Places Everywhere

1. Young man at his window: places everywhere

This is just common sense: look out the window of your home or office. What do you see? You only see places. A bench, a tree, a park where people converse and children play, a square, a street, a building, a mural on a building’s facade, a bridge, the sun, the sky, the clouds above, the sea, the atmosphere surrounding them—these are not just constitutive elements of a place, nor do they simply belong to places; rather, they are places in themselves. Every single entity that I have mentioned – every single material entity that actually exists – is a place, or, even better, every single bit of matter that constitutes a physical body is a place: a place where certain processes occur and become manifest.

Image 1: These red benches can be thought of as a place in Campo Bandiera Castello (another place), which is a square in Venice (another place), Italy (another place)… Then, the physical reality we are plunged in can be seen as a nested constellation of places: places within places, within places, within places…

For example, consider the red benches in Campo Bandiera Castello, a square in Venice (see Image 1, above). On one hand, they can be seen as the place where clouds of electrons spin around their respective nuclei at incredibly high speeds, and on the other hand, as the place where people sit and converse with each other. In the first scenario, the bench is the place where physical processes occur (and, if we extend our consideration to combinations of atoms, it’s also the place of chemical processes). In the second scenario, it’s the place of social processes. To be honest, nearly every human-made object is also the place of symbolic or intellectual processes, as its colors, forms, materials, and other features convey the creator’s intentions, aesthetic values, and modes of communication.

Image 2: This solitary tree can be thought of as a place inside an open field, which is another place in San Michele al Tagliamento, a small town (hence, another place), in the North-East part of Italy, a European Country… Places within places, within places, within places…

Again, the tree we see outside our window is the place where molecules combine the energy of light and carbon dioxide to form sugars, or the place where cells duplicate all of their contents, that is: at least, that tree is the place of physicochemical and biological processes. Broadly speaking, any tree, just like any other living being, is the place of physicochemical and biological processes. Furthermore, trees often serve as homes for birds, insects, or other living creatures, becoming the place where specific groups of living creatures perform their social rituals; plants are even capable of communication through their root systems and chemical signals, forming complex social networks in environments like meadows, woodlands, or forests. Therefore, trees and plants can be seen not only as individual entities but also as significant places of social interactions and processes, viewed from both internal and external perspectives (the place of their own social processes or those of other living beings). Regarding the possibility of understanding a biological body as a place for staying or dwelling, consider the pouch of a kangaroo, the mouth of a jawfish or, more broadly, the womb of a female organism: isn’t a female body a true place for the development of a new organism? In this case, the female body serves two-times as the place for biological processes: first, as the place of her own internal biological processes (an ‘internal place’, Renee Descartes would have said); secondly, as the place for the biological processes of other creatures (this enveloping womb would be an ‘external place’ for the guest organism, according to Descartes’s view, or, drawing from Aristotle, an exemplification of ‘topos’; furthermore, considering the nurturing function of that which happens within that envelope, it could be seen as an exemplification of the Platonic chōra).

In addition to the social processes related to specific animal groups mentioned earlier, social processes also apply to human beings; for instance, a park where people converse and children play can be seen as a place of social processes for humans.

Image 3: People socializing on a circular bench, in the Garden at the Arsenale Nord, Venice, Italy: places within places, within places, within places…

While the building we live in is another place—a unique and complex place where the entire genealogy of processes that shape reality is on display. For example, the building I’m in now is the place where physical forces are transmitted to the ground through piles of bricks, and where light enters through transparent glass windows; in other words, any building can be seen as the place of physical and chemical processes, where physical forces interact with different materials. This is the arena of gravitational, electromagnetic and nuclear forces – an actual place, indeed; it’s where materials either allow or resist the diffusion of heat, light, sounds, and so on. But this is just the beginning; in fact, the aforementioned physicochemical processes are intertwined with a higher order of processes – physiological and psychological processes (or, in just one word, biological processes) – through which humans, or even other animal forms or plants adapt to the building itself. For instance, various factors such as the amount of natural light, wall colours, material quality and texture, and heat exchange between bodies and materials can influence an individual’s physiological and psychological response to a building. Therefore, from this perspective, a building should be seen not only as a place of physicochemical processes but also as a place of biological processes.

