These are some considerations suggested to me by a recent conversation I had with a colleague architect, concerning the reception of the concept of space in architecture, before the modern epoch. I hope it can contribute to avoiding some possible misinterpretations, where, in a previous article — Concepts of Space in Vitruvius — I spoke about the possibility to interpret space (spatium) in a three-dimensional sense, in connection with a couple of passages in Vitruvius’s De Architectura. This question is more subtle than it may appear, and it deserves further elucidation, especially for those interested in the relation between space and architecture, and, more broadly, for those interested in the interpretation of the concepts of space in different epochs.
To say that people in the epochs before the modern one might have grasped or developed a protomodern concept of space in a three-dimensional sense does not automatically allow us to say that that concept may also apply to architecture, and be intended as ‘architectural space’. The fully-fledged three-dimensional understanding of reality as space was a late acquisition in the dimensional upgrades that occurred to the meanings of the concept of space; the specific three-dimensional sense of space understood as an architectural concept is an even later occurrence.
Here, I will often stress the use of the dimensional attribute (one-, two-, or three-dimensional) next to the noun ‘space’, because when we, modern people, speak of ‘space’, we immediately presuppose that space is a three-dimensional extent, while, in the past epochs, that was not always the case. We have seen it, when we took into consideration the Latin term ‘spatium’, in the article on Concepts of Space in Vitruvius: space had one-dimensional, two-dimensional, or temporal senses, more often than not. I’ve also spoken about the common modern presupposition of understanding space as a three-dimensional notion and its anachronistic application to previous epochs, in the article Concepts of Place, Space, and the Nature of Physical Existence,which is based on the presentation of the book The Nature of Physical Existence, by Ivor Leclerc, an American philosopher, former president of the Metaphysical Society of America, and interpreter of the philosophy of Alfred N. Whitehead.
In this regard, Leclerc also wrote a brief essay, titled ‘Concepts of Space’, where he explicitly said that ‘until the seventeenth century, the word “space” had the general meaning of “extent”, and in English, back to the fourteenth century, was used in two main specific senses, one in regard to time, an extent or lapse or interval of time, and the other in respect of linear distance, an extent or interval between two or more points, and consequently also a superficial extent or area.’[1] Overall, this is in perfect agreement with the study I have presented on the different interpretations of the concept of space in Vitruvius.
In parallel to these historical and linguistic considerations, I also often say that we have to take firmly in view that the three-dimensional sense of space should not be misplaced for the intuitive understanding that people have — and always had — of reality, perceived as a multi-dimensional fact, event, or happening. Physical reality is a place: we perceive places and the objects or bodies in it. Furthermore, on this website, I’m trying to show the possibility to understand ‘objects’ or ‘things’ (or bodies) themselves in the guise of places: the place of processes that constitute the ‘being’ — the essence — of that object, thing or body (for the metaphysical interpretation of place as the ‘being’ of all that exists, see the articles Being as Place: Introduction to Metaphysics – Part One, and Part Two). This also means that architecture, I mean a built architecture — the built artifact — is preferable to be understood and described as a question of place rather than (or before than) as space, which is a reductive term (fundamentally, a reduction of place, of which, from many characters, it abstracts the dimensional character alone). For me, the intuitive, three-dimensional, or, let’s say, phenomenic interpretation of reality is always referred to places and the objects that constitute such places — this is the physical environment, which, in its natural constitution, has nothing to with ‘space’. To attribute the multidimensional sense of reality to space is everything but immediate, or intuitive: we do not perceive space, which does not exist as an external entity, or frame of reference. Like the notable American psychologist of perception James J. Gibson once said: ‘space has nothing to do with perception’.[2] Space is a pure abstraction, a notion, which had a very long gestational period, between metaphysical, physical and mathematical/geometrical considerations, before it could be clearly recognized, isolated, and other connotations could be ‘attached’ to it — in no particular order: phenomenological, artistic, geographical, social, architectural, political, economic, etc. Space: an invention, a concocted concept, something ephemeral, intangible, or, again, to say it with J. Gibson, ‘a myth, a ghost, a fiction for geometers’.[3] That is space. Then, we can only imagine it, as a form of representation, an abstract reconstruction, and, as such, a reduction of that which really presents to our eyes, nose, skin, hands, brain, legs, stomach… for the first time: the physical environment as a whole — that is the place we live in. If ‘space’ is an invention, a concocted concept, the main question is: when was it ‘invented’? and by who? The linguistic and historically-based articles of this website shed some light on the possible answers, which can only be appreciated as the result of a very long narration, which started more than two millennia ago, with the early Greeks, and was dispersed between many different concepts, during different epochs. Just to name a few of these concepts: to apeiron, to kenon, topos, chōra, anaphes phusis, pneuma, aether, spatium, vacuum, locus, absolute space… until we arrive at more modern or contemporary spatial/placial concepts, like relative spacetime or the field-concept.
