making meaning out of the memory of architecture

15 march 2003

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meaning building
64 rooms
territories of meaning
memory and schema
case study: aldo rossi and the practice of memory
inner cities
notes and image credits

meaning building

his project asks questions about meaning in architecture

and the importance of memory in that meaning. As an
investigation of how architecture means, this work begins
with my story because I am the subject of this thesis and
because, as such, I am mostly responsible for the meaning I
find in the world; that is, the meaning I make of it. That is
meaning building, which is really what this work is of. (Notice I did not write about.)
Architecture happened to me. It continues to happen to
me. Architecture happened to me, and I remember it.
There was a time when architecture happened to me and
I was not conscious of its happening. That architecture
was an architecture of the everyday, and, as such, I could
not see it. The walls around me and the roofs over my
head were invisible. In fact, that which I experienced and
perceived was life spilling over the edges of architecture:
inside to sleep and eat, outside to play and travel; me in my
bedroom, my sister in the living room, my father standing in
the doorway, my mother walking down the hall. The world
contracts or expands depending on our relationship to very
specific spaces; our perception of the world is ever (never)
complete depending on the edges of architecture.
Later, there was a time when architecture happened to
me and I became conscious of its happening. I remember
it. I remembered it. Meaning, I first became conscious of
architecture happening to me as it happened to me in my
memory. Meaning, the architecture was just an image, but
an image of such profound significance that it single-handedly provoked me to embark on what can only be called
my lifes workmeaning architecture. Meaning meaning.
Meaning building. Meaning building. Building meaning.
Making meaning out of the memory of architecture.
Memoryautobiographical and collective, each integral to
the otherexists as the foundation upon which meaning is
built. Memory affords our connection to the world. Every
aspect of experience becomes enveloped in the process of
memory. It forms our identity as individuals, and it coheres
individuals together to form the identity of social groups.
Memory is also the thread which links the lived-in now with
the past and the future: what I remember of my past contributes to who I am now (at this very moment) and in many
ways affects what I will do in the future. Without memory,
meaning building cannot happen.
It seems evident to me that in the course of finding meaning
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in the built environment there must somehow occur a correspondence between

an individuals memory and the embodied memory of the architecture itself. To
speak of a building as having memory is to discover its relationship to time and
to history. In terms of the former, a building will inevitably ageas time goes by
it acquires a kind of patina (although I do not employ this word only to describe
surface qualities) as the physical
object registers the indexical marks
of its use over timethe scratches
and blemishes, coats of paint and
cosmetic facelifts, additions and
subtractionsand as the events
and activities which occur there
transform and construct a narrative
about its age. A buildings memory
also depends upon its visible relationship to history, which may be
manifest through style or type.
Each and every building will always
visibly express its relationship to
time in this way just by the very nature of it being a man-made artifact.
As physical constructions, buildings
exist in time and in place.
Similarly, as inhabitants of buildings, we each bring to any building a unique personal history which is dependent upon our individual, autobiographical memoriesthis is what we have at our disposal when confronting the built environment.
The special quality of this relationshipthe interaction of memories between
building and inhabitantrequires all the semantic fullness of the word context.
Not only does context denote the circumstances that form the setting for an
event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood;1 but
it must also be understood in light of its Latin etymology: contextere, literally a
weaving together. Admittedly, many aspects of the context in which we engage
buildings are variableenvironmental qualities like time of day and year or psychological qualities such as mood or intentionbut we will always bring with us
our histories, and a building will always display a portion of its history to us.
Memory of architecture, therefore, seems to depend more on our ability to perceive
the embodied situation. Moreover those situations are subject to particular catalytic
moments in timethose instances in which the energies of both the container and the
contained become virtually indistinguishable. The timing of those moments is uneven,
poetic, and anisotropic. It would be impossible for the constituent elements of a placememory to sustain a constant equilibrium or frequency of resonance in time.2

In this way, as users of buildings, we are responsible for meaning building in that
we must bring to architecture our memories and experiences and complicated
selves in order to complete its meaning. We encounter every possible type and
quality of building, and to some degree we will feel compelled to engage it and
we will discoverconstructmeaning in that engagement. Or not. Perhaps only
when, as Bloomer claims, the boundary between the container and the contained dissipates, when the embodied memory of the architecture resonates
with our memories and experiencesperhaps then meaning is made.

