Space and Place: Why They Matter
This website explores the meaning of two fundamental concepts: space and place.
They are not merely technical terms for physicists, philosophers, social scientists, or architects. They are cross-cutting concepts that shape how we understand the world—from physics to philosophy, from the biological to the social sciences, from culture to everyday life.
Yet their meaning is far from settled. As Einstein once remarked, there remains a profound uncertainty of interpretation surrounding them. Different disciplines—physics, philosophy, psychology, geography, sociology, architecture, art, and politics—offer their own accounts, sometimes complementing, sometimes contradicting one another.
My aim here is to contribute to this ongoing dialogue. As an architect working at the intersection of the sciences and the humanities, I believe we need a convergence of perspectives—a shared ground where scientific, social, and cultural voices can meet.
The task is urgent. Twentieth-century science has already reshaped our understanding of matter, space, time, place, and motion, pushing us beyond a Newtonian cosmology. These shifts are not only scientific; they transform how we imagine nature, society, and even architecture itself.
What is at stake in rethinking space and place is nothing less than the framework through which we understand reality—at once natural fact and sociocultural phenomenon, inseparably woven together.
Rethinking Space and Place: A Collective, Historical Undertaking
This ambitious program of redefining our ideas of space and place is an ongoing historical process, one that can only succeed if we are able to bring together diverse perspectives into a coherent and unified framework. Such a framework must not only clarify concepts but also open new theoretical and practical possibilities for analyzing phenomena. The program I present here—the redefinition of space and place—is therefore not a solitary effort but a collective, multifaceted undertaking, a line of inquiry with deep roots in centuries of thought. Allegorically, we might understand this intellectual journey as a peripeteia, to borrow the term used by the American philosopher Edward S. Casey,[1] or as a caravan already on the move toward a third watershed in our understanding of the world, following Aristotle and Newton, as the British theoretical physicist Julian B. Barbour has suggested.[2] Today, in an age when information and knowledge circulate instantaneously across cultures and disciplines, we have the unprecedented possibility to extend the discussion of space and place beyond traditional boundaries. This allows us to gather insights from philosophy, physics, the social sciences, and the arts, integrating them into a broader reflection on the meaning of reality itself.
Revisions of fundamental concepts have always coincided with critical historical moments of social and cultural change, responding to new scientific and philosophical ways of interpreting reality. I believe we are living through one of those decisive epochs. For architects in particular—whose profession is rooted in the comprehension and articulation of space and place—this question is not only timely but essential.
The Arena of Things and the Arena of Thoughts
As regards my interpretation of the two concepts, I take distance from the dominant tradition. I reject the view of space as an immersive frame of reference—an intangible container that holds objects and places—and I also set aside the interpretation of place as a mere part of space, a simple location, or a purely geographical or socially constructed notion. Instead, I argue that space is a derivative notion with respect to place. Ontologically, I consider place to be the fundamental entity in which objects exist and from which they emerge. Epistemologically, by contrast, space is an ingenious conceptual construction—an intellectual tool developed historically to aid in the quest for knowledge of physical reality. In this sense, space belongs more to the order of interpretation than to the fabric of concrete events.
Put briefly: place is the arena of things, the scene of all events; space is a dimensional, geometric idea, belonging to the arena of thought and figurative reasoning. Taken together, in dialectical and ultimately non-dualistic relation, space and place allow us to grasp reality as a unified whole from complementary perspectives: the concrete and the abstract. Eventually, I understand this ‘unified whole’ as place.
When I say that place is ‘the arena of things,’ I mean that things themselves constitute the arena—there is no place prior to them. In Heidegger’s terms, ‘the place is not already there before the bridge is… rather a place comes into existence only by virtue of the bridge’.[3]This shift paves the way for a background-independent model in which the focus moves from space, understood as abstract realm (‘the arena of thoughts’), to place, understood as the all-embracing category where the concrete and the abstract both manifest and interrelate—one emerging from, and bringing forth the other.[4] This also calls for renewed attention to the relationship between object and subject, or, more broadly, between concreteness and abstraction as modes of being and knowing. My starting point is clear: reality is not fundamentally spatial but placial. Reality is place-based long before it becomes spatial or spatially construed.
Reality, a Choral Realm
Instead of relying on an apparent dualism between the concrete reality of facts and the abstract activity of thought, we must expose and clarify their complementarity. Only by doing so can we attribute proper meaning to place and space, and thereby open the way to a renewed understanding of our being in the world. If there exists a virtuous circularity between the reality of facts and the abstract modes of knowledge through which we interpret and communicate them, then reality itself emerges as an encompassing realm—a choral whole, at once placial and spatial—[5]where the concrete and the abstract stand in reciprocal relation, offering new avenues for the analysis of phenomena.
If, by contrast, we fail to grasp the reciprocity of place and space, we risk falling into fallacies of reasoning. Such a failure is not merely theoretical: it can threaten our very existence. Many of the pressing problems of our age—social, political, economic, environmental—stem from a short-circuit between the concrete limits of our physical condition (the realm of place) and the unbounded realm of abstract thought (the domain of space), where we devise plans, theories, and projects without sufficiently grounding them in their limited and limiting ontological foundations. To put it briefly, space should be understood as an abstract entity, and place as the concrete entity from which abstraction arises. Taken together, they form the two complementary poles of a single encompassing reality.
To remove possible epistemological ambiguities, we must also recognize that both terms—space and place—belong to the abstract linguistic domain in which we operate. Yet there is an important difference: the concept of space is itself an abstraction derived from an already abstract domain (geometry and mathematics, later applied to physics),[6] while the concept of place refers directly, in the first instance, to the concrete realm of physical entities. For example, the black keyboard on which I am writing is a concrete place: it is where letters are typed, situated in relation to other concrete places—my desk, my office, Milan, Italy, the Milky Way. Speaking of place thus first and foremost refers us to the actual world of keyboards, desks, pens, rocks, trees, animals, buildings, and the events tied to them.
At the same time, my keyboard has a form. It is rectangular—more precisely, a solid body with a rectangular base. This bodily extension is itself an approximation of a geometrical form, a rectangle or, in three dimensions, a parallelepiped. These abstract determinations help us to understand the object more fully, extending the ways in which we can describe it. They are complementary to its physical existence as a concrete, plastic body, a thing-place among other things-place. In due time, we will see that the modern notion of three-dimensional space, in fact, was born from abstractions related to the analysis of concrete bodies and situations.