space has nothing to do with perception. We perceive places and the objects, or bodies in them; we do not perceive space, which we can only imagine, as an abstract, immersive frame of reference
Regarding the concept of space in architecture and the specific understanding of ‘architectural space’ intended as an instrumental, three-dimensional concept available to architects for producing or designing architectures, that concept has been envisioned starting from the late XIX century and became a diffused dominion of knowledge for architects only in the second part of the XX century (see the Appendix in the article On the Ambiguous Language of Space). Therefore, coming back to the interpretation of space at the time of Vitruvius, the Roman architect might have developed a conception of space and, specifically, of architectural space in a one-dimensional or two-dimensional sense (as a linear distance or an area, region, surface, etc. — see Image 04, 05, 06, in the article Concepts of Space in Vitruvius), but it is questionable that he could also have envisioned a clear-cut conception of space in a three-dimensional sense, as a background containing objects, walls, floors, roofs, people…; and, most of all, it is highly improbable, if not impossible, that he could also have envisioned that ‘background space’ as an instrumental three-dimensional tool for architecture (3D architectural space). Let’s see that question more in detail.
In antiquity, the Greek atomists developed a concept — ‘to kenon’, the void — which presented some analogies with the modern concept of space. Nonetheless, it was not the same as modern space. As we know, the Greeks neither had a concept of space, nor a term for designating it: by the ancient Greeks, ‘to kenon’, ‘topos’, and ‘chōra’ were the most popular terms through which they described what we now call the extended/dimensional character of reality, or even its environing character — which we could also call ‘the cosmic scene of all events’, the continuum that binds everything together and keeps it related and ordered in physical/material and temporal sense.[4] According to whether the cosmic scene was without bodies in it, occupied by bodies, or with bodies roaming through it, they spoke in terms of ‘kenon’, ‘topos’ or ‘chora’. In classical Greek antiquity, some other terms to describe that continuum, or all-pervading substratum — the cosmic scene of all events — were anaphes phusis, pneuma, or even the aether, each one with its specific connotation, either material or spiritual. None of those terms can be simply or directly translated for, or understood as ‘space’. And, most of all, as also Heidegger observed, while we may attribute a dimensional character other than an environing, immersive, character to that cosmic scene, the early Greeks did not experience that scene according to the dimensional character alone — extensio.[5] The ancient Greek atomistic concept of the void — ‘to kenon’ —, and its more complicated Epicurean variation as ‘intangible substance’ — ‘anaphes phusis’ —[6] was taken over and elaborated (and not simply translated from Greek into Latin) by the Roman poet Lucretius, a contemporary of Vitruvius, in De Rerum Natura:[7] that Greek conceptualization acquired some different nuances with its translation into Latin, by Lucretius himself, as ‘vacuum’, ‘spatium’ or even ‘[locus] inane’. Those were exceptional cases in antiquity — I mean those who focused their attention on the abstracting properties of the void, or space, as an alternative to the more concrete notion of place. As a matter of fact, the referential term and concept to describe the cosmic scene of all events was not space or the void, but ‘place’ (‘topos’ — or sometimes ‘chōra’ — by the Greeks; ‘locus’, in the Roman world), which became the established physical and philosophical concept of antiquity, thanks to the success of Aristotelian cosmology and Ptolemaic astronomy, which prevailed over other conceptual schemes (e.g., those of the atomists, or the stoics). And, most of all, no clear-cut distinction was elaborated between the void (vacuum), space (spatium) and place (locus) before the period between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries (this is a subject I’ve dealt with in the article Concepts of Place, Space, and the Nature of Physical Existence). Therefore, the possibility for Vitruvius to have taken up the concept developed by the Greek atomists and, later, by his contemporary Lucretius, was remote, but not impossible; conversely, the possibility that he could have associated that notion with the domain of architecture and transform it into a fully-fledged instrumental concept for architecture is to exclude. It is not a secondary question the fact that the transposition of a notion from a dominion (philosophy of nature) to another (architecture), also required the conceptual passage from the microscopic scale to the human scale, since the domain of provenance was the domain of microphysics, the domain of the ancient atomism. So, we are coming to the point of the discussion, which aims at clarifying my previous attribution of a three-dimensional sense of space to Vitruvius, in a couple of circumstances: we cannot exclude that Vitruvius, as an exponent of the Roman culture, following Lucretius’ intuition, could have glimpsed into a ‘protomodern’ conception of space — ‘spatium’ — intended as a generic, empty, three-dimensional expanse of the kind Lucretius himself, more than the Greek atomists, argued for. This is the sense of a couple of passages in De Architectura — 5.9.5 and 6.6.3, especially —, for which I left open the possibility to be catalogued under the heading ‘spatium as an expanse’, in a three-dimensional sense, and also in the context of a description of an architectural environment (5.9.5, specifically), or of other few passages, which, in Concepts of Space in Vitruvius, I catalogued under ‘figurative gap or cavity’, always, interpreted in a three-dimensional sense.
