Text by Carlos Jim nez Extract from Memory, a City, and the Need for Poetry . Rossi A work of architecture casts its rooms of light and shadow through the presence of things, simultaneously weaving the resolute tapestry of memory. It is through the urgency, the very unexpectedness of a precise or distant memory, that one completes the idea and the feeling of architecture. I have always marveled at the capacity that architecture possesses to persistently generate and reverberate with memory. Memory undermines the authority of the work of architecture as an autonomous object or as the object of its own isolated importance.
Memory delineates the connections that exist between everything that comes to pass in the world.
It also reveals the gradual construction of a work of architecture in time, revealing architecture as an instrument of perception. Like a protagonist in a Borges story, the destiny of one's present revolves around these confluent oscillations of time. What remains most vivid in my memory is the intensity of place, igniting even the most humble or discarded architecture with its particular nuance. This is the imprint that a place makes on those willing to take time to heed its invitation, to cross its threshold, to welcome its bountiful messengers. I recall that while growing up in Costa Rica's Pacific seacoast and countryside I came to regard architecture as if it were the extension of an exuberant landscape, another exotic plant life among the thousands that populate this small yet enormously blessed country.