Ed: Do you own a video camera?
Renee Madison: No. Fred hates them.
Fred Madison: I like to remember things my own way.
Ed: What do you mean by that?
Fred Madison: How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened.
Lost Highway, 1997
A building is a slippery thing. It seems so solid, so unchanging and objective. But it's nothing more than a collection of experiences in the mind. It's a sequence of sights, sounds, and smells woven into a movie by your brain. And it's a group of memories bundled under an arbitrary category - "my house", "the office", "the pyramids". These experiences, these memories, seem like external, objective things. But they're all in your head.
Your mind is building these places all the time. It takes your perceptions (a splash of color, a smell of paint, a feeling of cold or sun on your face) and bundles them with your stream of consciousness ("what room is the 11 o'clock meeting in again?") to make an image of a place. It uses this image to locate you in space, to fix you in time. It overlays time after time to build your memory of home. It shapes your dreams. It uses both experienced and borrowed images to personify institutions and far flung places. Your mind uses its spatial memory to structure your life.
No buildings aren't really made of concrete. They're made of memories. And memories are not a stable thing. They change all the time. So do our experiences of buildings. They drift over the course of our lives, with new spaces coloring old ones, with places mis-remembered, with changing opinions, and ageing physical abilities, and with forgetting. Our experience is a heterogeneous thing, full of holes and overlaps. Our brains compensate by automatically smoothing things out in the background, without us even knowing it. But the instability is there, just under the surface.
And our collective experience of buildings is even less stable. It's built up from a collage of different people's (unstable) memories, dreams, and desires. And it suffers from (mis)interpretation, imperfect documentation, and propaganda. It's codified in maps, pictures, and descriptions - with varying degrees of accuracy. Our collective spatial experience is partial and biased to begin with, even before it's colored by our cultural point-of-view. If our individual experience has holes, our collective experience is swiss-cheese.
Which leaves a gap between the bricks and mortar of our world, and our experiences of them. This allows our individual experiences to slip away from each other. Your experience of a place is very different from mine, from anybody else's. And our collective experience of a place may be only lightly connected to reality (if there even is such a thing). It enables fascinating, different experiences, from one person to the next, from one culture to the next, from one time to the next.
But "our" image of a place seems so familiar! Our brain does such a good job of smoothing out the kinks that we can't even imagine another point of view. It's an illusion. When we are confronted with the other perspective, a place may seem strange, even scary. I call this experience "alternate architecture." Explore it with me...
Renee Madison: No. Fred hates them.
Fred Madison: I like to remember things my own way.
Ed: What do you mean by that?
Fred Madison: How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened.
Lost Highway, 1997
A building is a slippery thing. It seems so solid, so unchanging and objective. But it's nothing more than a collection of experiences in the mind. It's a sequence of sights, sounds, and smells woven into a movie by your brain. And it's a group of memories bundled under an arbitrary category - "my house", "the office", "the pyramids". These experiences, these memories, seem like external, objective things. But they're all in your head.
Your mind is building these places all the time. It takes your perceptions (a splash of color, a smell of paint, a feeling of cold or sun on your face) and bundles them with your stream of consciousness ("what room is the 11 o'clock meeting in again?") to make an image of a place. It uses this image to locate you in space, to fix you in time. It overlays time after time to build your memory of home. It shapes your dreams. It uses both experienced and borrowed images to personify institutions and far flung places. Your mind uses its spatial memory to structure your life.
No buildings aren't really made of concrete. They're made of memories. And memories are not a stable thing. They change all the time. So do our experiences of buildings. They drift over the course of our lives, with new spaces coloring old ones, with places mis-remembered, with changing opinions, and ageing physical abilities, and with forgetting. Our experience is a heterogeneous thing, full of holes and overlaps. Our brains compensate by automatically smoothing things out in the background, without us even knowing it. But the instability is there, just under the surface.
And our collective experience of buildings is even less stable. It's built up from a collage of different people's (unstable) memories, dreams, and desires. And it suffers from (mis)interpretation, imperfect documentation, and propaganda. It's codified in maps, pictures, and descriptions - with varying degrees of accuracy. Our collective spatial experience is partial and biased to begin with, even before it's colored by our cultural point-of-view. If our individual experience has holes, our collective experience is swiss-cheese.
Which leaves a gap between the bricks and mortar of our world, and our experiences of them. This allows our individual experiences to slip away from each other. Your experience of a place is very different from mine, from anybody else's. And our collective experience of a place may be only lightly connected to reality (if there even is such a thing). It enables fascinating, different experiences, from one person to the next, from one culture to the next, from one time to the next.
But "our" image of a place seems so familiar! Our brain does such a good job of smoothing out the kinks that we can't even imagine another point of view. It's an illusion. When we are confronted with the other perspective, a place may seem strange, even scary. I call this experience "alternate architecture." Explore it with me...
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