Place and Occasion

I arrived at the conclusion that whatever space and time mean, place and occasion mean more, for space in the image of man is place, and time in the image of man is occasion. Split apart by the schizophrenic mechanism of determinist thinking, time and space remain frozen abstractions… A house should therefore be a bunch of places – a city a bunch of places no less. ^[1]
Aldo van Eyck

That quotation is reported by Adrian Forty in the book Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture. The same quotation also appears in Aldo van Eyck’s book ‘Writings: Collected Articles and Other Writings 1947-1998’, edited by Vincent Ligtelijn and Francis Strauven, but the final part is slightly different; this is the extended quotation in van Eyck’s book: “I arrived at the conclusion that whatever space and time mean, place and occasion mean more, for space in the image of man is place and time in the image of man is occasion. Split apart by the schizophrenic mechanism of deterministic thinking, time and space remain frozen abstractions… Place and occasion constitute each other’s realization in human terms. Since man is both subject and object of architecture, it follows that its primary job is to provide the former for the sake of the latter. Since furthermore place and occasion imply participation in what exists, lack of place – and thus of occasion – will cause loss of identity, isolation and frustration. A house, therefore, should be a bunch of places, and the same applies no less to a city”. ^[2] I preferred to use the quotation reported by Adrian Forty because of the final reiteration of the term place: it reinforces the importance of that concept within the discourse, and I read a possible metaphysical interpretation, in agreement with my thinking about reality, understood as a nested chain of places: places within places, within places, within places… (see the article Places Everywhere).

Notes

[1] in Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000), 271.

[2] in Aldo van Eyck, Writings: Collected Articles and Other Writings 1947-1998, eds. V. Ligtelijn and F.Strauven (Amsterdam: SUN Publishers, 2008), 317.

Works Cited

van Eyck, Aldo. Writings: Collected Articles and Other Writings 1947-1998, edited by Vincent Ligtelijn and Francis Strauven. Amsterdam: SUN Publishers, 2008.

Forty, Adrian. Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000.