Architecture like an art of the oblivion Giorgio Agamben’s lectio about the memory

Insān (إنسان), human being in Arabic, shares the same root as the verb nasiya (نسي), which means to forget.

The human being is ontologically the one who forgets. At the centre of this issue of ADH is the experience of losing and finding oneself within memory to continue to be. Within the set of habits that guarantee the continuity of culture and memory itself, lie the constructive traditions and compositional rules of architectural forms through which the past – never concluded in architectural experience – is brought into the present.

The parts are synchronically present in the architecture that carries out the task of connecting them without entirely losing their specific characteristics. The design process itself is not perfectly linear. Every drawing is a progressive verification of choices: moving from the plan to the section to correct the plan once again. Every decision tests the previous ones and can lead towards different directions. Memories separated from the material that once constituted their origin (ruins, remnants of cities torn apart by wars...) are destined for new combinations (architecture of spolia, reuse, recycling...), in an open field. The attempt to bestow upon them a presumed unity (difficult to achieve, lost, or never existed) characterizes works that reveal coexisting stratifications of eras and languages.

On the outer side facade of the Cathedral of Syracuse, the Doric columns of the Athenaion emerge among Baroque stylistic elements and, inside, from Byzantine masonry. Oblivion, while swallowing up a large part of the Greek temple, returns partial elements whose identities are reinforced through comparison with other elements.

Architecture measures time. Imagination and fantasy pass down a memory that is betrayed, incomplete, alive, and ever renewed. Like Proust's petite madeleine, every fragment – a sound, a smell, a detail – triggers the reconstruction of the entire image, reassembling the parts into which it had shattered over the centuries or in the exact moment of a catastrophe.

The Japanese art of kintsugi teaches us that value lies not so much in the sum of individual pieces, but in the ability to reassemble them and hold them together with an addition that is precious. That erasure confers meaning and enables a new interpretation.

Oblivion guarantees an imperfect mechanism for transmitting memories. It can be linked to contingent events or to a precise design choice that eliminates the superfluous and selects to consolidate memories by affirming new values. Among the most famous erasures are those of Michelangelo: the conversion of the Roman frigidarium of the Baths of Diocletian (Santa Maria degli Angeli) into a Christian Basilica, whereby walling up original 3rd-century AD openings and infilling imperial arches, a liturgical hall was created. On the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, to obtain a single surface, Michelangelo had 15th-century masterpieces chiselled away and destroyed (three frescoes by Perugino, including the altarpiece of the Assumption of the Virgin) as well as two lunettes that he himself had painted; in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, by eliminating the 15th-century porch, the medieval/early-Renaissance appearance of the complex is erased in favour of a facade articulated by a giant order of pilasters; the three-arched loggia placed by Michelangelo on the upper floor of the facade overlooking the Tiber of Palazzo Farnese gives new meaning to the work by abandoning the existing rhythm and compositional balance.

In contemporary times, needs for expansion or reuse have provided opportunities for other transformations, from the post-industrial conversion of the Tate Modern in London by Herzog & de Meuron (1995-2000) to that of the former Fabra & Coats textile factory in Barcelona by the studio Roldán + Berengué (2019), along with numeric other cases…

This comes despite the widespread adoption of an idea of conserving cultural heritage that, instead, separates historical stratifications into an archive of data that barely communicate with one another.

In Italy, the restrictions of the Superintendency of Cultural Heritage, for example, while having the merit of saving important historical evidence, have also paradoxically caused abandonment and decay, while around them an ordinary city has grown distractedly.

Giorgio Agamben, in the lecture “From Memory to Friendship” curated by Paolo Pelliccia at the Consortial Library of Viterbo which is offered in full below via the link delves into the continuity of culture and memory as a system of relationships and associated “tensions” between events, things, and people.

Agamben’s lectio discusses memory not a database to be preserved and drawn from, but as the presence of the past in our being in the world. It is illuminating in understanding how designers, historians, restorers, and urban planners can overcome the approach of absolute and shortsighted preservation of “cultural property” as finished objects separated from daily life, confined to leisure or tourist use, set within a time detached. 

In conclusion, before watching the lecture remotely, we can consider that remembering everything, continuously refining the technological tools devised for such purposes, could risk a sterile descriptivism, an accumulation and storage of information difficult to confront. Anyone who is no longer “master of memory” – a phrase used by Agamben in reference to Giordano Bruno’s The Art of Memory – struggles to understand the relationships between things, facts, and humanity, thus abdicating one of the most important duties of the architects.

Here is the link to Agamben's lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTMmVB-hzOE.