(First presented at the 1994 Southwest Regional Conference of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, Lafayette, Louisiana.)

Copyright, 1994: Christopher K. Egan

Introduction: Architecture and Emotional Power

In 1984 I sat before the church of Sant' Andrea in Mantua, Italy, sipping local wine while sketching Alberti's famous fifteenth century facade. Having been trained in rigorous formalism, I focused at first on issues as proportion, articulation, and implied perspective. Gradually, however, my concentration was broken by movement nearby. While I tried to sketch the stone facade, my eyes were drawn by human activity. As I watched, a pattern gradually became clear: people arrived in small clusters, chatted quietly, and entered the church. Some waited outside to smoke or wait for a friend, but all seemed somber and reserved. The somber mood and the reserved pattern seemed odd for a weekday afternoon in Italy. Finally yielding to curiosity, I inquired of the waiter, who quietly offered the explanation. The people I observed were gathering for a funeral, the funeral of a popular and attractive fourteen-year-old girl, who had died unexpectedly only a few days before.

I put away my sketchbook and my camera.

Sant' Andrea had ceased to be an object for intellectual analysis. Suddenly I saw Sant' Andrea through the eyes of grieving humans who sought solace in a time of loss. I had gone to Sant' Andrea to learn lessons about formal composition; but instead I learned lessons about the human soul. Sant' Andrea had reminded me of architecture's capacity to move us, and of our need to be moved by architecture.

I believe that buildings can move us. I further believe that buildings can move us in profound ways that are purely architectural; and I believe that that we can understand how buildings move us. This paper will examine how people are moved by built architecture, and it will do this by considering four main ideas. First, we will explore meaning itself, by examining contemporary psychology's insights into emotions and the poetic. Second, we will see that memory, the place of meaning, is structured in three different layers. Third, we will remind ourselves that space, not building, is the essence of architecture. Fourth, and most important, we will see that there is a parallel between the layered structure of human memory, and the layered structure of architectural meaning.

Science, the poetic, and the roots of meaning in memory

"Consciousness stands alone today as a topic that often leaves even the most sophisticated thinkers tongue-tied and confused."1

Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained

As we search for the source of meaning, it is natural to begin in the realm of psychology. From its origins in philosophy and science, psychology has struggled with an inherent contradiction: how to understand through objective means a set of phenomena which are primarily subjective: the human mind, behavior, and emotions. Since the 1960s, psychology's dominant voice has been cognitive psychology. Begun as "...an all-out effort to establish meaning as the central concept of psychology",2 this rigorous study of mental processes has unfortunately avoided many profound questions which are not easily answered through research. One of the most profound questions left unexplored has been the nature of meaning; but in recent years, leading psychologists have begun to question the reluctance to pursue meaning. In his 1990 book Human Memory, Cambridge University researcher Alan Baddeley cautions that while, "many of the richer and more intriguing aspects of human memory are difficult if not impossible to capture within the laboratory...elegant methods are not enough if they limit us to studying trivial questions."3 One of the most compelling voices in this critique has been Jerome Bruner, Research Professor of Psychology at New York University, and an early pioneer of cognitive psychology. In his 1989 Harvard-Jerusalem Lecture, he chided his colleagues: "I have urged that psychology stop trying to be 'meaning free' in its system of explanation. The very people and cultures that are its subject are governed by shared meaning and values. People commit their lives to their pursuit and fulfillment, die for them."4

This renewed interest in meaning has been reinforced by research in artificial intelligence. Among researchers who seek to produce consciousness in a machine, the most fruitful model seems to lie in the messy vitality of non-linear thought.5 It appears that a system which uses many simultaneous and unpredictable interactions is more likely to know "meaning" than the most massive collection of linear, programmed computers. Research scientists in many disciplines use non-linear, non-rational thought to obtain insights unobtainable through reason alone. This realm of non-rational understanding and creativity is called the "poetic," from the Greek word for creation, and it operates through the intuitive leap and the embrace of ambiguity. While explaining the self-imposed limits of science, Professor Peter Gray of Boston College indirectly describes the value of the poetic: "In poetry, a word or phrase may be valued precisely because it can be interpreted in more than one way, and thus can trigger many ideas in the reader's mind and mean different things to different people."6 It is helpful to recall that humans evolved as masters of the puzzle, seekers after mystery. Both neurobiology and cultural anthropology make it clear that the human ability to perceive pattern is as important as any other survival tool. Human thought proceeds through the ability to discover, apply, and create patterns and connections, a process which is stimulated by mystery. While it is customary to describe the human as tool-maker, I believe we are more accurately understood as pattern-makers: we gaze at clouds and see castles; we study stars and see both hunters and the hunted. This capacity to notice, store, and recall abstract connections is a central aspect of consciousness; it is essential to our ability to adapt in a changing world. Our poetic capacity, the ability to create light from shadows, is the mind's tool for discovering and revealing insights.7