Indeed — this is an important distinction to keep in mind, especially for those interested in architectural questions —, the possibility to understand space as a generic three-dimensional expanse, gap or cavity, is still very far from the possibility of developing a concept of three-dimensional space to be used as a design tool (for architecture, in this case). It is here the real threshold to understand specific discontinuities or distinctions in what we could term ‘a gradient-based meaning of space’: 3D space as a tool for calculation in a mathematical, or geometrical sense, and, more specifically, 3D space as a tool for architectural design require still another level of abstraction, as the vicissitudes after the Italian naturalists, Galileo, Descartes and Newton, or the philosophical and esthetical discussions that started in the late XIX century clearly showed. With specific reference to the architectural domain, the leap from understanding 3D space to understanding 3D space as a device to design architecture requires a form of intuition and knowledge that we cannot take for granted, as I have tried to explain in the article Concepts of Space in Vitruvius, where I have taken as an example my epiphany with space (which eventually evolved into particular spatially-biased architectural models which I termed Archi-textures – see the related article) or, by analogy, calling back to our minds the famous epiphany that Paul Klee had with colours, on his way to Kairouan, on 16 April 1914, when he wrote in his diary: ‘Colour possesses me. I don’t have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: Colour and I are one. I am a painter.’[8]
One question is what we have before our eyes, another question is to attribute a certain meaning to what is before our eyes (or, in the case of space, to what is not even before our eyes). In this regard — i.e., what is before our eyes, which is different from attributing a certain meaning to it — it comes to my mind a passage from the book Investigations, by the American theoretical biologist and complex system researcher Stuart Kaufmann; in that book, he reports a curious episode, concerning the Spanish conquest of the Americas: no response at all was given to early Spanish ships invasion in the Caribbean by native inhabitants, because ‘the ships were not seen — there was no concept for them.’ [9]
These observations inevitably take us to the following conclusion, which I’ve also discussed in the articles concerning The International Style: to look at the architectures of the past epochs — Greek, Roman, Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassical architectures, etc. — in a spatial, three-dimensional sense may be a useful exercise for modern architects or students of architecture — sure it is! —, provided it is not the privileged way to access the meaning and the value of those architectures. In this regard — the interpretation of architectures before the modern epoch — there are material, volumetric (in the sense of mass), geometrical and esthetical considerations (disposition, proportion, symmetry of the parts, etc. ) that should accompany or, better, should come before spatial/metrical considerations, since the latter considerations (in a three-dimensional sense) couldn’t have guided the hands and the minds of architects, in the epochs before the modern one. They had no conception of three-dimensional space, as an architectural instrument, tool, or abstract device. It would be an anachronism to think about the contrary.
