood Ruskin’s notion of a relationship berween buildings, literature and memory, and made it his ‘own —he even went so far as to describe the construction Sent Eire grdinant for a Ot srs, rang, 944. The Fata incomnon nih most mers, tad mamary ae cmponent of sees pecaptonVietnam Memoria Wesington, 0, ow fr modern setecture by densng meme, ha ut aa of fom sei of A la Recherche du temps perdu as that of a cathedral However, the notion of memory Proust was to develop was rather different from Ruskin's; whereas for Ruskin architecture was memory, Proust was emphatic that memory had an unstable and elusive relationship to objects, including architecture. As he put it in Sweann's Way, Iris a labour in vain to recapture [our own past): a the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden-somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (or in the sensation which that material object will give us), of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chancewhether we come upon this object before we ourselves must die. (vol. , 51) For Proust, while buildings could trigger involuntary memories, the process was haphazard and unreliable, (One can say, then, that while ‘memory’ was important in modernist aesthetics, its value came from a recognition of the fandamental unlikeness and discontinuity between the -physical world of objects, and architecture, and the mei “tal world of mentory. This distinction was one that had ~ Been absent from the eighteenth. and ninetcenth-century conceptions of architectural memory, and, as we shall see, ‘was largely ignored in its late twentieth-century version. Let us turn now co the third phase of architectural memory, that belonging to the last third of the twentieth century. To grasp the particularities of this phase, some context is necessary. The twentieth century has, in general, been obsessed with memory in a way that no period of history ever was before. Jts colossal investment in museums, archives, historical study and heritage “programmes are the symptoms of a culture that appears eetfified of forgetting. Nowhere has this-been more apparent in the astonishing commercial success of that prosthetic memory; the personal computer. Also in the twentieth century there has developed a distinction, between ‘history’ and ‘memory’, perhaps most persuasively articulated by the German critie Walter Benjamin. For Benjamin, “history” century = a nineteenth- rs gated distorted versions of events that served the interests of dominant power; ‘memory’, through which fragments of the past entered the present explosively and uncontrollably, was the principal means by which the individual could resist the hegemony oF history In one particular activity, unprecedented in any previous period of history, Westem civilization has shown an extraordinary confidence in the capacity of material objects to resist the decay of memory: that is in the building of war memorials to the dead of its many wars. ‘Memorials commemorating che name of every dead soldier, like those at ‘Thiepval in France, or Monte Grappa in Italy, oF moze sevently tho Viocnam memorial in Washington, D.C., have no carlir historical counterparts. Whatever the reasons for these artefacts, whatever purposes they serve, these many memorials rest on the assumptions that forgetting, individually or collectively, these many dead is one of the greatest dangers for modern society; and they demonstrate an imshakeable confidence in the power of physical objects to presecve memory. In ll these various commemorative activities and productions, modem architecture, and modern art, have taken litele part, and have been merely onlookers. And when architects, or artists, have tried to involve themselves in these memory-prolonging activities, they have - like Le Corbusier over the Mundaneum project (see ill. p. 166} ~ quickly attracted hostile crits The denial of memory within modernist aesthetics made it virtually impossible for anyone claiming to be a modernist to associate themselves with memorial or commemorative works. And the denigrarion of memory was reinforced from outside architecture and fine art by philosophy ~ so for example, the second chapter of Maurice Merleau- Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception is an extended attack upon associationism, claiming that memory has no part in perception. ‘On the other hand, with so much memorial activity going on in Westem societies, by the 1960s architects found themselves gazing longingly at this rich reservoir of emotive meaning (and profitable work), from which, so it seemed, they had wilfully cut themselves off. Against the blankness and ‘silence’ of late modernist architecture, a re-engagement with ‘memory” looked particularly appealing, and a strategy that certain literary works of the time seemed