Needless to say, a building can be the home for families, that is, the home-place for the most fundamental type of social interaction: the socialization between parents and children. Moreover, a building can serve as a hub (a place) for various functions that contribute to the social life of individuals and groups, such as schools, theatres, churches, museums, and stadiums. That’s why a building, any building, can be thought of as the place of sociocultural processes – the subsequent level of complexity after physicochemical and biological processes, if we exclude processes of second order (that is processes deriving from the combination of processes of first order; e.g., ecological processes, are the combination between first-order processes—physicochemical and biological processes).

Image 4: Keith Haring’s mural in Pisa, Italy.

Accordingly, Keith Haring’s mural on the building facade can be seen as the place for symbolic or intellectual processes (then, artefacts could be thought of as places through which individuals and societies convey certain sociocultural and symbolic values). Apart from the specific case of decorating buildings a posteriori, any building’s formal appearance – including its volumetric composition, form, proportions, materials, and colors – serves as the place for symbolic processes, a fact well understood by modern dictators, ancient Roman Emperors, and Egyptian Pharaohs alike. While animals can build impressive structures and modify places to a great extent (just consider dwellings and dams built by beavers), only humans modify existing places and create new spaces to fulfill their symbolic needs. Only humans build skyscrapers with the ultimate scope to surpass the height of another skyscraper to connote more power, more wealth, higher social status etc. In summary: a building, or architecture in general, is the place where a concretion of physicochemical, biological, ecological, sociocultural, and symbolic (or intellectual) processes become actual.

Fundamentally, from the smallest components of creation, such as quarks, atoms, and molecules, to the vastness of galaxies and the universe, including plants, animals, human beings, and their creations, everything is, in essence, a place—we are all places. The Archytian Axiom is vindicated once again: ‘to be [whenever, wherever, in whatever form] is to be in place.’ Building on this environmental, place-based awareness, which transversally reveals the fundamental solidarity of all that exists in nature, we should create a vision for our common future as Earth dwellers.

from the smallest components of creation, such as quarks, atoms, and molecules, to the vastness of galaxies and the universe, including plants, animals, human beings, and their creations, everything is, in essence, a place—we are all places.

2. Reality is a constellation – a system – of elemental things-place:^[1] we are all places–we are the environment

Since these four orders of processes – physicochemical, biological, sociocultural and symbolic processes – encompass all aspects of reality, the whole of reality can be thought of as a place or system: reality is the encompassing place of processes, or, more appropriately, reality is the place where these processes can concretize into physical matter, to begin with (there is a seamless continuity between place and matter). Since reality cannot be reduced to the sum of its individual processes, but as a whole, it is greater than the sum of its parts (that is, its value is greater than its constituent processes), then this place – which we call reality – can be viewed as an encompassing system: any place, at any concrete level, is a system of interacting processes that can concretize into material or symbolic structures. Taken all together, these processes, along with the physical or symbolic entities and structures that emerge from them, form reality as a constellation of places: places, within places, within places… We are all places—we are the environment.

Image 5: Postcard from the Past, reality as an encompassing place of processes: the rocks, the sea and the sky, the atmosphere in between them, as well as the notorious castle and the trees in the background, or the book in the foreground, or even the postcard itself and the words you are reading right now, are all places: in fact, any place may also be thought of as the concretization of physical, chemical, biological, social, cultural and symbolic or intellectual processes (postcard from Trieste, Italy).