By space, then, I refer to any abstract, representational, or imaginary domain, complementary to the realm in which concrete phenomena occur. This allows me also to imagine a futuristic black keyboard that can read my thoughts and relieve me from typing. Such a keyboard exists not in concrete reality but in space—as an ideal, representational, or even fantastic domain such as those evoked in literature or movies.[7] Spaces, and imaginary places, thus stand on a different ontological footing than the realm of actual physicochemical, biological, or social facts. And yet, it is only through the mutual correlation of the two realms—the actuality of concrete facts and the abstract frameworks through which we know and investigate them—that we can fully apprehend the world. Plato named this mediatory and all-embracing dimension chōra. I prefer to name it place: the primary term through which I will attempt to grasp reality as a concrete fact. Space, by contrast, I will reserve for reality as a representational, ideal, or possible domain that emerges from place. Thus, place and space designate two distinct yet complementary realms of one and the same reality. What follows will be an inquiry into their nature, their histories, and, above all, their reciprocal relation.
Place and Space: Historical Meanings and Roles
Then, what are the meanings and the roles that space and place played in the human attempt to cope with the environmental reality? How did the multi-layered meaning of the two concepts come into being?
From the beginning, the concept of place has always been psychologically related to some sort of thing, matter, or substance: place has always been considered the place of something, its physical situation—its placement properly— into this world, from which a primary relation between position, or location, and matter could be deduced. It was by means of abstract reasoning that the curious mind of the ancient Greeks bifurcated the thing from the place that intrinsically belonged to the thing itself (ultimately, place and matter are one and the same: similarly to what Descartes and Heidegger already argued, I consider their distinction is mainly conceptual; hence, their difference has to be elucidated at an epistemological level of investigation). By separating matter from the place that is intrinsic to matter, we have broken that which could not be broken, thus reducing what originally was a unit into parts: matter on the one side, place on the other. The next step in this line of abstract reasoning was an abstraction of a higher order: since place could be conceived of in abstraction from matter, there was no reason for relating matter to a particular place, as Aristotle believed; hereinafter, the substitution of the concept of place with the more neutral term ‘space’, as the support frame of reference for the existence and motion of matter or bodies.
A New World Vision
This shift—from place to space—was gradual, spanning nearly two millennia, from Aristotle to Newton.[8] With Newton, space achieved dominance as the universal container of matter and motion, eclipsing place and shaping the modern imagination, from scientists to philosophers, architects, and laypeople alike.
Yet more than three centuries later, a reversal is underway. Thanks to philosophers such as Leibniz, Kant, Whitehead, Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, and to scientific revolutions from relativity to quantum mechanics, our understanding of reality has shifted again. Philosophers have shown that place is never a mere point in space but always bound to the body and materiality. Scientists, meanwhile, have revealed that matter itself is a form of energy: diffuse, it is a field; condensed, it appears as matter—this is Einstein’s legacy.[9] Today physics describes reality in terms of interacting fields, as Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg notes,[10] where notions of spatiality and temporality arise as secondary—epiphenomenal—rather than fundamental. Space, or spacetime, is no longer the ultimate framework but an ‘ideal phenomenon’, a conceptual tool attached to the deeper reality of fields—which I understand as physical instances of places so that place becomes the ultimate status of reality or, as ancient Greeks said, the principle of nature—archē (ἀρχή).
Image 1: Seeing the Invisible: tracks left by subatomic particles in a cloud chamber.
Quantum mechanics reinforces this shift from space to place. Non-locality shows that entities far apart can act as one, challenging the classical link between matter and location. In a quantized universe, where continuity between adjacent ‘positions’ breaks down, it makes more sense to think of place as implacement—[11]the concrete outcome of processes through which entities emerge, rather than a simple location for entities. Reality, thus, appears as an entangled whole of processes and relations, each a place in itself.
From this perspective, three insights emerge:
- Matter and place cannot be separated. Place is not mere location but the processual ground out of which entities arise and in which they subsist. Consequently:
- Place is a system of processes. Whenever processes become actual, they concretize as entities-place—or simply, places: the place of processes. These appear as structured patterns, or organic systems, we recognize as things, life, societies, and thoughts, in ascending orders of abstraction. Reality itself is a place—a place of processes.
- Space remains a powerful abstraction. It is an intellectual construct (belonging to the category of thoughts) that has enabled us to interpret phenomena, though it does not coincide with the concrete reality of place.
Recent science (complexity sciences, systems science, cybernetics, non linear systems, chaos theory, ecology…) extends the paradigm of interrelatedness—first discovered at the microscopic scale of fields—into a macroscopic vision of systemic interconnectedness. Reality itself appears as a complex network of processes, phenomena, and relations.
If new meanings are to be given to space and place, they must resonate with this systemic, holistic sensibility: a worldview that transcends the reductionist and mechanistic paradigms of the past, and instead conceives reality as a unified, systemic or organic whole.[12]
To inquire into the nature of space and place today is not only a physical and metaphysical task, but also an epistemological and phenomenological one—requiring dialogue between science and philosophy, between the sciences and the humanities.
Place, Space, Time, Matter and the Fabric of Reality
To put it differently, the convergence of physical, metaphysical, epistemological, and phenomenological inquiries into space and place suggests that reality has a fundamental concreteness—a constitutive fabric, an all-embracing plenum out of which everything emerges and within which everything exists. This intimate texture holds things together and orders them. But what is its proper name? Space? Place? Chōra? Is it a continuum—dimensional, extensive, or intensive? Is it absolute or relative, finite or infinite, continuous or discrete? And if it is a fabric, is it ultimate, or does it itself emerge at different levels of complexity?
Such questions are unavoidable when we inquire into the nature of space and place. Since Newton, the terms we have used—absolute space, then relative spacetime—have often obscured rather than clarified the ontological and epistemological issues at stake. Physics itself has undergone a similar revision: the concept of field, which matured from Faraday and Maxwell to Einstein, now functions as the physicist’s way of naming that constitutive fabric.
From my perspective, however, the more fitting name is place—not in the ordinary sense of a location or a geographical notion, but in a revised sense: place as implacement, as the dynamic ‘taking place’ of processes. Place is the ground in which processes unfold and out of which entities emerge when processes become actual. Fields, particles, and energies can then be understood as physical states of place.
Reality (R) may thus be conceived as place emerging from correlated processes at different levels of complexity:
- Matter: the place of physicochemical processes.
- Life: the place of biological processes.
- Society: the place of social processes (whether vegetal, animal, or human)
- Thought: the place of symbolic processes—consciousness, creativity, values, culture (an exclusive human domain)
Image 2: The Fabric of Reality: an all-embracing place, or a system of places.
Each level includes and presupposes the lower ones. In this systemic view, reality is not reducible to a single fundamental fabric. Rather, it is an overarching place where multiple irreducible places—physical, living, social, symbolic—interact. This is what I call a multilevel ontology of place. With this notion of place – the notion of place I want to speak about in this website, see the article What Is Place? What Is Space? for a synthetic definition, we embrace the realm of the inanimate and the animate as well. Such an ontology resists reductionism: phenomena cannot be collapsed into physics alone, nor explained by a single form of knowledge. To know reality as the encompassing place between concrete and abstract, we must explore relations across levels, drawing on the insights of physics, biology, the social sciences, philosophy, mathematics, the arts, and architecture. Only through active transdisciplinary dialogue can knowledge itself form a unified structure.
