In order to learn architecture, one primarily relies on the combination of three cognitive faculties: perception, memory and imagination. It is not a coincidence that these faculties are central to the possibility of language itself. According to psychoanalyst João dos Santos, language means a set of techniques which allow human beings to move their intelligence from being strictly practical to manifesting itself in the form of shareable knowledge. [1] Without memory, it would be impossible to complete this passage. Through language, in turn, one is allowed not only to remember and describe an existing world, but rather to manifest oneself beyond the presence of things, places or events. In one word, it is possible to imagine a world yet to come.

Memory and imagination – that is the ability to transform things into ideas and vice-versa by means of images – are thus preconditions for the possibility of architecture understood as a proper discipline: a specific manner of reading, discussing and re-writing the world, with its own linguistic resources. In this process, one considers lexicon the toolbox [2] enabling those tasks. The acquisition of a lexicon means the collecting of instruments to interpret and transform the world around oneself: the means and not an end for itself. This is not to say, one shall further elaborate, that the means used to do so are unrelated to the ends defined as goals. The same words may be used to claim different things. Yet, in order to claim certain ideas, one often needs to use certain words or their synonyms. This, of course, is not a guarantee that those may not be interpreted differently by those who receive them. A risk which is inherent to the very act of communicating and producing any form of knowledge.

With specific regard to architecture, the historical affinity between space, memory and words has been clearly illustrated by Frances Yates in The Art of Memory, and more recently underlined in Marot’s L’Art de la Mémoire, le Territoire et l’Architecture [3]. At least as old as the Ancient Greeks, this art of memory refers to a set of exercises relying on mnemotechnical strategies to facilitate the construction and transmission of knowledge, particularly important in a world «devoid of printing, without paper for note-taking or on which to type lectures»4. In fact, this art of memory was often associated with the art of rhetoric, as it was used as a technique to structure and memorise long speeches with rigor and accuracy. This system was based on the ability to associate ideas, words, or phrases in relation to precise images of places, in order to better retain the relationship between the parts of a discourse. According to Yates: «the commonest, though not the only, type of mnemonic place system used was the architectural type» [5], as speakers imagined themselves walking through the different rooms of a building as they spoke. Real or imaginary, spaces were learnt and memorized according to their complexity, in order to properly adhere to the lesser or greater complexity of what was to be conveyed through discourse. A practice, Marot added, that «makes the speaker not only a stroller, but also an architect or an urban planner in imagination» [6], with eventual repercussions in the practice of architecture and urban planning.

It is clear that this relationship between places, things and their images does not only exist at the service of rhetoric – as an art of eloquence and persuasion – but at the service of the most elementary forms of learning. In primary school, when one learns to read and write, it is common that alphabet books used by teachers are profusely illustrated. Each letter corresponds to words initiated by the respective letter, but those words correspond to images which facilitate the understanding of a new abstraction introduced to children: in this case, written language. According to Rancière, it is this «poetical work of translation» that lies at the heart of all forms of human intelligence, characterising its inventive capacity. As he puts it, «the human animal learns all things in the same way that it first learnt its mother tongue, and in the same way that it learnt to venture into the forest of things and signs that surround it in order to take its place among humans: by observing and comparing one thing with another, one sign with a fact, one sign with another sign» [7]. As an art that requires reading and writing on the world, architecture makes no exception to this condition. Siza, for instance, has argued that drawing works for him primarily as a mnemonic technique.

In his own words, «drawing is language and memory, a way of communicating with oneself and with others, construction» and «he does not draw out of the demands of Architecture (it is enough to think, to imagine) » but rather as an exercise he constantly under- takes «out of pleasure, necessity and vice» [8]. This is the same intellectual procedure that is at stake when one takes a photograph, a collage or, quite simply, when one studies drawings, photographs or collages made by others: replacing signs by other signs. The concrete case studies we will refer to from now on seem committed to confirming this.

