Pringles lecture explored how knowledge prompts experience whilst experience prompts knowledge. The lecture was an analogous description of personal experiences of San Andrea Al Quirinale as a younger woman, and her return later in life and how this effected her interpretation of the space. Pringle spoke of the main events that lead her to stumble across the building, and how these related to her experience. She was interested in 'how you spend a lifetime meditating on one event to perfect it' and finding that "moment of rapture. "
Describing integral memories of San Andrea Al Quirinale, Pringle described the simultaneous interiors within the whole, The use of light in the layered domes, that seemed to suck her upward into space.
Returning later in life, her reading of San Andrea Al Quirinale was altered due to her acquired knowledge of the time and purpose for which it was built. San Andrea Al Quirinale was built during the the seventeenth century; "with it's baroque taste for illusion" which "was the golden age of the catoptric apparatus"1 She noted that if she had been educated the first time, she would have seen it very differently - At first relating the colours to her grandmothers house. Her experience was heightened through her education, which enabled her to relate the building to it's context. She was interested in space and time moving through one another but in contradictory ways.
Having visited the sight before on multiple occasion, I walked through Corrs Lane as prompted and my experience of the place was altered due to the lecture being fresh in my mind. I saw the narrow lane way as a crack that joined two juxtaposing parts of the city, that are seemingly separate whilst within them. I felt like the lane-way was mirroring the two destinations against each other. These observations and gained insight prompted my final response and my final understanding of the lecture and reading. This newly gained understanding will inspire further exploration of the concept; Allowing gained knowledge to guide my experiences of space as one doesn't move forward without being influenced by experience and constructed knowledge.
My visual response is attempting to portray that once you move on from a particular experience, it will continue to guide and influence new experiences; creating a construction or path of gained knowledge. Although the door is opening, one cannot escape past experience, it reflects onto the next door you will open, and leads from it.
The use of the mirror relates to the baroque as "the golden age of the catoptric apparatus"1 ... Gerard Gennette in Complexe de Narcisse explains the mirror as confirming the self "but under the species of the other: the specular image is a perfect symbol of alienation". Weiss explores the "reflected image" as a "dream or the imagination."1 "this is the ultimate manifestation of baroque imagery. Every element is transformed into its oppose, and the cosmos is in constant flux.."1
1 Weiss, A.S, 'Chantilly, a garden of mirrors', Mirrors of infinity, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995, pp. 78-94
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