Outside such a systemic, non-reductionist vision, no explanatory framework deserves the title of a ‘theory of everything’, as physicists have hypothesized. Ultimately, reality is place: every phenomenon, at every level of complexity, is a place—an implacement of processes out of which the world continually emerges. Nature is a nested system of places: places within places within places…
New Concepts for a New Era
What, then, can we learn from the recent lessons of the sciences and the humanities? Above all, that we must rethink the relation between space and place. Place is not merely a position in space, nor simply a ‘simple location’ for matter—to borrow an expression from Alfred N. Whitehead.[13] Place, in its most basic sense, is the concretization of processes through which matter and time (as duration) present themselves.
Place emerges wherever processes unfold: processes that codetermine the extension, location, and duration of entities. The What, the Where, and the When of any entity are inseparable, co-given in the unfolding of events.[14] This is what I call the process of implacement: the co-presentation of material extension, localization, and duration that makes reality appear as a place—or better, as a system of places. Place is not only a taking place (an occurrence, a happening), but also the actualization of entire chains of processes, extending from the inorganic to the biological, from the social to the symbolic. Thus, place becomes the fundamental unit of inquiry at any scale—physical, biological, social, and symbolic or intellectual.
This reformed concept of place subsumes older meanings by generalization. The traditional sense of place as location (the ‘aboriginal Where’) remains useful in common parlance, but only as a partial abstraction. For in fact, the Where cannot be separated from the What and the When, all of which are bound together in processes of implacement of any entity.
As living beings, our engagement with the cosmos shows this clearly. What we see, hear, touch, and act upon are not static objects but places of processes in which we ourselves participate. We co-constitute a primordial unity of experience-and-place alongside other organisms, bodies, and environments. Yet we do not perceive the processes directly, but rather their results: matter, form, presence… Our own biology sets the scale of what we can apprehend. Nevertheless, we remain active participants in the unfolding of processes that constitute places across scales—from the subatomic to the symbolic processes of knowledge.[15]
Since place and space are (co-)related concepts, the aforementioned interpretation of the concept of place inevitably affects the way should interpret space, assigning it a different meaning with respect to the classical tradition. If place names the concrete—actual phenomena in their unfolding—then space belongs to the realm of abstraction. Space is the arena of thought, not the fabric of the real. It is not a physical continuum ‘out there’ but a mental construct, a figment of reason, a tool for representing reality or imagining new domains.[16] To confuse space with place is to mistake the abstract for the concrete, the possible for the actual.
Image 3: ‘Space is a myth, a ghost, a fiction for geometers’ psychologist James J. Gibson said concerning the distinction between the notion of space interpreted as abstract geometrical entity and space interpreted as a physical continuum where concrete phenomena happen.
Unlike Kant, I do not consider space to be an innate a priori form of intuition,[17] quite the contrary (on this important fact, I completely agree with J.J. Gibson, an authority in the field of environmental psychology and perception—see James J. Gibson on the Concept of Space). I see it instead as a remarkable conceptual invention: a product of centuries of abstraction, formalization, and reasoning about the nature of reality. Geometry, especially Cartesian analytic geometry, made space explicit as an abstract continuum, paving the way for Newton’s absolute space and later Einstein’s spacetime. Thus, space is the domain of models, theories, and representations—a construct of mind that allows us to extend knowledge, though never identical with reality itself.
Still, once conceived, the idea of space reshaped the very structure of thought. It may even have altered our intuitive modes of perception, in a way that reconnects with Kant’s insight into the cognitive nature of space—though by a different route.[18]
The cultural impact of geometrical space (out of which the modern concept of space emerged) has been immense. Space—or spacetime—remains the stage of physicists’ thought experiments, the medium of mathematicians’ theorems, the designer’s canvas, the chemist’s and biologist’s models, the geographer’s maps. In each case, space functions as an abstract arena where hypotheses are formulated. But when those hypotheses touch reality, they must return to the stubborn facts of place.
Thus, we can see space and place not as interchangeable, but as complementary. Place is the arena of things, the concrete unfolding of processes concretized into atomic events (events are places—the place of realized processes). Space is the arena of thoughts, the abstract continuum of representation. The two exist in a dynamic circularity: abstraction gives us new ways to think reality, while reality grounds and corrects abstraction. To grasp this complementarity is to free ourselves from dualisms and reductionism and to recognize the full interplay between mind and world as a whole.
Entangled in Space: Geometrical Space versus Figurative Space
If we overlook the epistemological question and treat space as a real, three-dimensional continuum—an actual container of phenomena—we risk falling into serious fallacies. Against this view, I insist on distinguishing two abstract interpretations of space: first, the figurative or metaphorical use of the term to denote the continuum of reality; and second, the geometrical conception, rooted in mathematical formalization, from which the idea of dimensional extension—and the proliferation of abstract ‘spaces’—derives.
It was Descartes’s geometrical breakthrough that opened the path toward more complex spatial notions: Newton’s absolute space, Leibniz’s relational space, Hilbert spaces in quantum mechanics, or the non-Euclidean geometries now used by architects through digital tools.[19] But contrary to common belief, this modern concept of space was not ‘intuitive’ for Renaissance thinkers or their predecessors. If we believe that the concept of space (the three-dimensional entity) was already present and understood in the modern sense by Renaissance thinkers and later natural philosophers, I join Professor Leclerc’s historical recognition of spatial concepts (in the book The Nature of Physical Existence), when he said that ‘what was in controversy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries […] was not “space” as it is commonly supposed. This supposition rests upon the nineteenth-century sense of space as an entity […]. There was then indeed no concept of space at all in the modern sense. The relevant controversy […] was concerning “place”.’ (See the article Concepts of Place, Space, Matter, and the Nature of Physical Existence).
Both figurative and geometrical interpretations of space are abstract, but the geometrical is less misleading, because it clarifies the circularity between abstraction and concreteness, between space and place. In fact, I argue that the ambiguous notion of ‘intuitive space’ is a by-product of geometry, not a direct apprehension of reality: the very image of infinite volumetric extension presupposes the conceptual machinery of mathematics, as J.J. Gibson already intuited (see the aforementioned article). We needed at first Aristotle, then Descartes, and, finally, Newton before our minds could conceive of reality as a spatial container understood as a coherent system of three-dimensions (or four-dimensions if we include time) independent of its material content.[20]
This is why it is anachronistic to project our spatialized worldview onto ancient thought. What they grasped was ‘place’—the extended presence of things—not ‘space’ as a free-standing continuum. Our present-day intuition of space, so immediate and spontaneous, is the outcome of two millennia of abstraction, geometrization, and cultural learning. We now live inside this metaphor so seamlessly that we often forget its artificial and historical character. By confusing the abstract with the concrete—space with the real continuum—we blind ourselves to the risks of this entanglement.
… all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.
