As a child, Turner Brooks would lie awake in the smallest bedroom of a creaky seaside house in Maine. From below, he could hear his grandparents talking in the living room, and from the window, the crashing waves of the Atlantic Ocean. These two sounds became, for him, as much a part of the bedroom as its Dutch wallpaper—what he would come to call a “spatial memory.” Years later, while studying at the Yale School of Architecture, one of Brooks’s classmates glossed the idea like this: “if you removed the floor, walls, and ceiling, the space would still be there.”

The twenty short pieces in Brooks’s new essay collection, Spatial Memories and Preoccupations of an Architect, take up this idea, this notion that our psychological experiences inside architectural structures have the power to shape them. He examines buildings less as ends in themselves than as prisms for the human dramas they contain. In one chapter, he describes Grand Central Terminal as a womb from which other places are born. In another, he imagines that the columns of the Bibliothèque nationale de France tether its ceiling to its floor, so that it doesn’t inflate with its occupants’ buoyant thoughts and float away. Elsewhere, Brooks’s sensibility is more eclectic. His brief vignettes, neither entirely argument nor personal essay, blend architectural impressions from childhood with subjects as disparate as the art of Edward Hopper, midcentury French philosophy, Clement Hurd’s illustrations for Goodnight Moon, and steam-propelled bath toys. 

Since graduating from Yale and a completing short stint working for the Modernist Philip Johnson, Brooks has spent the past fifty years practicing as an architect in and around New England. His work includes a collection of rural polygonal houses, a residential campus for people with autism, a subterranean museum of brains floating in formaldehyde, and a theater that looks like a steamboat. Many of his buildings are shaped like ships; some of them literally move. He made Yale’s Gilder Boathouse look, as he puts it in the book, like it “beached itself on the riverbank” of the Housatonic. He positioned the Peek House in Vermont to look like it was “resting on mudflats waiting to float off with the rising tide.” The last Brooks heard of the Laffin House, which he designed on an eight-foot-wide steel frame with wheels, it was crossing the border into Canada. 

It follows, then, that Spatial Memories portrays buildings as interlocutors between inside spaces and the immense environments that surround them. Early on in the book, Brooks recalls engulfing himself in his father’s enormous furry overcoat: “Looking out down the long corridor of sleeve, I felt the world outside to be a much more inviting place than it was without this extra layer.” He found a similar experience inside his childhood tree house—spying on his surroundings from the dark perch seemed to transform his desolate, indifferent landscape into something benign and symbiotic. When I was that age, my aunt’s house had an old-fashioned laundry chute. I was small enough then to crawl down it from the top floor all the way to the basement. The passage’s cloistral and clandestine character was more appealing than its utility. I imagined I could climb in and pop out anywhere. (That house was demolished years ago, though I sometimes wonder if I could find the space where I once sat.)

The buildings that the adult Brooks likes and designs are replete with mazes, alternate routes, spaces within spaces. He loves a secret garden, exulting in labyrinthine spaces because they force us to “reconnoiter with where one is, where one is coming from, and where one is going to next.” One of his primary influences regarding the virtue of architectural interstices is Kafka’s short story “The Burrow,” in which an unidentified animal loses itself, to Brooks’s delight, in the tangled bowels of its own den to elude home invaders. Another is Sir John Soane’s Museum in London. Visiting Soane’s Frankensteinian Georgian townhouses, he found that, though their “spaces are intimate, the wandering among them, as among trees in a forest, seems infinite.” He sees in both the Kafka tale and the museum some echo of his own philosophy: that what we undergo within a work of architecture is encoded in its infrastructure and blueprint, its tangible twists and turns.

In his chapter on paintings, Brooks finds his own preoccupation with the permeability of social life and physical space reflected in historic masterpieces like Fra Angelico’s Annunciation. In the painting of the angel Gabriel’s visit to the Virgin Mary, he attends to the way in which the tips of the Gabriel’s wings seem to extend into, or protrude from, two pillars of the surrounding colonnade, seeming to make him continuous with his environs. In Hopper’s Rooms by the Sea, meanwhile, Brooks sees spatial orientations that reorder our conception of the physical world, reminiscent of his childhood bedroom in Maine: “The central blank wall with the diagonal swath of sunlight becomes a liminal zone between the vast ocean and the little domestic space.” Both works emphasize the connections a building draws between the universe around it and its own interiors, merging what we see out there with what we feel in here.

Brooks would say that the best architecture channels the tension between here and there, between tactility and emotion: “Often it is the pulsation between two deliberately ambiguously different volumetric readings of the space that brings the work to life.” Certainly one finds that tension at play in his own constructions. As Jonathan Schell wrote in the 1995 monograph Turner Brooks: Work, “It’s hard to think of a single house of Brooks’s that doesn’t bear some resemblance to an animal, a vehicle, a machine, and a human being.” 

I recently visited Brooks’s Cushing Center at the Yale School of Medicine. The tiny museum, tucked in a corner of the medical library, houses hundreds of brain and tumor specimens, as well as thousands of photo negatives and microscope slides—the collection of the neurosurgery pioneer Harvey Cushing. I went because I wanted to see for myself its unorthodox collection of floating brains, but also to experience firsthand how Brooks’s concept of spatial memory might engage with a space devoted to the mind. 

The small room turned in on itself like a maze, lined with polished wood and curved glass cabinets, a gesture at the folds and grooves in the organs they contain. As I assessed the architecture, I kept getting startled by the displays—the physical leftovers of hundreds of human minds. Their shapes were all slightly different. Some bore the marks of obscure neuropathologies, though that alone wouldn’t account for the degree of variation. I found myself wondering if each line been etched by some predetermined genetic code, or if they had been sculpted by a lifetime of experience. Brooks might say, What’s the difference?