64 rooms

series of 64 rooms, seemingly identical and occupied

by different figuresyet what is the nature of this series?
Do the rooms exist in physical succession, one after the
other, en filade, to be proceeded through, each door opening onto room after room after room? Or are the rooms
one in the same, a temporal succession of different states of
this one particular space, each moment containing a unique
character? Can there even be any distinction between
these two possibilities?
Perhaps, ultimately, all experience becomes translated temporarily and eventually into so many images, hammered flat
by the work of the mind, undifferentiated successions of
space and time. All the rooms of the past compress into
indistinguishable rooms, the uber-raum of memory into
which are stuffed every conceivable room experience
and sensation.
I cannot help but think of those ancient memory treatises
prescribing the method by which long orations may be
remembered: imagine to yourself a familiar architecture, a
clear succession of spaces. Place deliberately in each room
symbols which represent the key points of the soliloquy, the
essential details of the argument. As you began to recite
the oration, in your mind move slowly throughout the architecture, stopping in each room in order to identify each
of the symbols you have placed there. Thought has depth;
memory is spatial.
64 rooms, mostly occupied, completed in the mind. What
do you do with the occasional empty room? Are there
other rooms unseen which remain empty? Is there any
foreseeable limit to a series of identical frames populated
by infinite permutations?

01: hospital room, Cedar Rapids, IA 02: efficiency apt., Cedar Rapids, IA 03: farm house, Shoals, IN 04: post and beam
shed house, Shoals, IN 05: movie theater, French Lick, IN 06: Strange residence, Shoals, IN 07: church, Shoals, IN
08: farm house, Dover Hill, IN 09: general store, Dover Hill, IN 10: barn, Dover Hill, IN 11: Cunneff rancher, Tampa,
FL 12: small world, Orlando, FL 13: Mrs. Burns classroom, Shoals, IN 14: alley, Des Moines, IA 15: grandparents
rancher, Albuquerque, NM 16: Irene St. rancher, Albuquerque, NM 17: mega-church, Albuquerque, NM 18: Hernandez
residence, Albuquerque, NM 19: Capri Best Western motel, Albuquerque, NM 20: Beckys apartment, Roswell, NM
21: Elliot adobe house, Santa Fe, NM 22: Elaine Pl. rancher, Albuquerque, NM 23: Cunneff basement rec room,

24 60 27 04 42 51 38 02
Deerfield, IL 24: Jim and Jans mobile home living room, Albuquerque, NM 25: -- 26: hotel room, San Diego, CA 27:

09 49 10 12 35 44 15 40
Johnston enclosed veranda, Ruidoso, NM 28: pension, Topolobampo, Mexico 29: efficiency apt., Manitoba Springs,

18 01 56 20 21 39 23 55
CO 30: used book store, Cripple Creek, CO 31: Palmer farm house, Creston, IA 32: grandparents house, Davenport,

11 26 47 61 29 22 32 31
IA 33: Cox split-level house, Davenport, IA 34: re-located farm house, Media, PA 35: Furness trade school building,

33 53 05 46 37 41 30 17
Media, PA 36: Lockyer residence, Media, PA 37: Falcones art room, Media, PA 38: Cunneff residence, Chester, NJ

08 64 43 16 45 36 25 48
39: Bates motel, Barnegat Light, NJ 40: Freeborn residence, Media, PA 41: dorm room, Glasgow, Scotland 42:

58 50 06 52 34 54 13 19
flat, London, UK 43: dorm room, Philadelphia, PA 44: Linwood apt., Elkins Park, PA 45: Melrose apt., Melrose Park,