So far, we have stated that everything we see when looking out the window is a place (everything is a place: a place of processes). As a result, we have suggested that reality itself can be viewed as an all-encompassing place (needless to say, the room I am currently in, which is the counterpart of what lies outside the window, is also another place). But where is the threshold between what we commonly call ‘place’ – for example, parks, squares, or streets, that is, places where the specific locale or position of physical objects yield to the common notion of place as a geographical location – and what we commonly call ‘thing’ – for example, objects or bodies like a bench, a rock, a tree or even a person? To put it more straightforwardly, when did I come to understand that things or bodies are real material places, rather than just things or bodies existing in a place?^[2] I had to undertake a kind of reverse journey, using an inverse type of reasoning, to move beyond the simple description of what exists when we look outside the window. I had to ask myself: what would happen if the benches were removed from the park that I was looking at while I was observing the scene outside my window? And then, what if we also remove the trees and the bushes? What if we remove the lawn? What if we remove the buildings around the park? And what if we remove all the buildings and the streets that surround the park? What would be left if all living beings were removed, leaving only a flat, rocky surface and the sky? What if we extend this process of removal of things and bodies to every place? What if we remove the ground itself, and we also remove seas, oceans, the sky with its atmosphere? What would happen if we removed the sun and the moon? What if we also remove all the stars and the planets of any galaxy? What if any known bit of matter that composes reality, at any scale, is removed from the scene? What are we left with? What is the name or nature of that pristine scene? Are we left with a perfect void, a perfect no-thing, or does an ultimate place remain? In that pristine scene, does place contain the void or, vice versa, is place contained by the void? Starting from the physical experience of the places around my body, my accidental journey into investigating the concepts of place and space ultimately led me into the metaphysical domain. However, without even the necessity to arrive at the ultimate end of this game of removal, it seemed to me that the idea of place associated with the park outside my window was dissolving as soon as the ground and the sky (the atmosphere) were removed, as removing the ground and the sky (the atmosphere) would leave nothing to suggest that there was still a ground (both physical and metaphysical) to substantiate the idea of park. For me, such ‘no-thing’ equated to ‘no-place’. Hereinafter, I began to entertain the idea that a place appeared anytime a thing, body or object appeared. The idea that place and physical entities were two sides of the same phenomenon was beginning to seep into me; the same phenomenon told by two different perspectives: one more concrete (the actual entity, the thing, object or body), the other more abstract (the place as the field of localization relative to that entity, thing, object or body). So, in the end, I could logically infer that all material entities or bodies, primarily the ground and the sky, as well as the lawn, the trees and the bushes, the benches, the fountains, people, and so on, contributed to the idea of the park as a place. If all material entities or bodies contributed to the compound idea of the park as place, I could view each specific entity or body as a place within the larger place that I called ‘park’. Although briefly, these basic considerations led me to hypothesize the fundamental identity between things and places: ultimately, I realized that their difference stems from the modes of knowledge, of understanding and describing reality—modes of communication, in the end, which are merely a matter of opportunity. Before anything else, there existed a linguistic and epistemological threshold between things and places. But behind that, behind things and places, there is a fundamental unity, which can be viewed from two different perspectives: material substance and its localization, both of which are aspects of the same phenomenon (and, apparently, any actual phenomenon also has another important accompanying aspect that is still missing, but I will soon introduce it).

Let me give you another example: think about the bed in your bedroom. You likely agree that the bed is where (a matter of place) we sleep, rest, and even where children can jump and play. I believe we all agree if I generally say that the bed is also a thing or an object and that it can also be a designed object, created by an archistar. In essence, I’m saying that the distinction between a place and an object or thing is conceptual, as any object or thing can be viewed as a place where certain processes unfold and take shape, with no successful outcome possible without the harmonious convergence of place, matter, and time-as-duration during the process. Then, what is the real difference between understanding a physical entity as a place versus as a thing or object? What’s behind our conceptual habit and why should we look at that habit with suspicion? I believe there is a subtle but important difference in how we perceive physical entities: we tend to view them as self-contained, finished, and separate from the world around them. However, this idea is false, or at the very least, overly simplistic: an object is inherently tied to the subject, as it is the point where their connection is realized – as I discussed in my article What Is a Thing? Moreover, it is inaccurate to reduce it to this, since every entity is also linked to other entities through an infinite number of processes that lie behind them, most of which remain unknown to us. Rather than delving into complex metaphysical discussions (which, anyway, formed the basis of my worldview and understanding of concepts like place, space, matter, and time, which will be explored in future articles), let’s consider one of the glass vases depicted in Image 6, below: Thinking of this vase as a place (in the sense that I’ll propose on this website, as the concretization of interconnected processes from physical to symbolic) rather than just an object or a designed thing, requires us to examine the various interconnected processes and events that occur throughout its entire life cycle, from physicochemical to symbolic processes. To begin with, as the vase is the place of physicochemical processes, it must be regarded as a material substance with specific physical and chemical properties; therefore, we should examine the geological origins of the raw material used to make it.