Like the poetic, emotion has been re-evaluated by science. "Emotion is a topic that, more than any other, has bedeviled students of mental life....From the earliest philosophical speculations to the present day, emotion has been often seen as interfering with rationality, as a remnant of our pre-sapient inheritance - emotions seem to represent unbridled human nature 'in the raw'."8 Here again contemporary psychology resurrects the emotional: "The modern view answers the ancient concern about emotions. They are not necessarily remnants of our pre-sapient past, but rather they are important characteristics of an active, searching, and thinking human being."9 Whether we look in The Oxford Companion to the Mind or the writings of poet Diane Ackerman, we find that the "...mind doesn't dwell in the brain alone."10 Scientists now suspect that the mind uses the visceral region to store certain aspects of memory, in order to emphasize deeply significant phenomena which are essential to the well-being of the individual and the species. These visceral memories are tied to emotion.11 Long banished from serious discourse, both the "gut" feeling and poetic evocation have regained legitimacy through research.

Having considered the poetic, what do we "mean" by "meaning"? "The concept of meaning is every bit as problematic as the concept of mind, and for related reasons. For it seems to be the case that it is only for a mind that some things...can mean things....Meaning implied here being 'an individual reaction which an object may call out'."12 I suggest that meaning is born of memory, when patterns emerge within us: both patterns we have known, and new patterns compiled from memory fragments. Meaning seems to be the result of a triggering, when something outside us evokes a pattern which has significance within us. Meaning, born of memory, arrives along two different paths.13 The first path of meaning is internal, requiring nothing from the object or phenomenon involved. Whether or not the object has significance, we project meaning onto it in the same way we project a film onto a screen. This first path of meaning reveals more about the observer than about the observed. The second path of meaning occurs when we act on the world around us and impose or reveal patterns within. We might do this by cutting a block of marble to resemble David, or by arranging pigments so as to suggest water lilies, or arranging words to describe a wasteland. Believing as I do that the human is a cultural being, I suggest that the artifact we make will only "mean" when it triggers meaning in another. If a work moves us, it is because it has touched something within us, it has triggered some pattern, it has evoked some layer or layers of memory. Gaston Bachelard describes the "reverberation" which seems to flow from a meaningful work.14 To me this evokes an image of vibrations, deep within the meaningful work, which somehow trigger harmonic vibrations like a string deep within our soul. The metaphor I use is the cello: music begins when its strings are made to vibrate, but the cello's rich sound is produced only when the wooden body responds to the strings and vibrates with its own voice. This sympathetic answering reverberation is a metaphor for the way we are moved by meaning.

Meaning and the three layers of memory

"It is as though we had to describe and explain a building whose upper storey was erected in the nineteenth century, the ground floor dates back to the sixteenth century, and careful examination of the masonry reveals that it was reconstructed from a tower built in the eleventh century. In the cellar we come upon Roman foundations, and under the cellar a choked-up cave with Neolithic tools in the upper layer and remnants of fauna from the same period in the lower layers. That would be the picture of our psychic structure."15

Carl Jung, Mind and Earth

Meaning is born of memory, and it arises in three layers: personal memory, memory of culture, and memory of the species. First is personal memory, what you and I have experienced or learned. For most research psychologists, personal memory is the only memory, the memory an individual acquires during life. Cambridge University's Alan Baddeley writes, "Human memory is a system for storing and retrieving information,...that is, of course, acquired through the senses."16 This scientific focus on acquired knowledge is explained by our place in evolution. Most animals are born with much of the tools they need to survive: the knowledge, skills, and behavior we call instinct. But many animals also have the capacity to acquire new information, skills, and behaviors; we call this intelligence, the capacity to learn. When we say that humans are more intelligent than other animals, we mean that we are born without essential knowledge, being equipped instead with a sophisticated ability to learn. Most human knowledge must be learned through our own experience or through the experience of others communicated to us. This makes us highly adaptable to change, but it also means we are born helpless. Personal memory is specific, at least in the sense that we remember events by connecting them to our specific circumstances and the immediate effect they had on us, so that many of us can recall vividly where we were when we learned of John Kennedy's assassination or the Challenger disaster. Personal memory is subjective, although the cultural tools of language let us share our memories with others. Unless we use language to transform it into the memory of culture, personal memory dies with us. Essentially, personal memory is transitory.

