DMJ – Place is the Principle of Generation
The essay takes the theme of storytelling and architecture as an opportunity to reframe the received generalisations of time and space. Roger Bacon’s insight that place is intrinsically temporal anticipates the description of ‘scene construction’ by neuroscientists Demis Hassabis, Dharshan Kumaran and Eleanor A. Maguire as that which ‘constitutes a common process underlying episodic memory’. This suggests that spatial coherence, narrative and meaning are mutually dependent aspects of one phenomenon, thereby serving as the common basis of relational understanding in praxis, conceptual thinking and poetics.
Bacon’s proposition is first explored through Ghirlandaio’s fresco Confirmation of the Franciscan Rule (1483–1485), in which the artist articulates 15th-century Florentine courtly theatricality within a superimposition of three settings, three historical periods and two cities. In the wake of the Enlightenment dissolution of the traditional analogies, the essay considers Aldo Rossi’s famous drawing of the San Cataldo Cemetery in Modena (1972), which embeds a potential theatricality within a conceptual apparatus. The drawing shares the character of a speculative cartography with the maps of the 14th-century Opicinus de Canistris, one of Rossi’s references, in which the author seeks orientation in reality through the capacity of place to endow disparate fragments with a coherent story. This very capacity of place is put into question in Max Ernst’s collage Invention – The Bird of Infinity (1921). Ernst deploys the bare minimum description of place with elements from a manual of chicken husbandry to evoke a reciprocity between technology and religion, along with a perceptual combinatorics.
The essay concludes by returning to our modes of involvement with place. Rather than the universal generalisations of time and space, the importance of metaphor and ambiguity in the given reality is stressed to advocate the processual temporality of a relational poetics.
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DMJournal–Architecture and Representation
No. 3: Storytelling
Edited by Mark Dorrian and Paul Carter
ISSN 2753-5010 (Online)
ISBN (tbc)
About the author
Peter Carl received his MArch from Princeton in 1971 and the Prix de Rome in 1974. He has taught design and graduate research at the University of Kentucky (for 3 years), the University of Cambridge (for 30 years), and London Metropolitan University (for 7 years), and has held visiting positions at Rice University, University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University, and Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is currently studying metaphor and embodiment as the basis for the architectural poetics by which situations are reconciled with technology, ethics, mood, reference, etc.
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