Image 6: Any thing or any object of design can be understood as an elemental thing-place (Salone del Mobile 2018, Milano, Italy).

Then, without any particular order or reference to a specific vase in the image, if we consider a glass vase as a place where processes take physical form and have a certain duration, we should also take into account the various economic and industrial processes necessary for supplying, processing, transporting, and distributing that material, among other things (we can generally view those processes as social processes, which involve the cooperation and connection of many individuals’ activities in various forms of collaboration). Moreover, we must consider the biological implications of the vase, including its surface response to human touch and sight, its weight, and the potential effects it may have on the plant we put in it. Of course, that vase is also a place of aesthetic appreciation and symbolic meanings that intersect with other functional values and processes.

In a certain sense, by recognizing that any entity is the place of various processes, and by cataloging these processes (physicochemical, biological, social and symbolic processes encompass any aspect of reality – see the article On the Structure of Reality), we can gain a more accurate understanding of its nature, moving beyond the limited view of it as a mere physical object isolated from its context. This approach allows us to uncover its true character, which is shaped by its internal and external connections to other objects and subjects through a multitude of processes, spanning from physical to symbolic. By viewing a thing, object, or body as a place, we can gain a deeper understanding of its complete nature and meaning. In short, we can engage with it more responsibly by recognizing a physical entity as the place of processes, thereby acknowledging all the moments (that is, all of the processes or dynamics) that shape its nature.

Image 7:The proposition reality is a place is an axiom for my research concerning the concepts of place and space; more extendedly, I believe that any actual aspect of reality can be understood as a place where processes become actualized. This seller of pyjamas, in Udine (Italy), instinctively knows that a thing or an object – in this case, elegant pyjamas – can be understood as place: ‘pyjamas is a very nice place’ – the sign says.

Image 8: Myplace, Armchair. Design by Michael Geldmacher (Producer: laCividina)

That’s how I started exploring the idea of a ‘metaphysics of place’ in dialectic relation with an ‘epistemology of place’: through a game of removal. Therefore, I also began to consider the hypothesis that place was the first principle, which ancient Greeks would have referred to as archē (ἀρχή). A metaphysics and an epistemology of place are opportune fields of investigation for architects, as these fields imply the elucidation of fundamental concepts such as place, space, matter and time, together with the notions of subject and object, through which knowledge or experience are generated. These are basic notions for the practical and theoretical activity of the architect, as well as in physics and philosophy.

Place is the first principle (archē)

The step is short before we can imagine a specific metaphysics and epistemology for architects – as far as I know, this extended subject, whose contours I would like to delineate here, at RSaP-Rethinking Space and Place, is currently missing in today’s architectural academies. More generally, a philosophy for architects should not be seen as just one possibility among many, but rather as a future requirement for architects. The scope is to explore the preparatory ground for architecture and to reveal the hidden connections between architecture and reality, or nature, at all levels, – physicochemical, biological, social and symbolic – using the same fundamental concepts – place, space, matter and time to begin with – that philosophers and scientists employ to investigate the phenomena of reality. We have to pass through the gates of place and space, matter and time (and, of course, through the correlation between object and the subject) to answer some fundamental questions about the nature of reality, the nature of things – understood as places –, and the nature of architecture understood as one of those things-place among other things-place. Such basic questions about place and space are highly relevant to knowledge, regardless of disciplinary boundaries.