The second layer of memory is older and more lasting than personal memory: the memory of culture. This is the memory passed down to us from those before, and it comes in several forms. The immediate source of culture is the stories of our families, of our parents, grandparents, and ancestors. A more common understanding of cultural memory is the stories and behaviors a nation or other group uses to strengthen the bond within the group. A third and more permanent form of culture is the mechanisms developed for agriculture, trade, governing, and communicating. Culture is memory, the memory that lives beyond ourselves. Cultural memory has been neglected by many psychologists because it has no precise biological source. Others, however, have come to accept Princeton anthropologist Clifford Geertz's assertion that, "...there is no such thing as a human nature independent of culture."17 Peter Gray describes layers of learning: "We not only learn, but we code what we have learned into words and pass it on from generation to generation. This ability has spawned a new way of adapting, cultural adaptation,"18 while Jerome Bruner adds, "It is man's participation in culture and the realization of his mental powers through culture that make it impossible to construct a human psychology on the basis of the individual alone."19 The human would perish in a matter of hours without culture; we must be taught how to eat, how to walk, how to avoid danger; ultimately we are taught to communicate with others, the doorway through which we enter fully into culture. Cultural memory begins as personal memory, but through language it becomes shared. Cultural memory is expansive; the broader its focus, the more people it affects. And cultural memory is lasting; we remember today the musings of Socrates, despite his death more than two thousand years ago.

The third and deepest layer of memory is the memory of the species, the genetic memory of evolution, what Jung calls the "collective unconscious."20 Many scientists are uncomfortable with species memory, for two reasons. First, there is no currently understood biological mechanism for inherited memory; we can study genes for specific physical traits, but there do not seem to be specific genes for specific memories. Second, the question of whether or not humans have instinct is one that many find disturbing. After all, we prefer to believe we are free from the biologically determined behaviors so typical of other animals. But nature does not abandon mechanisms that work well, and instinctive shared memory is too useful to be abandoned completely. Peter Gray reminds us, "In psychology it is useful to think of three levels at which adaptation (learning) occurs. One level is evolution itself, by which change in genetic makeup over generations allows organisms to continue to survive and reproduce as the environment changes."21 While Dr. Gray is reluctant to assert a memory of the species, his explanation of recorded "change in genetic makeup" is at the very least provocative. Behavioral research has indicated that the tendency towards certain behaviors and emotional responses can be controlled genetically, even though the biological mechanism may not be understood. We may be less at the mercy of instinct than other animals, but we obviously respond to darkness and light, love and nurturing. These are ancient memories born of instinct, maintained by the species because they are useful. Because these memories are important, they are reinforced with the visceral memory we call emotion. This third layer of species memory is deepest both in the metaphorical sense of descending down into dark realms of the distant past, and deepest in the biological structure of the human brain. Genetic memories move us most profoundly, because they are shadows, and because they touch our most primal instincts of fear, joy, love, and aspirations.

Meaning in architecture: Layers and the primacy of space

"... the pleasurable intensity of my response to certain buildings, seen for the first time, suggests to me that they must somehow correspond to a model which already exists deep inside me. How else can I account for a sensation so much closer to recognition than to discovery?"22

Olivier Marc, Psychology of the House

If meaning is born of memory, architectural meaning is born of the memory of space. For architecture to move us, it must speak through the built work, in the spatial language of architecture. Architecture is not about words, it is not merely about buildings, nor is it primarily a visual art; it is closer to choreography, the shaping of human movement in space. Lao Tzu described the usefulness of the empty: "Molding clay into a vessel, we find the utility in its hollowness; cutting doors and windows for a house, we find the utility in its empty space."23 It is important to understand that space is not truly empty; rather it is full of potential for use. In this way architecture is like theatrical design, insofar as it creates the useful void in which is played the human drama. The most profound architectural experiences are spatial: those whose meaning arises from enclosure and openness, movement and rest, from effects of scale relative to the human, and from issues of order and chaos, clarity and obscurity.