to support. ‘The best known was the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1958), a widely read book, whose true theme might be more accurately described as ‘memory" rather than ‘space’. Bachelard’s aim was to ‘show that the house is ‘one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind’ (6). Bur if this seemed to give carte blanche to architects to concern themselves with ‘memory’, the difficulty was that the memory with which Bachclard was concerned was purely mental, and as he was careful to explain, did not lend itself easily to description, let alone physical construction (13). Again we come up against the fact that while an individual's memories may be triggered by buildings, or even take fon a spatial character, built works of architecture are not, as both Freud, and Proust had recognized, a satisfactory analogue for the mental world of memory. The inherent unlikeness of memory and architecture, already established in the early twentieth century, is implicit in Bachelard’s book. And more recently, the relation between the two has een pulled even further apart, in the work of the French philosopher Michel de Certeau, for whom ‘memory is a sort of anti-tauseum: itis not localizable” {108)- The particular force of memory Comes “rom its —_ very capacity to be altered — unmoored, mobile, lacking any fixed position ... Memory is in decay when itis noSonger capable of this alteration’-And he continues, jemory comes from somewhere els, it is outside oF Sef, it moves things about. The tacties ofits art are selated to what it is, and to its disquieting familiarity” 186-87). Seen in dle Certeau’s terms, a determinate selationship between buildings and memory looks ‘even less plausible than it did ro Prous. The reintroduction of memory into architectural scourse in the late twentieth cencury occurred for she relatively straightforward purpose of challenging, seodernist orthodoxy. As one of those responsible, the German architect O. M. Ungers explained: Memory as a bearer of cultural and historical values hhas heen consciously denied and ignored by the ‘Neues Bauen, The anonymity of the functionally correct organization of the environment has asserted itself over collective memory. Historically shaped places and historical peculiarities have been sacrificed on the altar of the functional constraints of Zweckrationalisnus ... Hardly any city remains that corresponds to its historical image. (75-77) OF those associated with the re-invention of memory, by far the best known, and most discussed (hecause, amongst ‘other things, of his erratic use of the concept) was the Italian architect Aldo Rossi. In his book The Architecture of the City (1966), as part of his critique of orthodox ‘modernism, he suggested that the way to develop new forms of urhan architecture was to study those already existing. Not only did the buildings of every existing city reveal a pattern of permanences specific to it, but ata deeper level, these characterized its ‘collective memory’ ASTROS put it, ne the city itself isthe collective memory of its people, and like memory it is associated with objects and places. The city is the ocus of the collective memory This relationship berween the facus and the citizenry then becomes the city’s predominant image, both of architecture and of landscape, and as certain artifacts become part of its memory, new ones emerge. In this carirely positive sense great ideas flow through the history of the city and give shape to it. (130) Summarizing his argument, he wrote ‘Memory ... is the consciousness of the city’ (131). sewing Lutzowalts, erin, O. Munger 582-48 Unger projects fromthe eoty sss Consus eveed amon’ a2 row lar 2 Memory Rossi’s purpose in introducing ‘memory’ was to find a rationale other than “functionalism’ for modern architecture, a concern common to the circle of architects associated with the Milan journal Casabella Continuita in the 1950s and early 1960s.’ The message of Rossi argument was that whoever undertook to build in a city would not only change the physical fabric of the city, but more audaciously, alter the collective memory of its inhabitants. Rossi had derived this idea nor from any of the precedents that we have so far described, but from, in particular, two pre-war French writers, one a historian, Marcel Poete, the other a sociologist, Maurice Halbwachs, From Poéte, Rossi derived the idea that the phenomenon of a city cannot adequately be investigated through its functional relations, in the manner attempted by the Chicago sociologists, but only through the record of its past, a8 manifested in the evidence of the present. It was Poete who gave to Rossi the idea of ‘permanencies’, that the very essence of a city’s complexity lay in the persistence through time of certain indelible features. ‘The