3. The phenomenon of place, matter, time and the concept of space

As I hinted at earlier, there is another important aspect that we haven’t fully explored yet, one that characterizes any phenomenon, in addition to its substantiality and localization: the inherent temporal character of all phenomena. Places are the positive outcome of processes and they appear to us in the guise of matter (physical structures), existing within a specific interval of creation. In other words, the successful outcome of a process (its actualization) is the co-presentation of place, matter, and time, which is the duration of the actualized entity shaped by processes. This fact suggests that the three aspects of reality – place, matter, and time – are fundamentally interconnected, and we cannot gain a true understanding of a phenomenon unless we consider how these three aspects inherently belong to the phenomenon itself.

To summarize, place and matter are ultimately the same: their difference, being merely conceptual, has to be explained by appealing to the joint contribution of ontology and epistemology.^[3] Duration, in the form of time, always accompanies place and matter, so that any phenomenon is inextricably characterized by ‘the what’, ‘the where’ and ‘the when’ of actualized processes. Furthermore, processes also involve notions of modality and causality – ‘the how’ and ‘the why’ of processes – as well as the participating agency of ‘the who‘.

What about space? The concept of space is intimately related to the concept of place. Space, which I see as complementary to place rather than simply related to it, is an abstract entity – a clever concept – that helps us represent the dimensional character of reality as a place. In a physical or concrete sense, space does not exist.^[4] Then, the actual distance between two objects is not truly filled with space: according to the scale of observation, that is the place/realm of electromagnetic fields, gravitational fields, Higgs fields, invisible dust particles, gas, and so on. The term ‘space’ has been used for centuries to describe the distance between concrete objects or places, without the need to consider what lies in between, such as air, dust particles, or physical fields. At any concrete level of complexity, reality is always a plenum; that plenum is a place, not a space.

Consequently, it is only at symbolic – or intellectual – levels that concepts of place and space may converge. No blending or mixing of the two concepts is possible at the physical level without the risk of committing a fallacy (fallacy of misplaced concreteness if we believe space is concrete). At concrete or actual levels, the concept of space should be employed with utmost attention to epistemological questions, and understood as a figurative concept only. Space is an abstract or ideal entity. Then, the recurrent expression ‘physical space’ is just a figurative expression, in my view. We risk misunderstanding if we don’t critically examine the concept of space or passively accept its figurative use, which can lead to ambiguous expressions. We must recognize the distinction and interdependence between the actual realm (the physical realm of existence, tied to place) and the ideal domain (this is the domain of the noun/concept ‘space’). Space is an idea and ideas are not ‘physical’; ideas may or may not conform to the physical, which is quite different.

The careful reader has already understood that within the framework that I’m outlining, the concept of time is incorporated into the concept of place through the duration inherent in any process through which reality unfolds; whenever and wherever a process becomes actual it emerges as a concrete entity-place through the interval of duration of its originating process. This processuality describes what the term ‘implacement’ means.^[5] In other words, the unfolding of a process – i.e., its ‘taking place’, which may emerge and appear in the guise of energy, fields, matter/things, etc. (i.e., a phenomenon) – is inherently tied to the duration of the process through which the phenomenon becomes actual. Therefore, place is not merely the seat of matter (or of energy, fields, things, etc.), but is the actualization of the process through which matter (or energy, fields, things, etc.) and duration co-present: it is from the actualization of such processes – from their implacement – that reality appears as situated matter within an interval of duration (duration is also what guarantees the permanence and stability of an entity – and ultimately of reality –, as well as its being transitory; that’s why matter and duration are entangled between them and with place). Processes do not unfold ‘within’ time, just as they do not unfold ‘within’ or ‘through’ space: there is no time external to the events, or processes, out of which things appear, and behave. Our conventional notion of time as a regular flow stems from the actual duration of regularly occurring processes, such as the sun and moon rising and setting, or sand falling in an hourglass. Therefore, time, the time of the clock we all know, is merely an abstract concept, just like space is. Time and space (or spacetime) do not exist as concrete entities: just places understood as the actualization of processes in the guise of situated matter (or energy, fields, objects, etc.) having a certain duration, truly exist. The actualized entity’s extension, duration, and localization are inextricably linked in place, encompassing ‘the where’, ‘the when’, and ‘the what’(or ‘the who’) of an entity, which arise from ‘the why’ and ‘the how’ of certain processes. No division of such unitary presentation is possible out of epistemological, a posteriori, interpretations. Furthermore, with respect to the overall temporal character of reality (that we often misplace for absolute time), it is out of the original duration of a process, from which an actual entity emerges as a realized possibility, that other determinations of time with respect to place are possible giving the way to relations of succession between the different entities-place that constitute reality. Duration guarantees the permanence of an entity, or its transitory being, and allows us to understand the relations of succession between different entities.

