Friday, January 2, 2009

Jung, Architecture, Existentialism and Romance

“Typologies are important to designers, because they represent a social contract between society and those who design and build. ” (49)

Last week I read Frances Downing's Remembrance and the Design of Place. (You might be wondering how I picked this book: I am an Amazon book search junkie, and spend my free time searching random keywords and browsing the "people who bought this also bought..." sections...this was bought by someone who bought something else I also bought.)

Downing's basic premise is somewhat Jungian
: an individual's memory of a place falls into one (or more) "domain" (archetype): secret places, ancestral places, places of self, sensate places, places of desire, places of comfort, gregarious places, places of region, vicarious places and abstract places. Since everyone can group their memories within these domains, designers can use their own personal memories of places, identify them with one (or more) domain(s) and use that domain (those domains) to generate new spaces that resonate with the client/end-user. To come to this conclusion, Downing created a game of "Spatial Solitaire," where she asked designers (young and old) to recall spaces, group them (according to the individuals sorting schemes) and then analyzed the results. Part II of the game asked the designers to use remembered spaces to generate a new space for an imagined client.

As I read this text, I'm pulled in two directions. At moments, Downings poetic writing makes me stop and recall my own experiences of place, play along with Spatial Solitaire, if you will. And then, I remember reading Edward Hall's The Hidden Dimension and become cynical: can there really be such a thing as a collective architectural conscious, one that spans cultural and geographic differences?

My own game of Spatial Solitaire would go something like this: my Grandmother's blue kitchen, the dark spaces beneath the overpass near my elementary school in Mumbai, the stairs down from that overpass to the school, the small hut near the beach in India with the well outside, the hallways in the apartment complex, the path behind the apartment buildings lined with honeysuckle, the Salem Public Library, the Hicks' garage, the locker room entrances at Allegheny High School, the back entrance to Mill Mountain Coffee Shop (with the old couches), the long walk with the steps up to the concert hall in Ohio (?), the National Gallery of Art, Villa Savoye, Carcassonne, Cezanne's garden studio, the steps with the café one block from the Seine in the 4th arr., the Lyon TGV station, the parcours in Lyon, the concrete loungers on Barcelona's beach, etc...

Each space has something of a story to it, some events have been fabricated from photographs (those spaces that I inhabited as a very young child), some have evolved in my dream world (I often dream of my Grandmother's kitchen and the bridge by my old school in India - I'm no longer sure if my memories are real or imagined), and some are still very real.

My own reading of the text responds to the questions of cultural barriers: as an Indian-born American (I was born in Mumbai and moved to the US when I was 7), I recall my Grandmother's kitchen in Bombay with its 4" blue tiles, white grout, stone counter tops, a grated window upon which crows would perch in the afternoon until I chased them away - an ancestral/sensate place that Downing (an American raised on farms in California) can relate to (in the text, images of her Grandmother's kitchen play a sizeable role). Sure, I have some American influence, but this memory in particular occured before my move to the US. I would be interested to see if my mother (who has spent the majority of her life in India) has similar memories of that kitchen.

What becomes the more pressing question, then, is whether the recognition of domains (by the designer and public) are important at all. The idea of the "design intent," when applied to this thesis (of memory and place-making), might suggest that the designer "intends" a particular interpretation of the domains present within the new spaces. But Downing warns against this:
“The designer’s ‘use’ of memory is free of any one construction.” (70)
In fact, Downing notes that the use of memory by designers is often subconscious, and wonders if we'd be better designers by making this use a conscious decision. She pursues and existential path:
“The expert designer simply ‘works’...is less conscious of her or his own process...It is probably only when they must explain themselves to others—builders, clients, users—that designers become more aware of how they reach certain conclusions in design.” (91)
Here, the "doing" is what is important, not the questioning of the process while in the midst of creation, only after the completion of the design act. Which begs the question: if Downing is writing about the important connection between memory of place and designing new places, is Downing's book moot? Does knowing about the relationship between memory and place-making help me design a memorable place (if, in the end, my memory-design is a subconscious act in order to be most successful)? Must I know what I do as I do it, if not knowing is what makes me do it well?

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