… it is helpful to think of architectures as ‘archi-textures’, to treat each monument or building, viewed in its surroundings and context, in the populated area and associated networks in which it is set down, as part of a particular production of space.
HENRY LEFEBVRE, The Production of Space
In this article, I will show how the concepts of space and place affected my research and approach to architectural design, before, in more recent years, I started focusing on the universal meaning of those two concepts, trying to go beyond their specific architectural senses. That shift of focus, from particular to universal, eventually coincided with a turn of my interest from space to place, and also with a reconsideration of the traditional meaning attributed to those two concepts, as soon as I realized that reality, to begin with, is a constellation of concrete places, things or bodies, and that space is an abstract conceptual entity, which is often misplaced for the actual environment in which things and bodies exist and move. At RSaP, I have argued that the obsessing metaphorical use of space makes us lose our cognition and orientation between concrete (place-based) and abstract (space-based) domains of reality. We would better understand the physical environment, or any part of it, as a place-world and not ‘space’, as also the American psychologist James J. Gibson understood from his specific perspective thanks to his pioneering studies on perception and the environment (see James J. Gibson on the Concept of Space).
What follows is a narration made many years after the actual happenings that occurred to me during my years as a student at the Polytechnic University of Milan (Politecnico di Milano), School of Architecture. Like any reconstruction, this is barely a faint image of the events and circumstances that really happened; many decisive connections between events were obviously lost or forgotten; nonetheless, what has remained certainly played an important part in the evolution of my understanding of spatial concepts and my later change of perspective on them. Overall, I believe this personal narration can offer some useful suggestions to students of architecture, to those scholars interested in the study and elaboration of spatial concepts, or to those colleagues of mine who can hardly accept any change of meaning for traditional spatial concepts (traditional concepts with which they grew up and established their professional careers), but understand that some of the arguments that I take for a change of perspective are convincing and hard to refute.
1. Preliminaries to understanding architecture and space
As I had the occasion to say in the article — On Architecture —, even if at an unconscious level, my interest in architecture goes back in time to some memorable experiences that I had as a child: those experiences were marked by the sensible presence of different types of architectural backgrounds — a cathedral, a sports arena, a cinema, a particular house, etc. — which I could now describe as a foreground for those experiences rather than a background. Those precious moments, which were inextricably linked to specific architectures and their atmospheres, other than arousing strong sensations in my body, affected my mind and also my memories. So, I will now focus on some of the passages that eventually allowed me to acknowledge and understand the architectural meaning of those experiences, enucleate them, take them at a conscious, rational level, and built on them a mode of architectural expression which considered architecture as a part of a greater environment, in symbiotic relation with it; later, when I became acquainted with Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, I called those modes of architectural expressions ‘archi-textures’. Such archi-textures had in their intrinsic nature the germs for questioning the traditional meaning of spatial concepts and, therefore, reconsidering the meaning of the architectural phenomena, from a more universal perspective.
This is a journey that began in the early ‘90s when I enrolled at the School of Architecture – Politecnico di Milano. The first years were not easy, for me: I was obtaining good results in historical and theoretical courses and activities, but what really counted to me — the ability to design beautiful buildings which is the reason why I wanted to be an architect — seemed to escape me: my first projects were poor and looked horrible to me. In just one word, the buildings I was designing were ‘ugly’. The fact that the grades I got from my first architectural projects were not so bad did not encourage me: how could I revert what I considered a disappointing aesthetical trend for my projects?
In the early ‘90s, the School of Architecture at the Politecnico di Milano, my Alma Mater, was caught in between internal stylistic battles between rationalist and postmodernist trends, especially. Personalities like Giorgio Grassi, Vittorio Gregotti, and Aldo Rossi — all of them graduated from the Politecnico — dominated the Italian architectural scene. Their influence could be hardly neglected by Italian students in the ‘90s, much less in Milano. Yet, my school was open enough to accept the influence of more up-to-date international trends like deconstructivism, or the evergreen organicism, which both had a charismatic and representative force in Italy: the work of the historian and critic Bruno Zevi. These alternative trends were diffused among students, but, overall, they were largely ignored by teachers in Milano, who stuck to the positions between rationalists, the greatest party, and postmodernists.