Architectural meaning begins with meaningful space, but architecture uses multiple elements in the shaping and articulation of space. The rest of this paper proposes a relationship among three components of architecture, and the three layers of memory. Music provides an analogy; like the mind, it works in three layers. Compositional form establishes the rhythmic structure, literally the heart of the work. Over and around the rhythm is woven melody, sometimes dancing with the rhythm and sometimes breaking away. Finally come the embellishments of harmony and counterpoint, and the specific messages of the lyrics. Each layer, rhythm, melody, lyrics, conveys its own meaning; but in addition each layer adds to and enriches the meaning of the whole. In the same way, I suggest that architecture speaks through three different layers: structure, enclosure, and surface articulation.

Layer One: Structure

"The architect's general task is to provide a warm and livable space. Carpets are warm and livable. He decides for this reason to spread out one carpet on the floor and to hang up four to form the four walls. But you cannot build a house out of carpets. Both the carpet on the floor and the tapestry on the wall require a structural frame to hold them in the correct place."24

Adolf Loos, The Principle of Cladding

Loos clearly considered structure secondary to enclosure. He continues by saying, "To invent this frame is the architect's second task," and later that, "...cladding is older even than structure."25 And yet in this passage, Loos crystallizes the relationships among space, structure, and enclosure. He affirms that making space is the architect's fundamental task, and for Loos, therefore, elements of enclosure are most important. However, in passing he observes that, without the structural frame the carpets could do nothing. I agree that structure is the servant of space, which is articulated by enclosure; but structure is a powerful servant because it governs what the enclosure can be. At the instant Loos' architect erects his structural frame, he has determined the potential for space; he has established what is and is not possible for the shape, scale, and orientation of the space made by the carpets. The frame determines where the carpets can hang, what shape the space will be, how high or low, how long or compact.

I maintain that structure is the deepest and most profound determinant of architectural meaning. Structure shapes space the way genetic memory shapes meaning: subtly, often below the level of consciousness, but setting the fundamental realm of possibilities upon which all other meaning will be built. Structure need not be revealed in order to speak; even when concealed, structural form determines the type of volumes possible. Le Corbusier understood the spatial revolution made possible by reinforced concrete, formalized in his "five points" of 1927and the 1914 Maison Domino.26 During the 1970s and 80s many architects abdicated their role as space-makers, and assumed that "meaning" could be applied like wall paper in the form of surface ornament. Seduced by the written word, these architects further misunderstood the spatial nature of architecture by assuming that meaning only arises if it can be precisely communicated in verbal terms. However, by abdicating the design of space and structure to the developer and the engineer, they unwittingly revealed the primacy of structure in architectural meaning. No matter what ornament is applied to the surface, the inhabitant's architectural experience is of the volumes inside, established by the location and spacing of columns, beams, walls, and slabs. No amount of ornament will enrich a spatially impoverished building; and no cosmetic surgery will give meaning to the uninspired space within poorly conceived bones.

Walking in the Roman baths, we find most of the surface articulation has fallen away; but we also find that the bones are still meaningful. The structure itself is capable of moving us because it shapes a spatial experience which is itself powerful. The same is true of Kahn's Exeter Library or Richards Medical Research Building. Imagine them as ruins: even if all the brick, wood, and glass were to fall away, the remaining structural skeleton would be evocative. As the layer farthest removed from literal symbols, structure may seem mute to those looking for literal meaning; but as the deep bones of space, structure can produce the most profound meaning, by touching us unconsciously. Like Jung's collective unconscious, structure speaks, not through precise symbols, but through shadows and suggestions, through volumes and patterns; it speaks in the most purely architectural of terms: space and the potential for space.