63 07 59 14 28 62 57 03
PA 46: house, Media, PA 47: Via Molveno 21, Rome, Italy 48: hostel room, Nice, France 49: studio, Rome, Italy
50: 10th St. apt., Philadelphia, PA 51: Spring Garden studio, Philadelphia, PA 52: Hotel Oxford, Mexico City, Mexico
53: open-air apt., Puerto Vallarta, Mexico 54: Green St. apt., Philadelphia, PA 55: Locust Bar, Philadelphia, PA 56:
Genies apt., Brooklyn, NY 57: 1314 E. 51st St., Austin, TX 58: Will and Lauras bungalow, Austin, TX 59: Carpenter
St. apt., Philadelphia, PA 60: Kitchen Sink studio, Philadelphia, PA 61: Grover Ave. house, Austin, TX 62: Basilica
of St. Francis, Assissi, Italy 63: Manor Rd. house, Austin, TX 64: University Ave. studio and apt., Champaign, IL

territories of meaning
Analogy gathers together scattered factors and, to one degree or another, judges the
importance of its gathering. Such judgments, however, are provisional: they take place
outside the imperative of choosing once and for all. That is, analogical knowledge, like
narrative itself, suspends the law of the excluded middle. Instead, it offers versions of
comprehensionconfigurations, analogies, wholes that do not erase partsthat can,
in fact, be superimposed upon one another precisely to create middles.3

nalogical thinking ignites at the conceptual intersection of the individual

parts of any given analogy, that zone created by the superimposition and
superposition of essentially translucent entities. The active light of interpretation
shines through these layers, as it were, illuminating significant shapes and figures.
Meaning actively happens here; it is constructed as images overlap each other,
aligning themselves momentarily, then shifting slightly, encouraging reevaluation
and reinterpretation. As a layered figure of depth in architecture, complexity occurs in both plan and section. As a site, the zone of meaning in the analogical
system is often ambiguous, never a statement of once and for all nor a mandate
issued from some authorial powerthere is space and freedom, room for play.
Yet, also as a site, this area has boundaries, or, rather, a set (largely unquantifiable) of all available meanings, which is different than a boundless field of all-inclusiveness or unregulated interpretations.
The middles which arise in the analogical system become the site of meaning
building. Here, practice and production culminate in a moment of ineffable clarity; and this moment of grace is inherently tacit rather than patent. Tacit knowledge is that which is understood or implied without being stated; it depends
upon visceral experience, learning by participation, and a whole set of unconscious factors that are culturally as well as biologically filtered and influenced.4
Conversely, patent knowledge is obvious, easily recognizable, articulated and
mediated by figuration.
Morris Berman, in The Reenchantment of the World, provides a telling example
of tacit knowing. Borrowing an anecdote from Michael Polanyi, he relates the
experience of medical students learning to identify pathologies in x-rays, a skill
which cannot be taught categorically with a list of instructions or a set of procedural guidelines. They learn by observing senior doctors over a period of several
months, by watching the more practiced professionals as they discern what each
miniscule blur or hairline or speck in the image discloses about the patient. The
x-rays and their identifying marks cease to be figurations of diseasethat is, signs
which must be contemplated and then translated into significanceinstead becoming somewhat transparent; the student eventually just sees disease without
deliberately and rationally contemplating its sign.5
Michael Polanyi, a scientist-turned-philosopher who spent the better part of his
career developing a theory of personal knowledge based on the principle of
tacit knowing, conceived of tacit knowing as a relation involving two terms: the
proximal and the distalwhere the proximal is the totality of the particulars in the
tacit relation and the distal is the comprehensive meaning of that relation. In apprehending the meaning of an entity, we attend from the proximal (particulars)
to the distal (meaning); and it is the proximal of which we have a tacit knowledge
without being able to articulate it. Borrowed from the field of anatomy, the terms
are appropriate considering Polanyis privileging of the body as the ultimate
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instrument of all our external knowledge, whether intellectual or practical. The

bodywhich we normally never experience as an object, but experience always
in terms of the world to which we are attending from our body6is the medium
of tacit knowing, and it is through indwelling, incorporating the particulars into
our body via proximity and extension, that we truly understand the relational
work of the proximal and distal:
We shall presently see that to attend from a thing to its meaning is to interiorize it, and
that to look instead at the thing is to exteriorize or alienate it. We shall then say that
we endow a thing with meaning by interiorizing it and destroy its meaning by alienating
it.7

