Fundamental Concepts of Architecture : The Vocabulary of Spatial Situations

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port memory, provide our perceptions with temporal depth,

thereby providing opportunities for engaging in dialogue with

history. Second, memory is always interpretation. We are able

to attribute new significance to the contents of architectural

memory, thereby reinterpreting the past and preventing it

from becoming fossilized. At the same time, memory fades

through familiarity and habituation to the constant presence

of objects and buildings, allowing them to become invisible.

> form character, image, inside and outside, meaning, sign,

symbol

> centring, circulation

> symmetry

> composition, measure, order, proportion, scale

> complexity, dramaturgy, order, sequence, simplicity

Concentrated in the monument is the architectural task of

serving as a bearer of meaning in two senses. First, as an ar-

chitectural monument where historical witness, genius loci,

and social representation overlay one another. Second, the

monument serves a structural function for a town or city, and

possesses validity beyond its historical significance; monu-

ments are key elements within the urban structure or land-

marks of incisive design.

As unrepeatable historical witnesses into which the traces

of the passage of time have been deposited, monuments ema-

nate what Walter Benjamin (1936/2006) referred to as the

uniqueness of the aura. As the sensuous substrate of histori-

cal events, a monument (Latin: monere, ‘to remember, to re-

mind’) makes the original milieu of a > place, or the culture

of a past epoch, immediately accessible and atmospherically

vivid. Many monuments have been reinterpreted and reused

in various ways through successive different epochs; diverse

layers of history are sedimented in them.

Metaphor

Middle
Mirror symmetry
Module
Monotony

Monument