Following Armenian Memories: In the Myth of Venice. In Search for Determinants of Architectural Form

Abstract

To invoke Mnemosyne (goddess of memory in Greek mythology) is to invoke her daughter muses? If so then memory is always behind the imagination. The idea of the research grew out of interest to understand if architecture can be recognized as a physical manifestation of memory. The work is an attempt to demonstrate how remembering is experienced through architectural forms. Literature, psychological and architectural narratives provided a necessary guidance to understand where the conjunctions between the theory and empirical studies of memory lie. After the exploration of different theories comes the time to respond to the question whether memories can be matters of architecture and if they can become principal tools of form finding. That weightless transitional forces making the unconscious to travel back in time and space, somewhere and sometime that you are not anymore. What can we do with them? To seize the forces of our mind and later to submit them to control of our reason as Andre Breton was saying in "First Manifesto of Surrealism". Images, associations and all what is remembered, let them serve as  paraphernalia for creative act. The discussion proceeds with a real act of memory connected to Armenian traces of Venice, an architectural experimentation with cultural, personal and contextual memories for definition of new forms on the island of San Lazzaro degli Armeni and in Armenian College Moorat-Raphael.