Robert Hutchison: Memory Houses

A Seattle architect’s speculations on how architectural types—from chapels to lighthouses—narrate memory and loss

Seattle-based architect Robert Hutchison’s Memory Houses is a project that investigates mortality and memory through the lens of architecture.

Speculatively situated along the banks of the Wye River on the Eastern Shore of Maryland where the architect grew up, architectural typologies such as dwelling, chapel, lighthouse and memorial weave together a spatial narrative about loss and recollection. Distant as well as more recent architectural memories make cameo appearances in the memory houses: the stave churches of Norway and the Great Mosque of Córdoba that Hutchison experienced as a child; the lighthouses of the Chesapeake Bay; the timber grain elevators of the Palouse; the Colosseum and the Santo Stefano Rotondo in Rome.

This publication, with a hot-stamped cover and end sheets printed with Hutchinson’s designs, documents the eight buildings that comprise the Memory Houses project, alongside built houses designed by Hutchison’s Seattle-based firm Robert Hutchison Architecture.