Memorial to Edgar A. Poe

This project was selected as one of Fifteen “Landscapes of the Twenty-First Century” in a competition sponsored by Landscape Architecture magazine. It was published in the December 1990 issue of the same magazine.

The “time-lapse” perspective drawing was selected as the winner of the 1989 Hugh Ferriss Medal for Excellence in the Graphic Representation of Architecture, sponsored by the American Society of Architectural Perspectivists, and Van Nostrand Reinhold publishing. It was published in Progressive Architecture and Architecture magazines, as well as in the book Architecture in Perspective (1992).

This project initially began as an exploration into the role of material change in the understanding of architecture. Recognition of the inevitable decay or “mortality” of all built works led to a consideration of Poe’s literary work. Poe’s poem “The Coliseum” and the story “The Fall of the House of Usher” formed the initial inspiration for this design.

Further readings of Poe’s work, as well as supporting critical literature, such as the psychoanalytic criticism of Marie Bonaparte and Gaston Bachelard’s writings on the material imagination, revealed several “substantial themes” that were incorporated into the design.

The drawings of the Poe Memorial demonstrate another theme that this project attempted to explore: the depiction of temporal change in architectural drawings. The perspective drawing of the “Gothic” masonry wall adjacent to the

tarn attempts to show the gradual decay of the wall over several centuries. The time-lapse is read from left to right.

The section drawing through the same wall, through the device of the inset vignettes, attempts to show seasonal changes, as well establish a “thematic transmutation” that permeates all elements of the landscape, regardless of scale or material.

Therefore, a correspondence exists between tree branches and ivy stems, or between the roots of a tree and cracks in the paving. All are just various manifestations of an “illness” that is attacking the architectural body. These two drawings are probably the most successful in demonstrating the Memorial’s life and processes of decay.