other idea, that the inhabitants of a city shared a collective memory manifested in the buildings of the city, Rossi derived from the sociologist, Maurice Halbwachs. Halbwachs had been a pupil of Emil Durkheim, and it is from Durkheim’s theory of society that Halbwachs’s ‘collective memory’, with its shortcomings, originates. Briefly, Durkheim had proposed that society is known to exist through its empirically verifiable institutions ~ religion, government, culture, etc. ~ but thar what binds it together is the collective consciousness that its members, share of being part of that society. The alienation and anomie characteristic of modern societies comes about through the decay of the collective consciousness. Maurice Halbwachs's studies of French workers in the 1920s and 1930s claimed that their necessary engagement with matter in the course of their work caused them to loge their sense of connectedness to society, and that this Joss presented the greatest danger to France. Its only remedy, he saw, was to strengthen the social mriliew outside the workplace, 60 a5 to compensate for the alienation created within it, Halbwachs was associated with Heenri Seles, and the French Garden City “Movement, in the creation of a number of ‘garden suburbs’ around Paris in the inter-war period with the aim of rehumanizing modern life.' The Collective Memory, the book from which Rossi took the idea of ‘memory’, was Halbwachs’s last book; in fact, within it Halbwachs went to some trouble to argue that while social groups may retain their identity as groups through their common memory of certain places, that memoryrelates not to an actually existing physical space, buc to [the particular mental image of the space formed by that [Rroup”” In other words, i is HOt Urban artefacts thar are the agents of memory, but their mental images. Rossi's selective, and very literal, reading of Halbwachs hardly took account of the nuances to which Halbwachs attached so much importance. Nor did it pay much regard to the weaknesses inherited from Durkheim's sociology — in particular, the identification of alienation in social, rather than economic causes; and the assumption that individual psychology provides a satisfactory model for the collective behaviour of a society. Not only did Rossi reproduce Halbwachs's assumptions uncrtically, but more remarkably, he cast them within a strongly idealist framework that was quite alien to Halbwachs’s own thought: so, for example, Rossi wrote, ‘the union between the past and the furure exists in the very idea of the city that it flows through in the same way that memory flows through the life of a person’ (131), and he presented the city as an object with an end of its own, “eorFealize its own idea of itself, But it Rossi's use of Halbwachs bore little relation to Halbwachs's own. thinking, we should perhaps accept that Rossi's idea of memory was, as Carlo Olmo says, more poetic than theoretically rigorous; and in any case, while espousing ‘memory’, Rossi managed also, especially in his subsequent writings and projects, to be thoroughly antihistorieal in his attachment to the idea of the autonomy of the urban artefact. Yer for all his, inconsistencies, it was Rossi above all who provided Enropean and American architects in the 1970s and 1980s with the idea that the city’s fabric constituted its collective memory. The other, often cited, case of the introduction of ‘memory’ into the context of modern architecture was the essay ‘Collage City’ of 1975 by Colin Rowe and Tred Koetter. In this extended reflection on the shortcomings of orthodox modemist architecture and urbanism, the authors questioned modernism’s exclusive concentration upon the realization of a future, utopian environment. Explicitly referring to Frances Yates’s The Art of Memory, they ask whether the ideal city might not ‘at one and the same time, behave as both theatre of prophecy and {theatre of memory’ (77); their point was that one should— hhave the liberty to choose between the two, and not be obliged to locate oneself in the future. In general, modernism had been at fault in supposing that novelty ‘was possible without acknowledgment of the memory- laden context from which it necessacily emerged. Within Rowe's oeuvre, otherwise devotedly modernist in its that ‘men stress upon the immanence of the work, this essay was something of an aberration. However, in its plea for pluralism, it was an important rext in the development of architectural postmodernism and its appeal to memory formed part of this. From the enthusiastic reception of the ideas of Rossi, Ungers, Rowe, and others, there developed a new orthodoxy, in which as Anthony Vidler has put it, ‘Urbanism ... might-be defined as the instrumental and practice of constructing the city as memorial of itsel™ (1992, 