All such fundamental questions regarding the concepts of place and space originated from the first rational discussions on the fundamental character of reality, or nature (what the ancient Greeks called phusis), and the desire to understand it through reasoning and logic. A continuous thread runs from Aristotle’s theory of place-as-topos, where elements move or rest according to their natural place, to Newton’s mathematically-driven dynamics of bodies in absolute space, and on to the more recent theories of Einstein and quantum mechanics. The continuous thread ultimately concerns the existence of matter – understood as physical bodies, fields, or energy, that is, what we generally refer to as the ‘what’ of things – and the ways in which it exists and behaves, or, more pragmatically, ‘how’ bodies or elements persist or change their status, or position, with respect to their physical environment, which involves considering the ‘when’ and the ‘where’ of things; it was from the ‘where’ of things that discussions on the concepts of place and space originated. We all understand that, along with notions of place/space, time, and matter, notions of motion, causality, force, velocity, mass, and energy immediately come into play; these notions required many centuries of sophisticated discussions before their role could be finally acknowledged and formalized. Not to mention the role of the ‘I’-subject intervening (or not?) in the process of actualization of an entity. I firmly believe that both the scientific and humanistic perspectives are necessary to understand fundamental arguments and the subsequent developments that led to discussions on the meaning of place and space; each perspective complements the other.

4. Rethinking the concepts of space and place

The redefinition of the concepts that describe the spatial and/or ‘placial’^[6]character of reality is an ongoing historical process; each era has expressed – and will express in the future – its own preferences and terminology for describing this fundamental character: apeiron, apeiron pneuma kosmoi, kenon, chōra, topos/place, aether, spatium/space, spacetime, fields, branes, spin-foam… This website is my contribution to exploring these fundamental questions and their relation to phenomena unfolding at different scales, from physical to more abstract levels. Therefore, in my view, the fabric of reality requires a description that incorporates different levels of complexity to achieve a unified understanding. Based on my experience as an architect and various readings, I will provide my interpretation of the concepts of space and place, which I initially understood from a technical and sectorial perspective, but now consider from different angles and scales to offer a more critical view. One of my goals in this virtual place or space is to bridge the gap between technical meanings and common sense, if such differences exist.

Image 9: The fundamental character of reality allows us to recognize places as bounded entities emerging from an ocean of indistinct processes. In this image – which I have elaborated on the base of two different paintings, ‘Number 1’, by Jackson Pollock, 1949, and ‘Omaggio a Pollock’, by Antonio Montanaro, 2009 – the contour of Pollock’s face stands out – it emerges, properly – as a distinct place from an infinite ocean of lines-as-indistinct processes in the background. This question is intimately connected with the conception of place as revelation of Being (see the article Being as Place: Introduction to Metaphysics).

Among other scales at which concepts of space and place function, architecture operates on various levels, creating imaginary spaces and modifying concrete places for dwelling (see What Is Architecture?). Architecture is a type of knowledge that combines abstract, creative, and ideal mental processes with concrete phenomena, operating in both the symbolic domain of imaginary spaces and the realm of physical, actual places. Then, is a choral discipline, inherently situated between space and place.