Layer Two: Enclosure

"In the beginning was cladding. Man sought shelter from inclement weather and protection and warmth while he slept. He sought to cover himself. The covering is the oldest architectural detail."27

Adolf Loos, The Principle of Cladding

In some construction types, structure and enclosure are identical, so that the walls of the Pantheon are both structure and enclosure. But today more than ever, structure and enclosure are usually separate. The industrialization of building production has encouraged use of the frame, a mass-produced assemblage of vertical and horizontal structure, which does not require enclosure for support. Today both structure and enclosure are produced in factories, and rarely do they meet until their assembly on the site. The distinction between structure and enclosure is not new; from the traditional Japanese house to Maison Domino, from Laugier's Primitive Hut to Kahn's British Art Center, many architectural forms distinguish between structure and enclosure, between the frame and the curtain wall. Even more than Loos, Semper considered enclosure the essence of architecture, "Hanging carpets remained the true walls, the visible boundaries of space. The often solid walls behind them were necessary for reasons that had nothing to do with the creation of space; they were needed for security, for supporting a load, for their permanence, and so on....Even where building solid walls became necessary, the latter were only the inner, invisible structure hidden behind the true and legitimate representatives of the wall, the colorful woven carpets."28 Some of the most elegant architecture of the twentieth century, from the Barcelona Pavilion and the Villa Savoye to Maki's Spiral Building, have derived their poetry from the dance of structure and enclosure.

If structure is the rhythm of architecture, enclosure becomes the melody, the lyric line weaving in and out and commenting on the structure's idea. Enclosure may mimic the volume of structure, but it can also deny it, expand it, condense it, or enrich it. Freed of structural responsibility, the enclosure can be opaque, transparent, lacy or ambiguous. Sweeping volumes can swirl around a straight row of columns, and layer upon layer of filtering screens can produce mysterious shells within a Cartesian frame. Where structure identifies potential, enclosure clarifies choice. Elements of enclosure determine where the light will be and how it will feel; they determine where space will be high and where it will be low, where grand and where intimate, where ordered and calm, and where chaotic and disturbing. Enclosure articulates where we will be and how we will move. Thus while structure shapes possible space, laying down a haunting and imprecise meaning in the unconscious, enclosure makes space real, clarifying precisely the architectural meaning. Just as cultural memory brings specificity to the shadowy memory of the species, so too does enclosure add precision to the less obvious meaning of structure. For without its draped layers of fabrics, tapestries, and rugs, what meaning would there be in the poles of a Bedouin tent?

"...the Alhambra became a written building, its body covered with script, telling its tales and singing its poems from its inscribed walls. It is filled with a kind of celestial graffiti, where the voice of God becomes liquid and where the joys of art, the intellect, and love can be experienced."29

Carlos Fuentes, The Buried Mirror

In architecture, the final layer of meaning is articulation of surface. It is no less important than structure or enclosure, but it serves a different role. Sullivan insisted that, "...a decorated structure, harmoniously conceived,...cannot be stripped of its system of ornament without destroying its individuality."30 Architecture is indeed powerful when ornament appears to have "...come forth from the very substance of the material...(as) a flower appears amid the leaves of its parent plant;"31 but it is useful to note that ornament contributes meaning in ways very different from structure and enclosure. Rome offers an example. Roman builders developed a versatile language of wall and arch construction, with which they could build every scale of cultural significance, from bridges and aqueducts to baths, temples and triumphal arches. While the construction typology was constant, each building could be given articulated status with overlays of surface symbolism. The builders of the baths dressed their powerful volumes with rich patterns of columns, arches, entablatures, and statuary, evoking the Classical Greek humanism they so admired. As structural analyses reveal, the rectilinear implications of applied pilasters and beams denied the arched wall structures concealed within. Orthodox modernism rejected such denial as "dishonest;" but it is more accurate to observe that the surface ornament produced an additional layer of meaning, allowing the architecture to speak with greater complexity.

Both Semper and Loos describe adornment of the body as the primordial act of ornament.32 In his search for the origins of architectural ornament, Semper suggests an ancient prototype in the erection of temporary structures for public festivals, not unlike the scaffoldings we erect for rock concerts and political events. "The festival apparatus, the improvised scaffolding with all the special splendor and frills that indicate more precisely the occasion for the festivity and enhance the glorification of the day - covered with decorations, draped with carpets, dressed with boughs and flowers, adorned with festoons and garlands, fluttering banners and trophies - this is the motive of the permanent monument, which is intended to recount for coming generations the festive act and the event celebrated."33 Of course not all ornament can be explained by Sempers's hypothetical festival scaffold. A much older origin can be found in the magical symbols carved into walls to influence unseen forces; and yet Semper's festival scaffold explains the recurring motif in architectural ornament of a tendency to mimic frame structures covered with draperies. In Pompeii this was transformed into structurally impossible but elegantly delicate wall paintings. In cities throughout the Roman Empire the frame and draped ornaments appear carved in stone on triumphal arches. And in the rooms of Robert Adam, frame and festoon are rendered in delicately detailed plasterwork.