George Eliot, Middlemarch
space… the most obsessing of metaphors in today’s languages
Michel Foucault, The Language of Space
Space as a Geometrical Object
It is important to distinguish between the two abstract, anti-substantivalist interpretations of space under discussion: figurative space and geometrical space. On closer scrutiny, we see that the former could not exist without the latter—at least in the modern sense inaugurated by Cartesian geometry. Both are products of abstraction, both founded on extension and dimensionality. Yet they differ fundamentally in origin. Figurative space is conceived as if space-as-extension were directly derived from reality (so, we say: ‘the dancer moves through the space of the stage’), whereas geometrical space is an abstract system derived from mathematics, only afterward superimposed onto reality. In this second case, the dancer can be conceived as moving not merely across a stage but within the volume of an imaginary parallelepiped defined by three coherent dimensions. From such abstraction arises the modern notion of space as three-dimensional container—an indefinite volume that persists even after dancer and stage vanish, giving us the illusion that what is in fact a mental construction is ‘really out there.’
The key lies here: the abstract volume of geometrical origin can be applied to almost any domain, which explains the enduring fortune of the concept of space, its reification, and its persistence in our discourse centuries after its formalization by Descartes and Newton. Space, in the modern sense, is not a datum ‘over there’, but the outcome of centuries of reasoning, debate, and symbolic elaboration. To believe otherwise is to mistake the abstract for the concrete. What really holds things together is place—the actual condition in which processes occur.
The risk of mistaking space for a physical entity is even greater when space is treated simply as a metaphor, a figurative term for indicating the dimensional continuum of reality. By contrast, if we understand space as a mathematical or relational construct—an abstract structure of dimensions we have learned and internalized—[21] we remain aware of the epistemological veil separating abstraction from reality. Our thoughts may roam freely in abstract space, but our bodies stand firmly in place. This awareness reminds us that ideas, to be effective, must ultimately meet the constraints of reality as the place of physical, biological, social, and intellectual processes.
In short, as James J. Gibson observed (see James J. Gibson on the Concept of Space), our modern conception of reality as an extensive continuum—whether three-dimensional space or four-dimensional spacetime—does not arise from direct perception of the world, but from abstract geometrical structures historically developed and superimposed upon reality. The long process leading from ancient astronomy, through trigonometry and Renaissance perspective,[22] to the insights of Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, and Einstein (see the articles Space and Place: A Scientific History – Part One and Part Two) shows how sociocultural and symbolic practices together forged the modern spatial imagination.
Image 4: The Italian architect Filippo Brunelleschi (1377 – 1446) was probably the first to have produced a mathematically exact linear perspectival procedure to represent reality as a three-dimensional fact. He also devised an ingenious method to verify the exact match between his three-dimensional drawing procedure and the actual built environment.
Thus, within the complementary structure of reality we envision, space and place must retain distinct ontological roles. To conflate them would be like mistaking the idea of a lemon for the lemon itself when making lemonade: for drinking our lemonade we need a real lemon, not its concept. Space is the abstract medium that enables theory, planning, and imagination. Place is the concrete domain where processes occur and things exist. Their complementarity—one abstract and potential, the other concrete and actual—allows us to envision reality as a unified whole: a place that embraces both the actual and the possible.
Spatial Conceptions, Scientific Revolutions and Society
By shifting from concrete to abstract modes of thought, humanity entered the Scientific Era. This transformation privileged space over place, abstraction over concreteness, and set the stage for the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions.
Today, however, we stand at the threshold of another epochal shift: the Information Revolution. If the Industrial Revolution was grounded in the mechanistic worldview of Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, the Information Revolution rests on different foundations: fields, systems, entanglement of processes. Electromagnetism, relativity, and quantum physics have already displaced the old Newtonian framework, giving rise to new technologies and new ways of conceiving reality.[23] Yet much of our social and cultural mindset remains anchored in reductionist, mechanistic and deterministic habits of thought.
To navigate this new era, we need fresh concepts of space and place. Traditional notions no longer suffice. Contemporary processes—from digital networks to ecological crises—cannot be understood with the simple idea of ‘physical space’ or with the limited, conventional sense of ‘place.’ Instead, we must think in terms of fields and extended places: interwoven, dynamic systems where physical, biological, social, and symbolic processes converge defining reality as a systemic whole.
Rethinking space and place is not optional. It is essential to align our conceptual tools with the realities of the Anthropocene—an epoch defined by the entanglement of natural, and human-technological forces.[24] For the first time in history, technology (the internet, virtual and augmented reality, artificial intelligence, etc.) makes palpable the interplay between the concrete and the abstract, between place and space. In this sense, we are entering what Plato once envisioned as the chōra—the ‘third realm’ where abstract and concrete meet. But this convergence is not yet balanced. Our abstract strategies—technological, economic, scientific—race ahead, often ignoring the material, ecological, and biological limits of reality-as-place. Without reintegrating abstract space into the grounding reality of place, we risk catastrophe rather than progress.
The redefinition of space and place is therefore more than a philosophical exercise. It is a cultural necessity and a political act. These concepts are detectors of epochal change. On Newton’s spatial concepts, modern capitalist societies were built (progress projected into reality seen as an unlimited space). On their redefinition, we must build the societies of the present and the future, capable of overcoming the crises inherited from the old mechanic worldview (progress projected into reality redescovered as a limited place).
Two and a half millennia after Plato and Aristotle, three hundred years after Newton, and after the new findings of physics at the beginning of the past century (relativity and quantum mechanics), we are again called to reconceive the very spatial, material, and temporal framework through which we understand the nature of reality. The caravan has already moved on: a third peripeteia is underway towards a new systematization of knowledge, one in which space and place will again play a decisive role.[25]
Place—as the system of processes from which facts and phenomena emerge—and space—as its abstract, complementary counterpart—must be thought together, as correlatives. Only then can we achieve a balanced vision of reality, one that honors both abstraction (human plans and projects in space—an unlimited domain of potentiality) and concreteness (realization of plans and projects in place—the limited domain of actuality).
Architecture and Society
What do these global changes mean for architecture? A new understanding of space and place—and with it, a new way of thinking about reality—points to a new kind of architecture. The seeds of this transformation have been present for decades. Today, many architects see architecture not as an isolated discipline but as a complex system within larger systems. This shift is reshaping the notion of place, and with it, the meaning of space, and the relations between space, place, and architecture.
Architecture is no longer defined only by form, function, or style. It is embedded in sociocultural and symbolic processes, and—since the rise of environmental awareness in the 1980s—also in ecological processes. All these processes reveal the deep interconnection of physical, chemical, biological, social, and symbolic dimensions that shape communal life. Architecture, therefore, is increasingly understood as part of a network of constraints and flows that extend far beyond the building itself.
This calls for a redefinition of architecture’s boundaries and meaning at the dawn of a New Era.[26]
Image 5: Solaris Building, Singapore, 2011, TR Hamzah & Ken Yeang Architects.
