On the invitation of Mount Allison's new VP Student Affairs, Ron Byrne, Colville House on Mount Allison's campus was the location of Architectures for Creativity symposium on February 5th. With its history as the residence of artist Alex Colville, this offered a particularly good opportunity to look at architecture as a layered record of cultural representation, official narrative, personal experience and public memory.
The production of space through cultural representation is inevitably more complex than simple. Artistic and literary images have often served as sources of spatial meaning and symbolic value, as have historical narrative of events, sites, or figures which lend themselves to commemoration in the form of public monuments. And yet architecture is lived as well, spaces invested with personal memory, experience, and interpretation.
First published in French in 1957, and translated into English in 1964, Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space is a philosophical meditation on the pursuit of such symbolic and archetypal meanings in architecture. “We are far removed from any reference to simple geometrical forms,” Bachelard wrote in a chapter entitled “House and Universe.” “A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.” Undertaking a “topography of our intimate being”—of nests, drawers, shells, corners, miniatures, forests, and above all the house, with its cellar and attic, rooms and garrets —Bachelard began a systematic study, what he called a “topoanalysis” of these spaces so poetic and familiar they become integrative, reconstituting the dispersed elements of our lives, and of being.
Considering Gaston Bachelard's emphasis on the experiential and phenomenological, participants "excavated" traces of the Colville House as dwelling-place, and the memory embodied in built form. Since 1978, Colville House had been transformed into a student residence and was renovated more recently in 2001 and yet original details like the corners, nooks, arched windows and doorways, shutters, fireplace and curved staircase still exist. The rubbings and sketches produced evoke memory in an inventory of details and suggest the depth of spatial imaginary of the built environment more broadly.