Polanyi accepts the theory of gestalt as a particular model of tacit knowing: in

visual perception we attend from a number of particulars (sensations given by
vision, by the body) to their meaning as a whole, which is the perception. Taken
individually, the proximal elements are meaningless until they are attended to at a
certain distance, being the distal (Polanyi refers to this process as transposition).
If we consider again the example of medical students learning to read disease
in x-rays, this conception of tacit knowing may become clearer. The tacit relation consists of the marks on the x-rays (proximal) and the meaning of the marks
(distal) which is either normal or pathological. And the students, while never
able to articulate the proximal, over time come to associate (attend from) certain
combinations of marks and blemishes and spots with a comprehensive meaning
(distal) which is the presence of disease. Let us recognize that tacit knowing is
the fundamental power of the mind, which creates explicit knowing, lends meaning to it and controls its use.8
Meaning buildingthe compound activity of perceiving, learning, inventingdescribes a process by which meaning and significance are generated via
tacit knowing. In Vision and Painting, Norman Bryson uses the tacit operation
as one of the key components in his analysis of painting and its long history of
representation. Tracing various attitudes towards realism in images, he attempts
to supercede the notion that representation in painting obeys a doctrine of
mimesis which necessitates a description of representation as a process of
perceptual correspondence where the image is said to match with varying
degrees of success, a fully established and anterior reality.9 Bryson remedies
the rigidity and social isolation of this formalism with the assertion of the painting as sign, as the site of cultural production, as material practice, where the
real ought to be understood not as a transcendent and immutable given, but as
a production brought about by human activity working within specific cultural
constraints.10 As an area of inquiry, material
practice encompasses not only the work of the
painter, but also the work of the viewer: both
are involved in tacit operations, improvisations-within-context which yield significance by
way of meaningful engagement and interaction
through practical and tangible workmuch like
the medical students learning to read x-rays. In
the territory of meaningthe middles of the
analogical systemmaterial practice catalyzes
the process of meaning building as we begin to
explore that in-between zone.

memory and schema

n order to better determine how the process of memory is entirely fundamental

to the meaning we make in the world, and especially the built environment, we
may consider some recent work by researchers in the field of cognitive psychologyin particular, a schema-based theory of memory. Modern schema theory is
best defined as one which holds that the mind employs generic knowledge structures that guide the comprehenders interpretations, inferences, expectations,
and attention.11 These are high-order, unconscious structures: high-order because schemas are primary means of organizing knowledge, and unconscious
in that they are deeply embedded into our cognition of the world. Frederick C.
Bartlett (1886-1969), hailed as the forefather of contemporary schema theory,
questioned the popular trace theory account of memory which held that memory
is episodic, such that specific, actual traces of past experience our stored directly in the brain for later recall. For Bartlett, memory is a dynamic process:
Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary
traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our
attitude towards a whole active mass of organized past reactions or experience, and to
a little outstanding detail which commonly appears in image or in language form. It is
thus hardly ever really exact, even in the most rudimentary cases of rote recapitulation,
and it is not at all important that it should be so.12

In modern schema theory, there are five operations in which schemas specifically
affect memory: attention, framework, integration, retrieval, and editing.13
Let us consider the schema theory of memory in terms of a real scenario: a trip to
a baseball game. Having been both a player and spectator of baseball, I possess
a rich set of schema and sub-schema for baseball game which organizes and
influences my knowledge and memories of baseball games. It will also influence
my experience of future baseball games. Each baseball game I have attended
is integrated into this baseball schema so that I have generic knowledge about
baseball games which includes information like the structure and rules of the
game, the sensual qualities of the baseball field and stadium, the various activities
and rituals of the spectators and players, etc. There are also a number of subschema, such as the experience of eating a ballpark hotdog or using the stadiums
public restroom. According to schema theory, when I remember a particular
baseball game many of the so-called episodic details of that experience may in
fact be incorrectly inserted simply because I have certain expectations about my
experience of baseball games based upon my schematic knowledge of them.
Likewise, there may be omissions of those details which were too incompatible
(and also, too insignificant) with my baseball game schema. The schema for
attending a baseball game is constructed by these experiences and changed by
them, altered or reinforced as new information is integrated.
Any consideration of memory, then, must address the question of whether or not
the process of remembering leads to accurate, veridical representations of the
past. In fact, accurate or not, we do strongly believe that our memories are not
only our own but are true, which may be in part due to the high level of detail
of the imagery that accompanies our memories.14 Of course, except in extreme
cases of mis-information leading to harmful false memories, some discrepancy
between what really occurred and what I believe to have occurred is probably not
so devastating to the sense of identity which our autobiographical memories as9

sist in constructing. In characterizing the interconnectedness between individual

