Eye of the Savoye

Our project start out as just a weekend exercise. To learn of our advisor we opened up the Three Lessons in Architecture. A particular passage in the description of the Memory Machine caught our eye: the moment at life’s end when all is recalled.

We were interested in the instant of compression in which the past is displaced into the present. If this was memory, what would forgetting be?

If one wanted to intentionally forget, then one obvious way would be to try to keep the past from being displaced into the present. To forget would be to block this unwelcome transgressor. Our weekend project became to make a machine for forgetting. What we wanted to forget for these two days was architecture.

We started off looking at places traditionally believed haunted — libraries, prisons, basements. These were all dark and somehow nostalgic spaces, spaces that didn’t connect to the architecture that we knew. Could we dehaunt something white and modern?

How about Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye? If it was haunted, where would the ghosts lurk? Since our ghosts weren’t the chain-rattling sort, our first task was to detect them. Le Corbusier claimed that the villa was purged of all traces of traditional domesticity; it was clear then that any residuals of houseness—center, concealment, control, etc.—could be considered hauntings.

Having identified the ghosts, we were then faced with the next problem: Ghosts being intangible, how do we deal with them? We decided that we needed to design devices for dehaunting.

For the weekend exercise, we went right to the task of exorcising the ghost of architecture from the Villa. Our first device dealt with the ghosts of traditional architecture as found within Le Corbusier’s Five Points of Architecture.

At the end of the weekend we realized that this project was our thesis. The collaboration followed the game-like format used for the weekend project. We took turns on the “board” (the villa), and each move was made in response to the other player. It was a difficult game.