When we first came into contact with Baukunst’s pedagogical practice, through the teaching of Adrien Verschuere, we were still exchange students at the Université Catholique de Louvain (LOCI Tournai), in 2013. Contrary to what we were used to in Porto, design studio started not with the assignment of a site and a functional programme, but else with a sequence of different documents: a letter from Pline to Gallus, a series of untitled plans and sections, as well as a satellite image of the Walloon region. Trusting in the students’ autonomy, the exercise presupposed that on the basis of one or more of these documents different problematics were identified. In order to address them, each project should find its proper theme. From Pline’s literary description of landscapes to the concrete reality of the Belgian territory, the whole exercise was about space. That is, about how each fragment of reality, by joining with others, could inform as well as transform reality itself.

To a certain extent, the format of each point of departure – a text, a drawing or an image – was relatively indifferent, since they should all be transformed and replaced by other products of imagination. These documents, in fact, did not strictly concern architecture, as they could also comprise technical devices or broader territories, with different natures. Yet, with a specific composition of elements, all those fragments served as a starting point for reflecting on architecture and its territory. By raising and addressing different themes and problematics, those fragments served mostly to reflect upon the way in which architecture frames and is framed by conditions and situations beyond it: what the studio’s brief identified as the «politics of space» [9]. Translating text into images, plans into sections, and the other way around, everything becomes a pretext to learn and discuss about architecture. In the same way, every architecture became a pretext to reflect upon what precedes and what succeeds its own making.

In parallel with these documents, a bibliography was suggested to the students with particular emphasis on the book Morphologie City Metaphors, by O.M. Ungers. This book contains an introduction arguing precisely about the role of perception, memory, and imagination not only in architecture but in all realms of human thought – namely art and science – «since it is nothing less than a synopsis, an overall ordering principle bringing order into diversity» [10]. In addition to this text, Ungers uses a systematic layout containing a drawing, an image and a word per spread. This composition elaborates the analogical affinities that may be established between those complementary forms of language and, in the space-between, the possibility of thinking «architecture as theme», beyond «naive functionalism» [11] or formalist contextualism.

In Baukunst, the importance of this relationship between language, memory and imagination in the process of thinking architecture was definitively revealed in their response to the invitation to write an essai [12] on architecture. Instead of writing an original text of their own, Baukunst collected, scanned and assembled fragments of text from others in their own library – architectural as well as non-architectural. The book has no images to illustrate this constellation. Rather, it invites readers to pursue it with their own imaginaries.

Each fragment is associated with a word and its definition, organised in the form of an alphabet. In this way, the answer given by Baukunst presents not so much a source of knowledge, a theory to be memorized by the reader, but it presents a way for each one to access knowledge and practice theory from the exercise of his or her own memory. With respect to memory and imagination, it appears to argue in favour of an intelligence which is always the result of a collective experience, surpassing the individuals who are only able to singularize themselves through the unique combination of fragments they are able to compile and reorganise by themselves, through the elaboration of new alphabets. In this movement, the abecedarium turns out to be nothing more than a starting point, the lexicon brought together as a set of tools to think about architecture, as well as the world in which it makes sense.

When we left Baukunst’s office, in 2018, Adrien Verschuere revealed the source of this exercise by offering us a DVD of GillesDeleuze’s L’Abécédaire [13]. The author, who resisted media appearances and for whom the philosopher’s job was to create concepts, accepted the possibility of making not a documentary about himself, but to record a series of conversations between himself and Claire Parnet. To this end, they proposed to reflect not only on his life and work, but above all on the relationships that may be established – or not – between a set of concepts organised in the form of an alphabet, presenting his position on concepts as varied as desire, resistance or style. In fact, the aim of proposing an essai in those terms, thus reflecting upon the very possibility of sharing and learning architecture in the form of abecedaries, may be better understood through the lens of Deleuze. In Rhizome, a text written with Félix Guattari, they explained that the book aims «to reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I», where «we are no longer ourselves» for «each one will know his own» and recognize that «we have been aided, inspired, multiplied». A book, they followed, which «has neither object nor subject» as it «is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds» [14]. It is precisely from this point of view that one fully understands why for Baukunst teaching systematically begins with a collection of drawings, words and images previously produced by others.

