The attempt to reconstruct my grandmother’s house through her narratives did never actually aim at presenting her home exactly as it was. Such a thing would be of no interest, more so it is impossible. It did though give cause to explore the ways in which people experience and in the end retain in their memory the places they have inhabited.

Ιn the case of the architect in particular, this is of special importance, since appart from being an inhabitant of the world, he also engages actively into shaping it. Thus, the second part of the research focuses - in accordance with a text by Paul Ricoeur, titled “Architecture and Narrativity”- on architectural design, presented as a process of “translating” or recreating places, i.e. as poetry. In short, the following case is made: Throughout their lives people come into contact with a series of spatializing narratives and narrating spaces, fragments of  which they then store into their memory in the form of memory-images. Those images, that are simultaneously formal and material are offered to the architect’s imagination- again both formal and material in nature- to be processed or “deformed”, in order for new places to be created. New places, indeed, that are able to affect people’s feelings, just as those places, that initially inspired them, did. In this regard, memory images can also be called poetic.

Coming back to the reconstruction of my grandmother’s house, despite the fact that the process of its recreation was completed, it was considered more appropriate for the end-result not to be presented. Through its detailed recreation, it became apparent that its most enchanting feature was exactly its fragmentary, ruinous nature. For it is this, that calls for completion and personal interpretation and in the end that, which forms the conditions for appropriating it. As I tried to show in the final part of this thesis, this is the case not only for the house in Messolonghi, but architecture in general. All buildings are in a sense already ruins and this should be regarded as one of architecture’s greatest virtues.