(autobiographical) memory and the collective memory of a particular social or
cultural group, Maurice Halbwachs noticed that we depend upon those around
us to corroborate our individual memories, and thus work together to build each
individuals collective memory of the group to which we belong.15
The implications of this are that alienation from a group may lead to a forgetting
or at least an uncertainty about the accuracy of ones individual memory, a more
tentative relationship to memory which is possibly pathological. We may also
wonder if, at any point, the memory of the groupand its power of corroboration,
of persuasive suggestionactually supercedes the memories of the individual,
thus corrupting the very personal and organic relationship between memory and
the sense of self. Especially in our own time, we are inundated by the Image, that
hyperactive stream of constructed visibility which leaves no time for contemplation. As Walter Benjamin, quoting Duhamel, wrote: I can no longer think what I
want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.16
In attempting to understand the power which memory exerts in our everyday
liveslives full of mundane details and extraordinary moments, of loss and discoverywe have the opportunity to probe an elaborate structure of meaning
which so often brings together apparently unrelated, anachronistic, and fractured
events, concepts, and images. Our memories are absolutely significant to who
we are as individuals, as well as our sense of ourselves and personal identity (in
effect, constituting our personal lore, our autobiography). In this way, we may
make a distinction between the effulgent mass of visual culture and the equally
bright and complex strata of individual memories, as Baudelaire did:
An important difference exists between the palimpsest manuscript that superposes,
one upon the other, a Greek tragedy, a monastic legend, and a chivalric tale, and the
divine palimpsest created by God, which is our incommensurable memory: in the first
there is something like a fantastic, grotesque randomness, a collision between heterogeneous elements; whereas in the second (memory) the inevitability of temperament
necessarily establishes a harmony among the most disparate elements. However
incoherent a given existence may be, its human unity is not upset. All the echoes of
memory, if one could awaken them simultaneously, would form a concertpleasant or
painful, but logical and without dissonance.17

Within the context of contemporary visual culture, the sheer excess of constructed images and their relentless production and transmission (the palimpsest
manuscript), tends to decrease the acuity of our understanding of the visual
worldthat is, our desire to scrutinize and critically engage the vast field of images in the world. The content of memory presents a similar stream of images
to the mind, yet this montage refers directly (we hope) to our uniqueness as
individuals, existing as a collection of lived experiences, relationships, abilities,
perceptions, ideas. Memory is the territory of meaning; it is the fundamental
process by which we establish our relationship with the world.

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case study: aldo rossi and

the practice of memory
In order to be significant, architecture must be forgotten, or
must present only an image for reference which subsequently becomes confounded with memories.18

he most evocative works of Aldo Rossi are exemplary of the process of building meaning as we engage
memory in our everyday experiences, thinking analogically
and understanding the world tacitly by doing and making.
Whether stated explicitly or not, Rossi must have sensed
the necessity to temper his early polemics about a theory
of design with a commitment to an architecture of intense
poetry, of non-quantifiable artistry, and an architecture conscious of its autobiographical significance. Underlying the
rationalist tendencies of Rossis theoretical work is a deeply
felt reverence for the power of memory, both his own as
well as the collective memory of a particular culture or society that is embodied in key architectural types. And the
force of memory permeates his entire oeuvre to such an
extent that it is almost pathological, or cultish, or verging on
nostalgia, to say the least. For Rossi, the process of memory
analogically suggests the evolution and morphology of the
physical form of the city; and a formal language based on
a typology of architecture; and, as a matter of necessity,
the repetitive, obsessive, and dynamic nature of his own
creative practice.
However, Rossis poetic was not as self-absorbed as it may
seemor, at least, it was not ultimately meant to turn in
on itself in the creation of a restrictive, self-indulgent reverie. He expected his obsession with memory to translate
into his buildings in such a way that it would invigorate
architecture with a new liberty, a freedom of experience
and meaning similar to so many of those buildings he had
discovered and cited in his early treatise, The Architecture
of the City: the Palazzo della Ragione in Padua, the Roman
amphitheater-turned-market square in Lucca, the tiny fishing huts along the Po River valleybuildings that, while
displaying characteristics of specific types, transcended the
program of those types by accommodating changing activities and uses. By analogically relating the transposition of
architectural types with the process of memory, Rossi was
privileging meaning building with his architecture as an integral part of the built environment, especially as it governed
the evolution of cities.
Meaning. Building. Verb becomes noun, action becomes
object; and then object transgresses its own boundaries
back into the realm of action