Before turning to specific architectural arguments, I need to clarify the concepts of space and place at a more theoretical level. Only then can we see how architecture operates within reality understood as a complex system—where concrete things-as-place and abstract spaces are complementary. The notion of place as a system of processes, which I discuss at RSaP, is instrumental for framing the transition of architecture into the New Era, both from a theoretical and a practical perspective.
Image 6, 7: Institute for Forestry and Nature Research, Wageningen, NL, 1998, Behnisch Architekten.
Image 8: Bosco Verticale, Milano, IT, 2014, Stefano Boeri Architetti.
Reality, Knowledge, and Representation
Interpreting space as a concrete entity is an epistemological fallacy. To put it provocatively, understanding space as the arena where phenomena occur is like risking illness from prolonged exposure to a painted smoking pipe on a wall. My point is that it is more useful to conceive of concrete reality—its continuum as well as its aspects—in terms of place or places, while understanding space as a conceptual tool that allows us to represent, think about, or gain knowledge of that reality-as-place. One thing is the concrete reality of facts, events, or objects; another is the representation or reflection we have of them. Objects and subjects are complementary poles of system-reality, whose circular relationship must be examined to understand the whole.
In architecture, treating space as the exclusive domain of design has long been conventional, but it is epistemologically misleading. Space is abstract; architecture is tangible. We inhabit places, not metaphors. Metaphors belong to reality, but they cannot replace it. Architecture, therefore, should be understood—and taught—as concerned with space-and-place: it creates spaces and modifies places for dwelling (spaces are truly created and refined through projects by the minds of architects, engeneers, etc.; places pre-exist human activities, so places cannot be created, just modified). This approach treats space and place as complementary, not isolated. Only through their interplay can architecture be understood in a contemporary context, where reality is seen as a complex system operating across multiple levels, from concrete to abstract.
Space is primarily an ideal domain: the arena of thought, memory, imagination, and conceptualization. It sustains ideas, allowing them to evolve or express potentiality without guaranteeing actualization. Misunderstanding space as concrete leads to what Whitehead called ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’.[27] Those who treat space as a generic container for places risk conflating abstraction and reality. Likewise, reducing place to a simple geographical location or socially constructed setting ignores its systemic and relational character.
I argue that the unquestioned identification of space with the locus of phenomena, and of place with isolated settings, is misleading. It confuses representation with reality, privileging abstract conceptualizations over the all-encompassing system of processes that constitutes the world. Through my practice and writings, I aim to challenge this conventional dichotomy and to promote a more nuanced understanding of space and place.
To move beyond the epistemological traps between representation and reality—and between space and place—we must acknowledge their circular relation. Concrete places emerge from processes, while space provides an abstract framework to comprehend those processes and the behavior of phenomena. This circularity makes space and place indispensable for communicating and understanding experiences of the world. Abstraction—through thought, memory, imagination, or values—is part of reality because it shapes human agency. Both concreteness and abstraction are fundamental, yet their distinct natures must be recognized. It is in the encounter between objects (places) and subjects (agents of abstraction) that reality emerges as a unified realm. Objects-as-place and the abstract ideas of space arise together, reflecting the interplay between potentiality and actualization.
We must acknowledge the complementary relation between concreteness and abstraction, objectivity and subjectivity. Reality is a unified, encompassing realm, where each aspect relies on the other. This positive circularity underpins a doctrine of mutual immanence between objects and subjects—a mutuality that reconciles dualism. By analogy, space and place share the same complementary structure. Space, as the abstract, and place, as the concrete, coexist in a choral, interdependent relation, akin to Plato’s concept of chōra, the mediatory realm between sensible and ideal forms. While they cannot fully blend due to their different natures, they are inseparable in understanding reality.
Ultimately, the framework I propose situates space and place within a correlated, circular structure, reflecting the interplay between subjects and objects, abstract and concrete, potential and actual. From this perspective, reality itself emerges as a unified, concrete place, in which all levels of existence—physical, natural and mental, symbolic/cultural—intersect and cohere.[28]
Image 9: Reality as choral domain (X). Concepts of place and space should be understood as correlated or complementary aspects concerning the concrete and the abstract modes through which reality unfolds. We can refer to those operative modes to the difference and correlation that exists between objects and subjects.
Reality and Its Continuum: Chōra or Place?
An apparent contradiction seems to emerge between two ways of conceiving the continuum of reality:
- Chōra, Plato’s ‘receptacle,’ a mediating domain between the sensible and the ideal;
- Place, understood here as a system of processes or ‘places’ through which reality emerges.
Although linguistically and philologically distinct—chōra is neither a synonym for ‘place’ nor for ‘space’—both terms, the Platonic ‘chōra’ and ‘place as system’ point to the fundamental continuum that holds different aspects of reality together—the concrete with the abstract, the sensible with the intelligible, the particular with the universal, the physical and the ideal or mathematical. At first glance, they appear mutually exclusive. Yet I argue their difference is not irreconcilable.
The abstract or ideal realm arises only after the concrete realm of stubborn facts or dynamics—physical, chemical, and basic biological. Excluding the reflexive agency of the mind, we must conclude that place as system is the more encompassing concept: a bounded realm creating and modifying its own orders. Before human consciousness, reality could only be thought of as place or a set of places—i.e., the natural world. With the emergence of the inquiring human mind and its abstract productions (theories, concepts, hypotheses, projects, etc.), reality could also be understood as chōra, the mediatory domain where the actual and the ideal meet. From an evolutionary perspective, the threshold between reality as place and reality as chōra coincides with the emergence of complex nervous systems and symbolic thought.
No contradiction exists, however. Both chōra and place as system encompass the real and the ideal, the concrete and the abstract, the actual and the potential. If we understand place as a concrescent system of processes out of which entities emerge, then space and all other abstractions are derivative—contained within place rather than the other way around. Place, so conceived, becomes the most encompassing category: it holds both the material and the immaterial or symbolic, the ideal and the physical, etc.
Seen in this way, a multilevel, place-based ontology begins to take shape (and, parallely, a topological cosmology—the Cosmos conceived as a continuous creation of places—can be hypothesized). Place emerges from chains of processes; yet these processes are actualized not only in themselves, without the need of human presence, but also through our epistemological interpretations of them. In other words, reality as all-encompassing place is constituted in the correlation between object and subject—or, more precisely, between object and ‘superject’.[29]
This, I believe, is the deepest philosophical implication of rethinking place as system (and, consequently, space): reality is neither exclusively ‘out there’ (as in materialism) nor merely ‘in here’ (as in idealism), but always a co-emergent continuum where processes, entities, and interpretations are inseparably bound. Such a view rests on a fundamental evolutionary vision—one that follows the theory of evolution in both its physical/astronomical and biological dimensions—thereby re-establishing the continuity between nature and culture.
Place and Space: What Next?