As soon as I finish illustrating more precisely my reformed understanding of place and space as universal notions, I will focus on exploring how these concepts impact architecture through physical, biological, social, intellectual, and symbolic processes. This long-range project has some distinguished precedents, but it is not often pursued by architects.^[7]

Image 10: Seeing the Invisible; Archi-textures: A Space Syntax, 1998 – 2008, Alessandro Calvi Rollino Architetto. With these series of studies, I considered the possibility to conceive architecture from a constitutive fabric of relations between the perceiving subject and the physical environment around the subject. These relations – interconnected processes or events – define a three-dimensional texture reified by means of metallic wires (in the example above), cotton threads, or even spaghetti, strands, etc. In this web of reified relations, the interplay of the perceiving subject with the physical objects around the subject constitutes the environment as a unified whole. Similarly to the situation represented in the Image 9, above, it is out of such relations and processes (physical, biological, social and symbolic processes) that reality emerges in the guise of a place or a concrete system of places, and architecture may emerge as well, as one of such places, whenever it passes from the abstract, symbolic spatial domain of the project to the concrete realm of its realization. For further details, see the video Chōra

Notes

[1] I have used the expression ‘elemental things-place’ with a similar intent and meaning used by the American philosopher Edward S. Casey, in the book Getting Back into Place, in the following expression: ‘Take a mountain: is it a thing or a place? It is an elemental thing-place’. Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 216.

[2] I’m writing these notes some years after the period in which I was making this consideration for the first time. I don’t think Aristotle’s theory of place or Descartes’s distinction between internal and external place had some influence on my thoughts, at that time. I began to be interested in metaphysical, or ontological, and epistemological questions of place and space in consequence of naïve considerations resulting from my own personal experience and logic, rather than the other way around. I arrived at the core questions of philosophy (and physics) studying the thought of philosophers to give some structure to those initial personal intuitions that any curious mind or person can have, independently of their education; philosophy and physics – or better, the history of philosophical and scientific thought – played almost no conscious role on my intuitions about reality understood as ‘place’. I began to explore the ideas of philosophers and scientists as soon as I realized that I unintentionally ventured into the domain of metaphysics, or ontology, and epistemology. As I had the occasion to say somewhere else, initially, I had no specific interest in philosophy, physics or in any other discipline external to architecture, only caring about architecture itself. However, as I delved deeper into simple and sincere architectural thoughts on space and place, I realized I was questioning the same fundamental facts of reality that philosophers and theoretical physicists usually explore. This led me to feel compelled to study what scholars from other fields had to say on the subject. My ultimate focus remains architecture, and, specifically, the relations between architecture, humanistic and scientific perspectives on questions of place and space.

[3] See the articles, The Place of a Thing, and What Is a Thing? for a more detailed recognition of what I consider to be the relation between matter and place, or between things and place.

[4] According to this perspective, space would be an abstract idea, at the origin of which we find the notion of dimensionality/extension: so, to begin with, we could understand space as mono-dimensional or two-dimensional extension (I believe this was especially the way it was understood before the modern times), as well as three-dimensional, tetra-dimensional (this is actually spacetime), or n-dimensional abstract extension (this would be the case of the extra dimensions needed by string or superstring theories, just to name few examples of new physical theories that aim at expanding our knowledge of reality attributing new meanings – and dimensions – to the concept of space).

[5] For a technical explanation of the term ‘implacement’ as used by the American philosopher Edward S. Casey, see note 10 in my article Preliminary Notes.

[6] As in the case of the term implacement, I have taken the term ‘placial’ from Edward S. Casey. Its coinage, as Casey intuited before others, is a necessity since it extends and includes the meaning of the term ‘local’ which is usually used as an attribute of place; that classic attribute – local – is now too narrow in meaning with respect to the extended sense of place that we are proposing.

[7] With due differences, two notable architects and theorists who, in different periods and with different approaches and results (one more abstract and focused on space, the other more concrete and focused on place), have dealt with the issues I’m dealing with, were Richard Buckminster Fuller and Christopher Alexander. For both authors, conceptualizations of space (Buckminster Fuller) and place (Alexander) with respect to architecture and society played an important role. My goal is to explore how a revised understanding of spatiality, encompassing both space and place, is necessary to make architecture responsive to the challenges of our time.