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In Closing: Architecture as Legacy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 October 2019
Summary
Legend has it that the ancient poet, Simonides of Ceos, miraculously escaped from a dining hall mere seconds before it collapsed, killing everyone inside. By accessing his mental image of the hall filled with the diners, Simonides was able to recall the exact seating plan and help identify the dead. He was the first to use the ‘memory palace’, or the method of loci. This method, popular in the early modern period, advises its practitioner to memorise large amounts of information by placing them in separate rooms in a palace. To recall the information, one simply needs to walk through the palace to find the chamber in which the data is stored. Although a large house or palace with many rooms is said to work best, advocates of this method of memorisation posit that any loci can be used. That this method uses architecture as a way to compartmentalise knowledge and memories is quite telling: physical structures carry a lot of emotional and mental power. Architecture is and was meant to evoke an emotional response. Whether it is the house you grew up in or your first school, buildings feature strongly in our memories, reminding us of our individual past as well as a collective past, either familial or collegiate. Buildings are the keepers of our memories. It is therefore not surprising that architecture could – and still does – transform words, needs, and desires into actuality, into physicality. Our visions can become reality. The physicality of architecture and the space that it creates provides a theatre in which lives are enacted. This interaction of movement, action, events, and space creates a special relationship between physical structures and our lives. In doing so, architecture and space hold the essence of memory, manipulating and even romanticising it in our minds. There is no doubt that architecture means something to people, as the commonly quoted passage from Maurice Halbwachs's Space and Collective Memory demonstrates:
The great majority [of a city's inhabitants] may well be more sensitive to a certain street being torn up, or a certain building or home being razed, than to the gravest national, political, or religious events…not only homes and walls persist through the centuries, but also that whole portion of the group in continuous contact with them, its life merged with things.
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- The Culture of Castles in Tudor England and Wales , pp. 209 - 216Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2019