I remain with this topic—place and/or chōra as fundamental aspects of reality spanning the concrete and the abstract, the actual and the ideal, being and becoming—because in the coming epoch we must learn to inhabit reality as a hybrid domain. In this condition, the actual and the potential, the present and the past or future, coexist in unprecedented ways through the virtual. The proliferation of hybrid domains—virtual worlds, mixed and augmented realities—is already reshaping daily life. All these new realms are conditioned by how we understand space and place.
The task, then, is to establish clear ontological and epistemological boundaries that distinguish, yet also connect, their domains. Without such clarity we risk conceptual confusions with practical consequences. These boundaries must reveal continuity: only through a virtuous circularity between space and place can a sustainable approach to reality, suspended between the concrete and the abstract, be cultivated.
Image 10: Supermarket of the Future, ‘Bicocca Village’, Milano, IT, 2016, Area-17; INRES; Carlo Ratti Associati.
Image11: Immersive walking tour in between the real and the virtual, discovering the places and the works of Leonardo Da Vinci in Milano (‘You are Leo‘, Milano, Italy, 2019).
Image12: Experimental test conducted in a Russian farm to verify the impact of alternative environments on milk production using VR Headsets adapted for cows (2019).
Abstraction, which distinguishes humans from other beings, is a powerful mode of functioning. But it risks error: mistaking the abstract for the concrete or, conversely, the concrete for the abstract. My reinterpretation of space and place seeks to avoid such errors by clarifying their distinct roles.
Space and place are complementary modes of grasping reality. We are accustomed to think of space as the arena of things and phenomena—the physicist explaining planetary motion through spacetime curvature, the architect declaring architecture the art of space. In so doing, we confer on space a physicality it does not possess. This, I believe, is the decisive mistake of tradition. The fallacy lies in treating space (or spacetime) as a concrete entity. By attributing to it the substantial quality of place, we obscure the richness of processes that unfold in the real world. Space, precisely because of its abstract nature, cannot sustain the dense processuality intrinsic to places. Moreover, materializing space burdens it with constraints that diminish its potential as a tool of abstraction, thereby limiting the human mind’s own capacity to abstract.
Space and place must therefore be re-thought together: complementary concepts which, in their interplay, describe reality as a unified whole. To begin with, place is concrete, bounded, finite, tied to time as duration, and expresses the concrescent processuality of nature. Space is abstract, unbounded, infinite, time-independent, and expresses the abstracting processuality of mind—belonging to nature yet tending to transcend it.
To rethink space and place without falling into metaphysical traps is a delicate balancing act. On one side lies the fallacy of misplaced concreteness: mistaking space for something material. On the other, the fallacy of misplaced abstractness: dissolving place into subjective or exclusively abstract projections. Both deny what I hold essential: the correlation between concreteness and abstraction, object and subject, mediated by embodied mind and language. Rethinking the traditional meanings of space and place is a necessary step to avoid these traps.
As I argued earlier, redefining these concepts is part of an ongoing historical process. Concepts of space and place remain indispensable not only for common sense but also for physicists, philosophers, mathematicians, architects, artists, social scientists, politicians, and many more. My contribution, as architect and independent researcher, is to highlight aspects that may serve across disciplines. Given their legacy and enduring role in knowledge, we cannot dispense with space and place in our effort to understand reality as the encompassing domain where the actual and the ideal meet. Only by grasping both their differences and reciprocity can we outline a new Weltanschauung—before we relapse into barbarism, chasing shadows on the cave wall.
Image 13: Image of a drone strike. Concepts of space and place always conflate, whenever technology is applied to reality. If we fail to acknowledge their correlation, that is, if we fail to acknowledge the correlation between abstract and concrete modes of thought, we may endanger the progress of our modern civilization.
POSTSCRIPT (September 2024). I published this article on 5 September 2015, exactly one year after participating in the 5th Global Conference on Space and Place in Oxford. That experience prompted me to create this website. The paper I presented at the Conference, together with this long introductory article, distilled years of study and wide-ranging readings. They formed in me a diffuse cultural background—very much the fruit of the zeitgeist—which, a decade later, has faded in many of its details and ramifications. What remains are certain lines of thought and key insights, some of which I continue to develop in the articles I propose. As time passes, I often wonder whether the long theoretical journey I began ten years ago—one that shaped both my life and my profession—was worthwhile, and whether the path I took was the right one, not merely a solitary journey. Encounters with others who share similar ‘spatial’ concerns, though very rare, always bring me relief.
Today I was reading, for the first time, the words of philosopher Karsten Harries on the Philosophy of Architecture (2016). Reflecting on his earlier book The Ethical Function of Architecture (1997)—a work I already knew and which surely contributed to my own intellectual formation—Harries explained: ‘My decision to return to this material once more (the reference is to the content of The Ethical Function of Architecture’)… reflects the fact that I have kept thinking and lecturing about what I wrote in that book. Not that I have changed my position in any fundamental way […]. But circumstances have changed; the world has changed. More especially, the way we today relate to space has changed and continues to change. Our understanding of space has changed. And since architecture may be understood as the art of bounding space that suggests that our understanding of architecture, too, should have changed. Two developments seem to me to be particularly significant in this connection. One is the way an ever developing technology, and today especially the digital revolution, have opened up our everyday existence in ways we cannot quite foresee […]. The other, in a sense opposite, […] has to do with the way the inevitably limited resources provided by this small planet have to collide with a still increasing humanity and our ever increasing demands for a higher standard of living […]. Climate change further complicates the picture.’ (Karsten Harries, Philosophy of Architecture: Lecture Notes, 2016).
Harries thus underscores how our concept of space has changed—because the world itself has changed. This was precisely the kind of insight that prompted me, years ago, to revisit the traditional understanding of spatial concepts and, ultimately, to create this website. He further identifies two decisive forces—technological revolution and ecological crisis—as central to this transformation. These are the very factors that motivated me to propose an alternative perspective on the meaning of space and place, and to explore how such shifts might reshape architecture. What a remarkable alignment of thought.
Notes
[1] Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 340. See also paragraph 12 in this article, and the article Place and Space: A Philosophical History for a review and a summary of Casey’s book.
[2] Julian B. Barbour, The Discovery of Dynamics (New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 2001), 13. See also paragraph 12 in this article, and the article Space and Place: A Scientific History – Part One for a review and a summary of Barbour’s book.
[3] Martin Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in Basic Writings, edited by David Farrel Krell (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993), 355-356. I have substituted “place” for “locale” as a translation of “ort”, similarly to the translation of the Italian philosopher, Professor Gianni Vattimo, where “luogo” (i.e., “place”) is the translation of “ort”, and to the translation of the German philosopher, Professor Karsten Harries, in the paragraph ‘Building and Dwelling’ of the book ‘The Ethical Function of Architecture‘.
