The essay investigates the connective thinking of the art historian Aby Warburg and the spatial thinking of the architect Juan Navarro Baldeweg. It analyzes the Atlas Mnemosyne project, developed by Warburg between 1924 and 1929. The Atlas is a genetic code, a system for reformulating hypotheses and concepts, essentially thinking in images. The scholar is interested in the combinatory power of its memory mechanism, based on permutability, to break the unidirectional chains of traditional logic. He sought in History a symptomatic and revelatory potential. The panels, in their final form, were made of wood with black linen cloths, with clips to easily secure the photographs. Warburg dictated the notes to Gertrud Bing for the lecture at the Hertziana Library in Rome. This is where he explicated, in 1929, his project on Mnemosyne, to unfold through serial images the function of ancient expressive values and to found a new theory of the memorative function of human images. In the same place, about a century later, Navarro Baldeweg builds the new Hertziana Library, where he merges Warburg’s connective thinking with that of archaeology. He retrieves the organization by terraces of the Villa of Lucullus, in accordance with the topography of the site. It is a project which is understood in section. The choice was to create a large light well, with an inclined system of planes-terraces to make light diffuse into the interior space. Archaeology, 5as an excavation in section, combines memory and complexity, within a space that expands and breathes.