179). One of the difficulties, though, of this, proposition was the lack of direct evidence from previoss historieal periods that anyone had ever actually perceived cities or architecture in this way: it is only as a result of the arguments of Poéte and Halbwachs, as mediated by Rossi and others, that cities had come to be discussed im such terms, Out of the need to legitimate the view of the city as the embodied memory of its inhabitants, there has developed a new kind of historical project, dedicated to proving the presence of this idea in previous ages. ‘The most ambitious and sophisticated of these artemprs is Christine Boyer’s The City of Collective Menrory (1994), where the aim is to discover “how does the city become the locus of collective memory?’ (16). Yer while investigating most thoroughly the intellecraal origins of this idea, curiously Boyer at no point ‘questions the proposition itself: assuming that cities, are the embodiment of memories, she shares the new orthodoxy. The symptoms of the postmodern orthodoxy of memory as part of the subject of architecture are threefold, First of all, there isa lack of interest in the ‘ery extensive investigations into the general phenomenos ‘of memory undertaken in the realms of psychology. philosophy and literature in the twentieth century; in particular, the neglect of the insight of Proust, as of Freud y" on its own is not interesting ~ what matters is the tension befween-memory_and forgetting-Not for nothing did the ancient Greeks place the springs of Lethe (Forgetfulness) and Mnemosyne (Memory) close by, and insist that those who wished to consult the oracle at Trophonios drink from first one, then the other. Secondly. there is a general, and unjustified, assumption that social memory can be explained by reference to individual ‘memory, And thirdly, the supposition that buildings, or indeed any artefacts, provide a satisfactory analogue in the material world for the aleatory world of memory is far from convincing. In the recent study of social memory, attention has moved away from things and rowards activities as theoperative agents of memory. Paul Connerton in his book How Societies Remember (1989) draws a distinction between ‘inscribing’ practices and ‘incorporating’ practices in commemoration, and suggests that ‘inseribing’ practices ~ those where memory is recorded in an object ~ are of less significance than ‘incorporating? practices ~ those involving some kind of bodily action ~ in the creation of social memory. Iris through ceremonies, rituals, codes of behaviour and repetition that collective Sebreriegiererrencccineeeliamiangs te imeerabetaee ~ society, and may become attached to particular places. Seen in these terms, objects like war memorials are less important than the ceremonies and activities that take place around thems and indeed ro hope to preserve ‘memories socially through works of architecture would appear futile unless accompanied by some kind of incorporating practice. This is indeed the lesson drawn, by Dolores Hayden, who in her book The Power of Place (1995) described various projects for the protection of social memories in parts of Los Angeles. None of the projects rclied upon buildings or even artefacts except in a secondary way: the principal emphasis was upon public participation through workshops which interpret and re-interpret the historical associations and significance of particular places. ‘Modernism had good reasons for detaching ‘memory from architecture and urbanism. The attempt to recover “memory” as a active constituent of them may he inderstandable in terms of the apparent condition of silence to which modernism seemed to have reduced architecture by the 1960s: but, with the indifference architects and urbanists showed to the investigation of ‘memory’ that had taken place in other disciplines during the twentieth century, it remains doubtful whether architecture has achieved any distinctive contribution to the ‘are of memory". ‘Memory’ may well yer prove a short-lived architectural category alien to architecture. and one inherently Memory 1 Se for example Scruton, Aesth, 1979, 138-43. 2 Seefor example se various project of Hem Ineot’ deeb in| “renscrl Desi, 4% 1979, no8 St 3 Sex Ballantyne, Richard Payne ight, 1997, chapter | 4 See. Mackie inrotion ro Prost, O Roadie Rusin, 1987, xe. This trains of The Bil of Amiens nd teanaton of Prova’ preface to Sel fede Neen rene ete al 5 See Gils (ed), Commenoratons, 1984, or sme ineeesting dsusions ofthe ‘ge ad parcelany of tremchceary war memorial 6 Seo Teg, ‘Mundane aoe toleai 5 192th prot wa erred or ite mer and chai charter’ (8) 7 See Olno, Aston he Text’, 1988, Assemble no. 5 forthe rmatances ‘of Rou ideas. 1 See Reino, French Mader, 1989, 321, 236 on Hallmncs 9 See Hibwachs, Collects Memory, apa 140-1,