Spatial Memories and Preoccupations of an Architect

How does an architect become an architect? In this intimate and playful work of autobiography and criticism, Turner Brooks explores this very question, mapping the way his childhood impressions and enthusiasms later influenced his award-winning architectural work.

How does an architect go about imagining and shaping space and how is that work shaped by his own experience? In Spatial Memories, Turner Brooks, an award-winning architect and a longtime teacher at the Yale School of Architecture, describes how memories of spatial experiences--a small child occupying a father's gigantic overcoat, lying awake in a tiny bedroom in an old house in Maine, traversing the soaring concourse of Grand Central Terminal--evolved into a lifelong preoccupation with architecture.

Brooks's Emersonian eye considers the kinetic work of Frank Furness in Philadelphia, John Sone's perception-defying museum in London, and the sublime pyrotechnics of Borromini in Rome and baroque palazzos in Sicily, as well as the experience of space in books and paintings, from Clement Hurd's illustrations for Goodnight Moon to Kafka's "The Burrow" to Edward Hopper's Rooms by the Sea. An assignment in architecture school, the "dominant void"--to construct a space that is more palpable than the material used to define it--becomes a divining rod for Brooks's own arresting, intimate designs.

A beautifully written, idiosyncratic, moving meditation in the tradition of Gaston Bachelard and Witold Rybczynski, Spatial Memories is a revelation of the profoundly personal character of the architectural imagination.

Author: Turner Brooks
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: 10/27/2026
Pages: 144
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.41lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.80w x 0.40d
ISBN: 9798896230229

About the Author
Turner Brooks is a principal of Turner Brooks Architects, based in New Haven. The firm, established in Starksboro, Vermont, in 1972, initially designed (and often built) small houses and community facilities local to the area. In the decades since, the firm has expanded its practice to institutional projects, designing university buildings, arts and community centers, and more in the United States and beyond. The monograph Turner Brooks: Work was published in 1995. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Graham Foundation; was awarded a Mid-Career Rome Prize Fellowship in 1984; and in 2015 received the Sidonie Miskimin Clauss Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities. He has taught at Carnegie Mellon University, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of Miami, Middlebury College, the University of Vermont, and the Yale School of Architecture.