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It is how Rossi engaged the profound memories of his past.

It is how he anticipated people would live with and within
his buildings, seeing in those forms their own memories
of an architectural past, encouraging them to reactivate
those connections, those relationships in his buildings.
The emergence of relations among things, more than the
things themselves, always gives rise to new meanings,
wrote Rossi.19 Perhaps, like this: Confront the built formit
reminds you of other buildings and other experiences you
have had beforethis new building feels familiar and established in your understanding of the givenyet, you experience this building as something different, its meaning has
changed from what you thought it should be because of
the change in how you use the architecturethe given is
expanded, enriched with new meaning meaning building.
It is how Rossi practiced architectureby working analogically from drawings to buildings to writings, discovering
relationships, exploring the space where meaning happens,
in between those things which can be explicitly articulated,
patently expressed.
The immediacy with which Rossi constructs his drawingsmaking do, like the bricoleur, with whatever material,
whatever images he has on handand the obsessive searching which this activity indexically signifies (his line roams
the page, like someone in a dark room who must feel his
way through it) consume this catalogue of observations,
memories, and imaginations. The coffee pots, the small
cabins, the smokestacks and the monumental cubes from
the Modena cemetery, the outline of the arcades in the
Gallaratese apartment building, the hands of San Carlo, the
lighthousesthey all reappear throughout the body of work.
As a process and a record of that process, the special quality of the drawings is that maybe they are never brought to
a point of completion but are always provisional, always
capable of being continued. So, in fact, Rossi does make
the same drawing over and over again; yet each drawing
presents a different instantiation of those familiar images
and forms: a particular arrangement or composition or
quality of light, a different scale or set of relationships. He
imbues them with a unique specificity that embodies the
active processes of both remembering and inventing: Likewise in my projects, repetition, collage, the displacement of
an element from one design to another, always places me
before another potential project which I would like to do by
which is also a memory of some other thing.20

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inner cities

he drawing of an imagined city analogically reveals and

describes the evolution of the real city. It develops in
time and space, at times according to a brief program, at
other times according to no rational order at all. The plan of
the city takes shape organicallybuildings and districts reacting contiguously to those elements that precede them.
The buildings themselves are abstracted, typical in nature,
and void of any particular style, blank. (In that lack of style,
does the apparent visual purity of modernism make a return?) Forms are essential, not in order to call attention to
themselves as forms, but as constituent parts of the larger
organismthe city.
As an inner city, the depicted metropolis exists perhaps on
two conceptual (and semantic) scales: the city of the imagination, interior and private, limitless; and the city as scale
model, into which the viewer projects himself, navigating
the impossibly narrow streets, the occasional boulevard,
the accidental piazza, the dead-end alley.
But it is also the city of memory: Paris, Rome, Venice,
Philadelphia, Mexico City, New York, Austin, Albuquerque,
London, Chicago. One and all of these urbanscapes simultaneously. Perhaps memory, then, is the only program to
which this drawn city adheres. The laborious drawing (ink
and brush) is meditative and paced slowly. The mind exists
diachronically, immersed in the practice of making: memory (past), process (present), contemplation (future).
All this so that Marco Polo could explain or imagine explaining or be imagined explaining to himself that what he sought
was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the travelers past changes
according to the route he has followed: not the immediate
past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but
the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveler
finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies
in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.21

The blank sheet of paperforeign and unpossessed. The

hand which holds the brush dipped in ink drags a deep
black line across the surfacea journey. The image of a city
recognized but not recalledthe past that I did not know I
had.