Overall, it seems to me, there are three distinctive spatial objects implicated in the discussion, here — I mean three types of three-dimensional entities: Type 1) three-dimensional space understood as a void/neutral background of events, things, bodies, etc.; Type 2) three-dimensional space considered as ‘architectural space’ — an entity initially neutral (i.e., Type 1), which assumes the qualities, or the atmosphere emanated by the ‘object-architecture’, that is the qualities emanated by walls, roofs, windows, doors, balconies, fences, etc. (here, we could have a further subdivision between interior and exterior space); this is almost a passive transposition of Type 1, generic three-dimensional space, into Type 2, the space of architecture, whenever an architecture, or, more generally, a human-scale construction is present in a certain place; Type 3) the most abstract and complex spatial object to grasp, that is, ‘architectural space-as-a-tool’: this is the most abstract structure, having, at first, geometrical and symbolic properties that can be extended to other levels of complexity, e.g., esthetical, functional, social, etc., to devise abstract models to control reality (which, I repeat, is a place — any physical environment is a place, not a space). The difference between the first, the second and the third typology of space is a question of distance, or of increasing level of engagement with which the architect (or the one who is dealing with the architectural phenomenon) may relate to space and the surrounding environment: the first and the second typology of space are more easily conceivable as seemingly external structures ‘observable’ from the outside (a question of perception and cognition of the surrounding environment, acknowledged, at least, as a complex three dimensional event, which can also be expressed/represented using the term ‘space’; actually, the direct object of perception and cognition is always a place with objects and/or bodies contained in it, and not space, which does not exist as an external object — that’s why I have used the italics for the expression ‘seemingly external structures’, and I put the term ‘observable’ between quotation marks); while the third typology of space is a question of creation or modification of the surrounding reality from the inside, that is: again, it is a question of perception and cognition of the surrounding environment, acknowledged at least as a three dimensional fact, but, in addition, there is a deeper awareness of how perception and cognition work, so that it is possible for the architect to influence in advance the perception and cognition that people will have of the physical environment, by changing the spatial/volumetric structure of a project (this is the space of the project of architecture, precisely). The latter is a possibility exclusively reserved for modern architects, given that — we are saying — three-dimensional space is a modern tool, while architects in the past epochs could only count on the possibility to change in advance the material elements of the projects — walls, windows, roofs, their dispositions, symmetries… — without the possibility to rely on any abstract three-dimensional spatial tool, which they did not possess. This ‘third typology’ of space, architectural space understood as a three-dimensional tool for design, was alien to Vitruvius as well as to the architects of the epochs before the modern; this is clearly attested by the following two articles, based on the evidences of the important book for architects, The international Style: Mind, Space, Architecture: On The International Style and On the Ambiguous Language of Space. Now, architects have also other conceptions of space at their disposal, which go beyond the limits of three-dimensionality, but this is not my point here (as a matter of fact, those notions — and I specifically refer to relative spacetime and the field concept — should be better understood as typologies of place, or in correlation with the reformed sense of place that I’m arguing for in this website).
To conclude the sense of this reflection on space, and the further recognition of the concepts of space in Vitruvius’ De Architectura, we have seen that space, at the time of Vitruvius, had prevailing meanings in one-dimensional, two-dimensional and temporal senses, while Vitruvius’s understanding of space as an architectural tool, was at best two-dimensional (the case at 6.2.5 in De Architectura is exemplary — see Concepts of Space in Vitruvius). This fact, on a very few occasions, does not exclude the possibility that he could have interpreted the term spatium in a generic three-dimensional sense (à la Lucretius, in the Epicurean sense): as a figurative term in connection with an architectural explanation, or to describe a gap or cavity (these typologies of space are Type 2 and Type 1, with reference to the typologies of space I described above). This is to confirm that: first, Vitruvius had, at best, an understanding of space, in architectural sense, as a two-dimensional concept; second, there is a difference between understanding space as a three-dimensional notion, and understanding space as a three-dimensional notion to be used as a tool for design (architectural space-as-a-tool): the two are very different conceptualizations and the former does not entail the latter (while the contrary is true: this fact is demonstrated by the very different spatial qualities that architects can instill in the architectures they design); third, as a consequence, Vitruvius might have glimpsed into a ‘protomodern’ concept of space as a three-dimensional notion, a container of bodies (a remote possibility, but not impossible, on the base of Lucretius’ spatium), but he could not have glimpsed into the notion of architectural space as a three-dimensional concept or tool for design.
This is the state of the art concerning the traditional notion of space in architecture (architectural space) — I mean the concept elaborated since the late XIX century, thereby excluding more recent research and applications between architecture and non-Euclidean spaces. One of the possible directions of this research on the traditional interpretations of the concept of space in architecture is to see if this state of the art is established once and for all, or if it has been established in this way because of the lack of interdisciplinary spatial studies on the authors of the past, which could contribute to putting into question that state of the art. What I am thinking about is not a historical study on specific architects of the epochs before the modern to show their generic disposition with ‘space’ (these studies are often biased with modern presuppositions and, therefore, anachronistic interpretations of space); more extendedly, it is a study on the specific spatial language used by architects in their writings (something similar to the study I made on Vitruvius, but focused on other architects of the past: I mean Brunelleschi, Alberti, Palladio, Perrault, Ruskin…), compared to the way the concepts of space and place were understood in their epochs, from a physical and metaphysical point of view, especially. Here, at least, the competence of architects, who are at ease with the language of space and its different meanings, should preferably intersect those of historians, philosophers, or philosophers of science, who have specific competences in spatial questions.
