Brooks & Turner on Architectural Memory and Spatial Reflections

Description

New York Review of Books, paperback

Publication Date: August 25, 2026

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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.

In Spatial Memories and Preoccupations, award-winning architect Turner Brooks 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 Station–evolved into a life-long preoccupation with architecture.

Brooks’s Emersonian eye considers the kinetic work of Frank Furness in Philadelphia, John Soane’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 Good Night Moon to Kafka’s The Burrow to Edward Hopper’s “Room by the Sea.”

An assignment in architecture school, “The Dominant Void”–to construct a space that was 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 and Preoccupations is a revelation of the profoundly personal character of the architectural imagination.

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