Oz Volume 12 Article 2 1-1-1990 The Writing of Architecture: Mnemosyne and the Wax Tablet Jeffrey Hildner Follow this and additional works at: https://newprairiepress.org/oz This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Hildner, Jeffrey (1990) "The Writing of Architecture: Mnemosyne and the Wax Tablet," Oz: Vol. 12. https://doi.org/10.4148/2378-5853.1190 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by New Prairie Press. It has been accepted for inclusion in Oz by an authorized administrator of New Prairie Press. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. The Writing of Architecture: Mnemosyne and the Wax Tablet Jeffrey Hildner The concomitant sensations second edition of Marc-Antoine Laugier's awakened in us by the direct Essai sur l'arcbitecture of 1755. In this perception of a work of art ... are . canonical image of architecture's mythic only realized through memory. origins, a woman seated amidst broken Memory therefore 'does not fragments of classical architecture assume in art a subsidiary or an gestures with apparent graceful authority cillary function as happens in nor to the primitive hut's idealized (relcon mal life, but is, itself, Art, in which struction formed in accordance with all the various arts are united "principles ... founded on simple nature.' '6 without residua. Ancient myth Four trees are columns; four branches are ology saw this clearly, in a way, beams; branches above " inclining when it imagined that Mnemosyne towards each other, meet at their highest was the mother of the Muses.' point" (Laugier 12) and form a roof ter - Antonio RussP minating in triangular openings at two ends (a differentiation of the otherwise In the search for nature - for the "true" equal four sides- or quadripartite space origin and order of things - we will find - which we may say constitutes the in architecture the origins of memory and "original" example of formal hierarchy).