In the course of our research, we have recently realised that this exercise was shared by Renée Gailhoustet. [15] An architect who has left her mark in the landscape of Parisian peripheries through the second half of the 20th century and, not coincidentally, who was also influenced by the perspectives of Deleuze and Guattari. [16] Under the title of jeux de construction, Gailhoustet has produced for the 1986 almanac of L’Humanité an abridged version of an abecedarium whose definitive version would be published in 2009. [17] In it, the architect listed a series of concepts and spatial devices that constituted her own architectural vocabulary. In her words, this abecedarium presented «some concerns shared by architects and inhabitants», which also meant that the latter «could enrich this vocabulary and thus enter into dialogue with the architects, artisans of a difficult material: space» [18]. Once again, the alphabet was not supposed to work as a recipe. As an exercise, the alphabet was not a closed and definitive statement, but an exercise to be carried out by others and with others, in a constant process of updating. Letters corresponded to words, words corresponded to images. Sometimes these were illustrated by further commentaries or definitions, sometimes they were not. From cuisine [kitchen] to urbanité [urbanity], passing through terrasse [terrace], the qualities of these formal devices are thought of in relation to the vital relationships they might foster. An important perspective for a politically engaged architect close to and working for the municipal management of the French Communist Party, for whom «architectural invention» finds answers to urban contradictions «not by isolating the building from social life and workplaces, but by establishing new spatial relationships» [19] in-between.

Although we have no information to assert whether the abecedarium was a pedagogical exercise actually used by Gailhoustet in the short period she taught [20], it is known that in her own formative period in the studio of Lods, Hermant and Trezzini, at the École de Beaux-Arts in Paris, writing played an important role. Theory was considered an important tool to disentangle design from drawing for its own sake, bridging the gap between architecture and many other areas of thought. [21] This was reflected in the architect’s career, who regularly published not only in magazines – architectural and otherwise – but also authored books such as Éloge du Logement or Des Racines pour la Ville. Monographs balancing between theory and practice, architecture, philosophy and sociology, and for that reason somewhat difficult to catalogue.

This affinity between the abecedaries of Baukunst, Gailhoustet and Deleuze establishes an opportunity to reflect upon how one thinks and shares ideas in architecture. The latter explained that «even in philosophy we don’t create concepts except in function of problems that we estimate to be badly seen or badly posed (pedagogy of the concept) » [22]. In this movement, «the concept is the outline, the configuration, the constellation of an event to come» [23 ] that allows «our ideas to be linked together following a minimum of constant rules, and this association of ideas has never had any other purpose than to bring a little order to ideas» [24].

Although for the philosopher it was clear that the creation of concepts was exclusive to the field of philosophy, one believes that outlining problematics and laying down of illustrated answers is also a fundamental tool for learning architecture. As an exercise, it has the agility to break down any barriers between theory and practice, between writing, drawing and the production of images. For Baukunst, for instance, this reconstruction of an open-ended abecedary for architecture has served to systematically problematise questions raised by a new geological epoch characterized by the ecological consequences of human activities both on particular ecosystems and global climate. [25]

For Gailhoustet, it has historically served to problematise the role of architecture in relation to the issue of housing, as well as to gather the specific instruments it might use as a contribution to politics, proposing other ways of being with others and inhabiting the world together. From both points of view, the history of a specific architectural knowledge was understood not so much as the duty of continuing architecture for architecture’s sake, but as part of a topology in which all things can be related to each other, in a dialectic developed from and for the redesign of those very encounters. No longer folded over its own discipline or the comfort of a dead language, evading confrontation with that which lies outside, ultimately giving it its meaning. It is in this process that architecture as «the organisation of space» [26] may reassess its political condition; and that those who teach architecture may critically rethink the pertinence of its pedagogy: learning to read not by memorising the same old sayings, but by learning to pose the right questions.