[4] I believe that to overcome the dualism intrinsic to the traditional theories of space and place (a dualism between space, or place, and matter, which is the expression of an even more ingrained form of dualism: the dualism between the concrete and the abstract) it is necessary to supersede old theories expressed in different epochs (I refer to Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Newton, Mach, Einstein and more recent theories). Of course, this move requires [A] rethinking those concepts to avoid falling into anachronism; and [B] illustrating the relation between the new extended meanings attributed to old concepts and the past theories.
[5] Chōra – whereby the English adjective ‘choral’ derives – is the name given by Plato to the realm where the always changing and perishable world of sensible forms meets the abstract domain where those forms ideally exist according to perfect and immutable mathematical relations. With respect to such Platonic perspective, I understand reality as the encompassing arena where things (what Plato called ‘sensible forms’) and thoughts (the abstract counterpart of sensible forms), exist in circular relation, one the complementary part of the other. The same circularity holds for the concepts of place and space, since one – place – refers to the arena of things (actually, I believe place is the very arena of things emerging from different kinds of process), the other – space – refers to the arena of thought (see the previous note). Through their circular relation we can define reality as one encompassing realm, where place and space coexist at different levels and with different roles and, most of all, in discontinuity with the prevailing view that wants space and place acting on the same (physical) level, although at different scales (place contained in space).
[6] In the end, it was through the work of mathematicians that the concept of space, conceived of as autonomous three-dimensional abstract entity – I mean the geometrical object – was formalized. Descartes’s analytical geometry played an important role at this regards. Before Descartes, Euclidean geometry was devoid of any reference to space as an autonomous three-dimensional concept – see also Einstein’s 1934 article: ‘The Problem Of Space, Ether, and The Field in Physics’. Maybe the idea of a coherent physical continuum was present in the mind of pre-scientific people at the level of intuition, yet this sort of intuition of the continuum, difficult to define, was not formalized into three-dimensional space until the modern epoch, thanks to the joint work of mathematicians, astronomers, philosophers, architects, artists, etc. – we are going to see this in detail.
[7] Within the framework that I’m going to delineate, the concepts of space and place may conflate at a symbolic level, so it is not always easy to set up clear boundaries between the two at such level. I’m thinking of thoughts, dreams, memories, fantasies or even hallucinations… Are dreams representations of places or are they spaces? In his ‘Poetics of Space’ is Bachelard speaking of spaces or places? Is Gotham City a place or is it an abstract space only? These and other related placial/spatial questions I also want to explore in this place.
[8] An invaluable source of historical and philosophical information concerning the alternate fortunes of the concepts of place (and space) is Edward Casey’s book ‘The Fate of Place – A Philosophical History’.
[9] This is the extended passage on the meaning of field and matter taken from the text ‘The Evolution of Physics’ by Einstein and Infeld: ‘Can we think of matter and field as two distinct and different realities? Given a small particle of matter, we could picture in a naive way that there is a definite surface of the particle where it ceases to exist and its gravitational field appears. In our picture, the region in which the laws of field are valid is abruptly separated from the region in which matter is present. But what are the physical criterions distinguishing matter and field? Before we learned about the relativity theory we could have tried to answer this question in the following way: matter has mass, whereas field has not. Field represents energy, matter represents mass. But we already know that such an answer is insufficient in view of the further knowledge gained. From the relativity theory we know that matter represents vast stores of energy and that energy represents matter. We cannot, in this way, distinguish qualitatively between matter and field, since the distinction between mass and energy is not a qualitative one. By far the greatest part of energy is concentrated in matter; but the field surrounding the particle also represents energy, though in an incomparably smaller quantity. We could therefore say: Matter is where the concentration of energy is great, field where the concentration of energy is small. But if this is the case, then the difference between matter and field is a quantitative rather than a qualitative one. There is no sense in regarding matter and field as two qualities quite different from each other…There would be no place, in our new physics, for both field and matter, field being the only reality.’ In Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, The Evolution of Physics (London: The Scientific Book Club, 1938), 256-258.
[10] Steven Weinberg, “The Search for Unity: Notes for a History of Quantum Field Theories”, Daedalus, Vol. 106, 1977, 23.
[11] I have taken the term implacement from Edward Casey. According to Casey, ‘the im- of implacement stresses the action of getting in or into, and it carries connotations of immanence that are appropriate to the inhabitation of places’. Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed understanding of the World-Place (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), xiii, 315. I think this type of ‘active’ connotation is apt to describe what I mean for place when I say that a place is always a place of processes that cannot be severed from the entities – which are states of place – that accompany those processes; whenever processes become actual, they are actualized into entities-place or, simply, places. I believe the term implacement describes very well the intrinsic relation that I believe exist between processes and entities understood as places (or ‘elemental thing-place’ to take another fortunate expression from Casey, Ibid., page 216).
[12] For an overview of the new systemic understanding of life and the cosmos, I suggest Fritjof Capra’s widely accessible books; among others, his last published book (co-authored with the Italian Chemistry Professor Pier Luigi Luisi), The System View of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
[13] Alfred N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Pelican Mentor Books, 1925).
[14] With the expression ‘unfolding of events’ I mean the process through which entities encounter each other (so that any event, as the concretization of processes, is contained within – or emerges from – ‘the why’, ‘the how’, ‘the where’, ‘the what’ and ‘the when’ of reality); it is only from the encounters of two or more entities that reality may emerge – and can be understood – as a systemic whole.
[15] With respect to the process of knowledge, the active role of the mind (both unconscious and conscious) in its correlation with the reality of physicochemical processes was beautifully expressed by two Chilean biologists, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, through the expression ‘bringing forth of a world through the process of living’. Their theses represent a scientific way to escape the troublesome issue of irreconcilable dualism that affected Western Thought since its origins. The way I interpret reality through the concepts of place and space somehow reflects their way of relating knowledge (subject) to reality (object), and, ultimately, the concrete to the abstract as a unique realm deriving from their reciprocity. The quotation in italics is taken from H.R. Maturana and F.J. Varela, The Tree of Knowledge (Boston: Shambhala, Revised edition, 1992), 11.
[16] As the American psychologist James J. Gibson once said about his pioneering studies in the field of visual perception, ‘The concept of space has nothing to do with perception (…). Geometrical space is a pure abstraction (…). The visual third dimension is a misapplication of Descartes’s notion of three axes for a coordinate system (…). Space is a myth, a ghost, a fiction for geometers’, in James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (New York: Psychology Press Classic Editions, 2015), xv.
[17] According to Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation of 1770, ‘space is not something objective and real, neither substance, nor accident, nor relation; but subjective and ideal, arising by fixed law from the nature of the mind like an outline for the mutual co-ordination of all external sensations whatsoever’, in William Eckoff, Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation of 1770 (New York: Columbia College, 1894), 65.
