TheArchitecture city is a collaborative project between the dead and the living. Perhaps the dead are not as passive in the structure of the city as our modern rational minds would have it. Perhaps even today attention to mortality is an essential, catalytic component of communicative urban life. How might architectureArchitecture belong to those possibilities? What are the implications for the life of the city, the life of the street? Foundational to those questions is a reminder: the traces of the past, its ruins and remnants, are not merely physical remainders, mute and detached, but extensions of lives, aspirations, and projects of those now deceased. That is no less true in the contemporary city than it was in the pre-modern one. How, then, might contemporary architectureArchitecture engage, sustain, and modify such vestiges and their creative potential? What might be gained? This chapter turns to the works of Norwegian architect Sverre Fehn (1924–2009) for help with those questions. An examination of his proposal for the Trondheim Public Library suggests a range of architectural decisions aimed at an engagement of the city’s pasts, and shows how those conditions are made available to the unfolding daily life of the street. This chapter–in essence a prolegomena–introduces these ideas in light of excerpts from Victor Hugo and Walter Benjamin, and supports the exploration of the Trondheim Library proposal with references to Fehn’s Hedmark Museum in Hamar.