The primary limit to this third layer of meaning is its transitory nature. Physically, surface articulation is usually the first element to disappear through decay, erosion, or defacement, leaving the bleached bones of structure to speak their more mystifying language of volume and rhythm. Further, as the most specific and conscious layer of construction, surface articulation is the least universal and the first to become inscrutable, because it functions chiefly in the realms of personal and cultural memory. Ornament is transitory if it speaks within a specific culture; we may forget the meaning, or we may not understand the meaning, if its symbols are those of a foreign culture. The Koranic verses of the Alhambra may have profound meanings for the devout Muslim, but the meanings are lost to non-readers of Arabic; meanwhile we do not completely understand the writing on Mayan temples. In this way, the third layer of meaning, surface articulation, is similar to the memory of individuals. Personal memory lends precision and particularity to the memory of culture, just as surface articulation lends precision and particularity to the meaning produced when enclosure overlays volume. Ironically, it is this precision and particularity which makes the meaning transitory. Just as personal memory is the first layer of memory to lose meaning, surface articulation is the first component of architectural meaning to become meaningless.

Even if an ornament's meaning is foreign or forgotten, however, we can be moved by the power of devoted craft; and yet there is one element of surface articulation which does not lose its meaning, whose poetic power is more universal than the written word or a specific symbol. I refer to the marks left by the hand of the craftsman, or by the hand of the technology. When we can see how a thing has come together, whether the nuts and bolts of a steel frame, the intricate placing of bricks, or the sheer drama of massive piers set by carefully balanced cranes, we call it articulation, the revelation of the act of assembly. It can move us precisely because it is a perfect incarnation of the memory of the making. By revealing the act of making, articulation becomes a manifestation of the idea. Articulated making reveals the essential act of any art...the physical incarnation of spiritual idea, word made flesh. This is why "God is in the details."

Conclusion

Architecture moves us. It can comfort us or intimidate us; it can enlighten us or mystify us; it can bring us joy or tear at our hearts. Architecture moves us by touching three layers of memory. At its most primal, architectural space touches our deepest emotional core, evoking shadow memories of the womb, the cave, the forest, and light. Architecture can move us by recalling memories of culture, of our place in the historical world. Personal memories add overlays of subjective meanings, as buildings are associated with events in our lives; an ordinary house may remind one person of the warm glow of childhood, while stirring up repressed memories of abuse for another.

Theoretical models should not distort reality for the sake of elegant simplicity. It would be wrong to suggest that the three layers of architecture precisely match the three layers of memory; and yet there is a parallel in depth and permanence between the layers of memory and the layers of built architecture. Structure, like the collective unconscious, forms the oldest, most permanent core. Enclosure, like the memory of culture, expands on structure, but is subject to loss of meaning through forgetting and decay. Surface articulation, like personal memory, can speak most precisely, but will lose its meaning quickly, an easy prey for time.

Washington's Vietnam Veterans Memorial offers a closing example. Some veterans found the simple wall of the original design too abstract, so a sculpture was added to represent the soldiers. But because it was a precise literal representation, the additional sculpture was incapable of speaking in universal terms. By being obviously male, the forms excluded the women who served and died. Maya Lin's original design, however, speaks in purely architectural terms, simultaneously universal, cultural, and personal. We move spatially down into the earth, a universally understood entrance to the world of death. We look into polished granite slabs engraved with names, our culture's architectural symbol for honoring the dead. We touch specific names, people we may or may not have known, and see ourselves in ghostly reflection behind their names. In this one built form we touch three layers of memory; in this one built form we find three layers of architecture. Memory and architecture intertwine, overlaying one another like threads in a fabric, constructing meaning in complex layers. Memory and architecture intertwine, and through their layers, we are moved.

NOTES

1. Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1991:22. (See note 7 below.)

2. Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990: 2. Professor Bruner was a pioneer of cognitive psychology in the 1950s.

