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Hello...
This digital video is a trial podcast...
... prepared to supplement the third module of the course "Survey of Imaginary Buildings"...
...provided on-line by Morgan State University.
This week we have explored the archetype "Solomon's Temple" ...
... which can be seen as the basis for that particular genre of imaginary designs which explore structures of knowledge...
...particularly those which reflect the power and the limits of the human mind.
Contemplation of Mind often accompanies architects' imaginative speculations about their Architecture.
But the inverse of this is also true. Writers whose subject is psychology or memory or consciousness...
...often use architectural metaphors to describe the structure of either physical organ or intellectual spirit.
We've already touched upon one example of the latter, Camillo's Memory Theater.
In this field of mnemonics one can find other architectural examples...
...such as Matteo Ricci's Memory Palace, described to a Chinese audience at end of the 16th-century.
Coming forward to the 19th and 20th centuries, we find other emphases in discussions about the Mind,
... dominated, perhaps, by Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic writing.
A visit to Freud's own Viennese apartments brings to mind
some of the most common architectural metaphors in use by him and by his colleagues.
I've prepared here a short bit of visual "doggerel" ...
...to suggest Imaginary Architecture's own preoccupation with certain architectural motives,
... which may in turn represent psychological phenomena or states.
Pay attention to the images of portals, of windows, and of seeing through one thing to another.
The familiarity with which a writer such as Freud might have viewed these everyday architectural elements...
... may suggest the sources from which architects sought to build imaginative environments in their speculative architecture.
So here we are, with a visit to Sigmund Freud's apartment in Vienna, Austria.