SELFHOOD, MEMORY, AND IMAGINATION

Architecture is essentially an art form of reconciliation and mediation, and, in addition to settling us in space and place, landscapes and buildings articulate our experiences of duration and time between the polarities of past and future. Memory and fantasy, recollection and imagination are related and they have always a situational and specific content. Someone who cannot remember can hardly imagine, because memory is the soil of imagination. It is hard to recall, for instance, a familiar/iconic photograph as a two-dimensional image on photographic paper; we tend to remember the depicted object, person, or event in its full spatial reality. The characteristically human mode of existence takes place in the worlds of possibilities, molded by the human capacity of remembrance, fantasy, and imagination. There are different kinds of architecture in relation to memory: one that cannot recall or touch upon the past, and another that evokes a sense of depth and continuity.