Notes
[1] Ivor Leclerc, ‘Concepts of Space’, in Probability, Time, and Space in Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Paula R. Backscheider (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1979), 209-216.
[2] This is the extended quotation ‘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. The doctrine that we could not perceive the world around us unless we already had the concept of space is nonsense. It is quite the other way around: We could not conceive of empty space unless we could see the ground under our feet and the sky above. 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.
See also James J. Gibson on the Concept of Space.
[3] Ibid., xv.
[4] I have taken the expression ‘the cosmic scene of all events’ by Samuel Sambursky, slightly modifying the original formulation — ‘the cosmic scene of material events’ — which was an expression referred to the Stoics’ concept of ‘pneuma, an all-pervading substratum’; in Samuel Sambursky, Physics of the Stoics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 1.
[5] Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. by Gregory Fried, and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 69. See also note [111] in the article Being as Place: Introduction to Metaphysics – Part One.
[6] Because of this concept, ‘intangible substance’, Epicurus is said to be the first to have isolated the concept of space. It this regard, in Casey’s book The Fate of Place, we find a quotation, elaborated on a statement from Long and Sedley, according to whom Epicurus was ‘the first ancient thinker to isolate space in the broadest sense’. In a passage from Sextus Empiricus and reported in Casey’s The Fate of Place, Epicurus refers to an ‘intangible substance’ (anaphes phusis), as he calls it, which is named ‘void’ (kenon), ‘place’ (topos), or ‘room’ (chōra) according to whether that substance is empty of all body, is occupied by a body, or bodies roam through it. In: Edward S.Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 83.
[7] An interesting contribution concerning this question and, more in general, concerning the reception of the concept of space in the Roman period is the paper by Carlos Lévy, — Roman Philosophy under Construction: the Concept of Spatium from Lucretius to Cicero; here, the discernment between the different meanings of space-spatium is especially focused on the ‘chronological’ versus ‘local’ sense, without putting special emphasis on the distinctions concerning the different dimensionalities intrinsic to the ‘local aspect’, e.g., ‘it seems that in pre-Lucretian Latin there was a rather clear separation between temporal aspects, or more precisely durative aspects, mainly expressed by “spatium”, and local aspects, for which “locus” was generally used’; Carlos Lévy, ‘Roman Philosophy under Construction: the Concept of Spatium from Lucretius to Cicero’, in Space in Hellenistic Philosophy: Critical Studies in Ancient Physics, eds.G.Ranocchia, C. Helmig, and C. Horn, (Berlin, München, Boston: De Gruyter, 2014), 129.
[8] See also note [11] in the article Concepts of Space in Vitruvius.
[9] Stuart Kauffman, Investigations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 81.
Works Cited
Casey, Edward S. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Gibson, James J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. New York: Psychology Press Classic Editions, 2015.
Heidegger, Martin. Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Gregory Fried, and Richard Polt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.
Kauffman, Stuart. Investigations. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Leclerc, Ivor. ‘Concepts of Space’. In Probability, Time, and Space in Eighteenth-Century Literature, edited by Paula R. Backscheider, 209-216. New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1979.
Lévy, Carlos. ‘Roman Philosophy under Construction: the Concept of Spatium from Lucretius to Cicero’. In Space in Hellenistic Philosophy: Critical Studies in Ancient Physics, edited by: Graziano Ranocchia, Christoph Helmig and Christoph Horn. Berlin, München, Boston: De Gruyter, 2014.
Sambursky, Samuel. Physics of the Stoics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.
Vitruvius. ‘The Ten Books on Architecture’, translated by Morris Hicky Morgan. London: Humphrey Milford Oxford University Press, 1914.
Image Credits
Featured Image: Paul Klee, View of Kairouan, 1914, 73, watercolour and pencil on paper laid down on cardboard, 8.4 x 21.1 cm (Franz Marc Museum, Kochel am See, permanent private loan).
Image 01: Paul Klee, Before the Gates of Kairouan, 1914, 216, watercolour on paper on cardboard, 20,7 x 31,5 cm (Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern)
For further information about the images, see also the digital resource Mapping Klee offered by the Zentrum Paul Klee.