[18] It seems to me that Kant, by introducing the concept of space within the realm of cognitive processes (in the Critique of Pure Reason), formalized another type of space, different from Descartes’s geometrical space and from Newton’s physical space: I’m referring to the type of mental space from which many theories of knowledge and perception were derived in one way or another (with regard to the notion of ‘perceptual space’, in many cases this is a misapplication of Kant’s theory since according to Kant space is a form of pure intuition, thereby its conceptualization is free of sensation, unrelated to the way our senses function; Kant’s argumentation with respect to the ideal nature of space is also quite different from Leibniz’s ideal space). Independently of Kant’s primacy in the history of modern thinking with respect to the cognitive nature of space (one could attribute that primacy to Leibniz as well, but this is not my point here), I believe that much confusion may arise by using the same concept – space – to explain different occurrences within different realms or domain – the geometrical, the physical and the cognitive or psychological -, if we underestimate the consequences of that transposition. With respect to the possibility of explaining physical phenomena by using the concept of space, that possibility has been long surpassed by the utilization of other concepts in physics (the spacetime concept and the field concept, respectively). Conversely, as far as I know, the traditional understanding of space as the arena of things is still widely used as mere representational concept in the field of psychology and in many theories of knowledge to which disciplines like, psychology itself, philosophy, geography, sociology, anthropology or architecture – just to name few – still refer to.
[19] More often than not – and more often than spaces based on simple Euclidean geometry – architectural spaces based on non-Euclidean geometries remain within their ideal domain in the form of drawings, renderings or models, to testify the great gap between idealization and actualization, between space and place. In this regard, the ultimate goal of an architect is the actualization of space into place – that’s what Architecture ultimately consist of -, while the actualization of space into paper or models is an intermediate passage – indeed necessary and vital for the discipline itself – for architects to thoroughly fill the gap between abstract space – the space of the project – and the real places where ideas contained in projects are reified, or actualized, during the phases of construction through the agency of physicochemical, biological, ecological, social (economic, political, technological etc.) and symbolic processes.
[20] Of course, this is an oversimplification that I will try to explain with more specific arguments in the historically-based articles that I will post in this website.
[21] With respect to the different phases – from topological to metrical – through which the concept of space is envisioned in the human mind, see also Jean Piaget and Barbel Inhelder, The Child’s Conception of Space (London, Routledge & K. Paul, 1956).
[22] In the essay ‘Perspective as Symbolic Form’, Panofsky was able to extend the relevance of a technical discourse on perspective to a global discourse on knowledge and the different world-view expressed by an epoch (Weltanschauung). By analysing the case of perspective, we can see how cognitive, psychological and technical practices of an epoch are interwoven, thus unveiling the reciprocal roles that biological, sociocultural and symbolic factors play in the process of knowledge. What is geometrical perspective if not another crucial historical moment to express one of the several abstract passages needed for the concept of space to be envisioned and developed by Western culture as means to understand, represent, mimic or surpass physical reality? I believe the invention of geometrical perspective pushed forward the edge of knowledge and extended our cognitive domain, preparing the mind to further explorations and expansions needed for the concept of geometrical space (as an integrated system of three dimensions) to be conceived – by Descartes – and reified – by Newton.
[23] The theory of relativity played an important part in stressing the importance of the field concept in physics as well; see Einstein and Infield, The Evolution of Physics, page 260. Einstein was the first who tried to devise a Unified Field Theory.
[24] The Nobel Prize-winning scientist Paul Crutzen, declared the Anthropocene to be the dawn of a new human-influenced epoch following the Holocene. Current environmental changes of the Earth-system are deemed to be the direct effect of the human agency on this planet. There is scientific evidence for this: rising CO2 levels, airborne particulates from fossil fuel burning in sediments, unprecedented levels of nitrogen and phosphorus in soils, pushed extinction rates of animals and plants, dispersed radioactive elements from nuclear bomb tests, etc. See Paul J. Crutzen, “The Anthropocene“, in Earth System Science in the Anthropocene edited by Ehlers and Krafft (New York: Springer, 2006).
[25] For the contingencies regarding the ‘third peripeteia’, see Edward Casey, The Fate of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 340; for those regarding ‘the caravan already on the move’, see Julian B. Barbour, The Discovery of Dynamics (New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 2001), 13.
[26] The reference is to the Anthropocene. See note 24.
[27] The accidental error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete was called ‘Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness’ by Alfred North Whitehead. In: Alfred N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Pelican Mentor Books, 1925), 52, 54, 59.
[28] Within the context of this kind of philosophical argumentation, the intricate relation between concepts of place, space, time, experience, subjectivity and objectivity, are arguments of thorough exploration by the Australian philosopher Jeff Malpas in the book ‘Place and Experience’.
[29] I borrow the term ‘superject’ from Whitehead’s ‘philosophy of organism’ according to which the subject emerges from the objective data of the world, therefore a ‘superject’ rather than a subject — see: Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality – An Essay in Cosmology (New York: The Free Press, Corrected edition, 1978), 88. From process philosophy I also take some argumentation in order to devise a possible solution to the dualism that afflicted Western thought; some of the complementary relations that Whitehead investigated – between process and reality, between object and subject – are part of my discourse on the differences and complementarities that exist between place and space as concrete – or objective – and abstract – or subjective/superjective – modes of experience. Always with respect to the original meaning of the term ‘subject’, it is extremely interesting Heidegger’s argumentation regarding the shift of meaning that the term underwent during the centuries, passing from being referred to the thing (‘sub-ject’ was the character that underlies a thing) to indicating the Cartesian ‘I’ of the proposition ‘I think’ as fundamental entity of reality – this is the way we currently understand the term ‘subject’ — see Martin Heidegger, What is a Thing? (South Bend: Gateway Editions, 1967), Section B, or the corresponding article in this website — therefore, during the centuries, the same term ‘subject’ reverted its meaning. While Heidegger tries to recover the old truth utilizing a hermeneutic approach, Whitehead by introducing a new term (superject) directly re-establishes the same old truth Heidegger refers to; two different approaches to the same fundamental fact. In the overall, it is not by chance that Heidegger’s reconstruction of the original truth about the subject and the object is parallel to the shift of meaning that the concept of place underwent from designating the concreteness of matter-as-implaced thing to a simple (abstract) location within space. The underlying process is the same and is referred to the passage from more concrete to more abstract modes of thinking about reality, a very long, multifaceted, process that regarded mankind in any of its aspects and culminated in the mechanistic and deterministic worldview that emerged from Cartesian philosophy and Newtonian mechanics.
Works Cited
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—. “Building Dwelling Thinking”, in Basic Writings, edited by David Farrel Krell. New York: HarperCollins Publishers,1993.
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Image Credits
Featured Image and Images 2–4, 9–11 by Alessandro Calvi Rollino, CC BY-NC-SA
Image 5 (source) by TR Hamzah & Ken Yeang Architects
Image 6, 7 (source) by Behnisch Architekten
Image 8 (source) by Stefano Boeri Architetti
Image 13 (source) by Ministry of Agriculture and Food of the Moscow Region
