The Soil of Architecture is its Memory

Zvi Hecker, October 2009

It seems that we architects avoided for very long using our memory, actually for so long that now it might be too late to reactivate this faculty.

The Architectural Memory reaches thousands of years back to the Babylon Hanging Gardens, Pharoah's Pyramids, Hellenistic Temples, the proportions of their columns perfected for two hundred years by Greek architects, Sinan's streamlined rocket launchers in the form of minarets and so on and on...

If the architectural memory is restricted to 20th century as only the memory as a living faculty of intelligence will certainly degenerate.

That is why so much of what is built today looks unintelligent and dead though constructed recently.
Nothing grows without soil and Architectural Memory is an architect's soil.

Zvi Hecker

Concise brief of Zvi Hecker Lecture at MAK Vienna on 24th of November 2009