14

notes
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21

Concise Oxford Dictionary, 10th ed., s.v. context.

Kent Bloomer, Memory and the Poetics of Architectural Time, Crit 18 (Spring 1987): 30.
Ronald Schleifer, Analogical Thinking: Post-Enlightenment Understanding in Language, Collaboration, and
Interpretation (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000), 15.
Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 348.
Ibid., 138-41.
Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1967), 10, 15, 16.
Michael Polanyi, The Logic of Tacit Inference, in Knowing and Being (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1969), 146.
Ibid., 146, 156.
Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 38.
Ibid., 5.
Arthur C. Graeser and Glenn V. Nakamura, The Impact of a Schema on Comprehension and Memory, in
The Psychology of Leaning and Motivation, Volume 2, ed. Gordon H. Bower (New York: Academic Press,
1982), 60.
Frederic C. Bartlett, Remembering (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), 213.
William F. Brewer and Glenn V. Nakamura, The Nature and Functions of Schemata, in Handbook of Social
Cognition, Volume 1, ed. Robert S. Wyer, Jr. and Thomas K. Srull (Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,
Inc., 1984), 143-52.
David C. Rubin, introduction to Remembering Our Past, ed. David C. Rubin (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), 4-5.
Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, (Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1980), 22-3.
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arrendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968),
238.
Charles Baudelaire, quoted in M. Christine Boyer, The City of Collective Memory (Cambridge: The MIT
Press, 1994), 479.
Aldo Rossi, A Scientific Autobiography, trans. Lawrence Venuti (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1981), 45.
Ibid., 19.
Ibid., 20.
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1974), 29.

image credits
(all images and photos by the author unless otherwise noted)
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Inner city, sumi ink on paper, 40 x 50

Industrial building, Fishtown section, Philadelphia, PA
Commercial building, Champaign, IL
64 rooms, series of 64 lino-cut prints on paper with gouache and acrylic, each image 4 x 4 1/2
Map drawing of Trastevere section, Rome, Italy
Analogic, graphite and collage on paper, 36 x 36
(top to bottom) Aldo Rossi, Friedrichstaadt Housing block, Berlin, 1981-88 (Reprinted from Rossi, Aldo
Rossi: Architect, London, 1995, p. 195); Aldo Rossi, Monument and town square, Segrate, 1965; Aldo
Rossi, San Cataldo cemetery, Modena, 1971-78.
(top row) Aldo Rossi, Untitled, 1981; Composition with bridge, 1970; The hand of the saint, 1976; Urban composition with monument, 1973; (2nd row) Untitled (Casa Bay), 1975; Architecture, 1972; Study
for a monument to the resistance, 1970; Composition with S. Carlo - cities and monuments, 1970;
(3rd row) Gauloises caporal, 1971; Larchitecture assassine, 1974; Architettura razionale e imagini
celesti, 1974; Il teatro del mondo, 1987; (bottom row) Dieses ist lange her - ora questo perduto, 1975;
Untitled, 1993; The hand of the saint, 1973. (All reprinted from Rossi, Aldo Rossi: Drawings and Paintings, New York, 1993, pp. 8, 40, 64, 90, 93, 95, 105, 106, 119, 150, 171; Rossi, Aldo Rossi: Projects
and drawings 1962-1979, New York, 1979, p. 15, 154; Savi, Larchitectura di Aldo Rossi, Milan, 1985,
p. 49, 87, 88.)
(top to bottom) Aldo Rossi, Gallaratese housing block, 1969-1970 (Reprinted from Rossi, Aldo Rossi:
The Life and Works of an Architect, Cologne, 2001, p. 49); Arcade, Gallaratese housing block; Aldo
Rossi, Il Teatro del Mondo, Venice, 1979 (Reprinted from Aldo Rossi: The Life and Works of an Architect, p. 88); Aldo Rossi, Contemporary art center, Vassivire, 1988 (Reprinted from Aldo Rossi: Architect, p. 148); Aldo Rossi, Town hall, Borgoricco, 1983 (Reprinted from Aldo Rossi: Architect, p. 119);
Aldo Rossi, Fontivegge commercial district, Perugia, 1982.

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