3. Alan Baddeley, Human Memory: Theory and Practice, Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1990: 1-2. Professor Baddeley is a leading research psychologist with the MRC Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge, England.

          4.      Bruner, op. cit.: 20.

5. Several books are useful as an introduction to artificial intelligence. Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, New York: Vintage Books, 1980, won a Pulitzer Prize. Hofstadter joined with Daniel C. Dennett to write The Mind's I (New York: Bantam Books, 1981). A very recent work is David Hillel Gelernter's The Muse in the Machine, New York: Free Press, 1994.

6. Peter Gray, Psychology, New York: Worth Publishers, Inc. 1991: 575. Professor Gray is Chair of the Boston College Psychology Department. This book is a comprehensive introductory text, noteworthy for its balanced and lucid discussion of the issues.

7. Christopher Egan, "Dancing on the Threshold of Thought," in Accessory/Architecture, Auckland: The University of Auckland School of Architecture and Planning, July 1995. This paper explored the importance of non-linear thought and the puzzle. For a further understanding of pattern-making, see: Ernest L. Schusky and T. Patrick Culbert, Introducing Culture, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1987 (chapters two and three); and Gray, cited above (chapters four, five, and eleven).

8. "Emotion", in The Oxford Companion to the Mind, Richard L. Gregory, Editor, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987: 219. This is a useful one-volume encyclopedia of the current state of psychology. The discussion of emotions is brief, but compelling.

                    9.     Ibid.: 220.

10. Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses, New York: Random House, 1990: 293. Ms. Ackerman, a poet, is writing a series of books exploring consciousness.

                    11.   "Emotion", in op. cit.: 220.

                    12.   "Meaning", in Oxford Companion to the Mind, op. cit.: 450.

13. Our most important moments are dense with memories and meanings; but memory and meaning are elusive, they shift constantly, and evaporate just as we drag them into the light. This is unsettling for scholars more at home in the rational world of well-reasoned premises supported by publicly verifiable facts. However, if we are to understand architecture, how it affects us and how we might carry it into the future, we cannot avoid wrestling with the spirits. Two sources of insight are: "Memory refers to our storehouse of information and to the processes that allow us to recall and use that information when we need it....Every waking moment is full of memories. Every thought, every learned response, every act of recognition is based on memory. In a very real sense memory is the mind." (Gray, op. cit.: 323); and "..Meaning is not, on this account, primarily a property of objects, John Dewey observed; it must be primarily a property of behavioral responses and derivatively of the objects that enter into those patterns." ("Meaning", op. cit.: 452.)

                    14.   Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Boston: Beacon Press, 1969:                              xii-xiii.

15. Carl Jung, Civilization in Transition, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970: 31. Many academic and research psychologists question Jung's speculations as non-verifiable. However, despite legitimate skepticism, his ideas of the collective unconscious and the archetypes have been found useful by many in the clinical setting.

                    16.   Baddeley, op. cit.,: 13.

                    17.   Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books,                              1973: 49.

                    18.   Gray, op. cit.: 85.

                    19.   Bruner, op. cit.:12.

20. See Gray, op. cit., chapters three and four, and the article "Jung" in Oxford Companion to the Mind, op. cit.: 403-405. Also see Volume Nine of The Collected Works of Carl Jung from the Princeton University Press. A useful companion is Robert Hopcke, A Guided Tour of the Collected Works of Carl Jung, Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1989.

                    21.   Gray, op. cit.: 85.

                    22.   Olivier Marc, Psychology of the House, London: Thames and Hudson, 1977:                               7.

23. Amos Ih Tiao Chang, The Tao of Architecture, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956: 7.

24. Adolf Loos, "The Principle of Cladding", in Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays 1897-1900, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1982: 66.

                    25.    Ibid.: 66-67.

26. Stanislaus von Moos, Le Corbusier, Elements of a Synthesis, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1979. Chapter Three (pages 69-142).

                    27.    Loos, op. cit.: 66.

28. Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989: 104.

29. Carlos Fuentes, The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992: 57.

30. Louis Sullivan, "Ornament in Architecture," from Kindergarten Chats and Other Writings, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1979: 188.

                    31.    Ibid.: 189.

32. See: Adolf Loos, "Ornament and Crime", quoted in: Benedetto Gravagnuolo, Adolf Loos, Theory and Works, New York: Rizzoli International, 1982: 67; and Semper, op. cit.: 270.