Indeed, all of those architectural inputs were very different and contrasting. With hindsight, I’ve learned that too much information, from very different sources and going in different directions, equals chaos or no information at all if you have no instruments to separate the wheat from the chaff. At that time, I had no instruments, and — alas — my idiosyncrasy to blind conformism did not allow me to follow one safe street embracing a stylistic trend rather than another, resolutely. As a consequence, the impossibility to give those different influences order or coherence was reflected in my first, architectural projects, which, at that time, were mainly guided by formal or stylistic considerations, that is by ‘superficial’ considerations — literally, concerning the surface of things, or what you see, e.g., the façades of buildings, their figurative compositions, symmetries between elements, etc. without knowing that what you see is merely the result of many different processes that you do not see. At that time, I did not know that. Having no prior architectural background, for me, architecture was a question of hand-drawing beautiful perspectives, orthogonal projections or bird-eye views (the era of computer-aided design was just at the beginning), that is, I mainly believed architecture consisted in designing and assembling pleasant facades and functional plans, without even seeing the correlation between one and the other. Fundamentally, I was considering architecture as an ‘external’ phenomenon, something to be controlled from the outside and from above — the mind and the hand of the architect, as a kind of creator,a demiurge or a deus ex machina (like it or not, this is still a popular image for architects/designers in the building sector; the ‘archi-star’ is probably the highest legacy of that still-diffused way of considering the architect’s profession).
To run out of those initial architectural difficulties, my strategy was to intensify the readings on the masters of modern architecture — Frank Lloyd Wright, Adolf Loos, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, Louis Khan, etc. — and learn as much as I could from different theoretical approaches or schools (e.g., organicism, constructivism, suprematism, modernism, Bauhaus, De Stijl, etc.). There were highly interesting aspects in all of them, even if they had very different approaches. Of course, I also studied on paper and visited by person famous buildings, as soon as I could; in the early ‘90s, I started devoting my summer holidays to travelling Europe far and wide, by train, with the backpack on my shoulders: from Helsinki to Lisbon, from Glasgow to Wien, visiting special places and their architectures, whether historical, modern, or contemporary.
Gallery 1 (clockwise, Image 1, 2, 3): Laon Cathedral, Laon, FR, (1170). Image 2: photography by Andrew J. Tallon.
Moreover, like any other student fond of architecture, I was also surfing through the pages of architectural magazines from all over the world, with the (fallacious) hope that those beautiful, eye-catching images of buildings and projects could inspire me, or show me the way to design beautiful architectures. That did not happen. The old, unsolved problem did not change: how could I synthesize so many different sources of beauty and interesting information into a coherent understanding/image of the architectural phenomenon?[1]
In those first years of apparently unfruitful wanderings, I understood that for a hybrid discipline like architecture, where art and science combine, goodwill or hard work might be not enough: you need more than pure will or hard work if your aim is beauty to combine with utility, or form with function.[2] The ‘art-side’ of architecture (actually, the art-side of everything), is almost inexplicable and transcends standards, norms and recipes, which you often find in books because they are easily transmissible; but those are quantitative determinants. Conversely, the ‘art-side’ of things, to begin with, responds to qualitative determinants, difficult (if not impossible) to formalize or crystallize into transmissible knowledge: quality is elusive or fleeting and cannot be described in any encyclopaedia.[3] But, most of all, within the limits of knowledge that a young student could have, I soon realized that science and norms alone, (with special reference to the indispensable engineering and technological aspects that allow buildings to function and be solid) were not enough to deliver beautiful or simply interesting projects.[4] And if you ask me what is meant for ‘beautiful’ or ‘interesting’, today like yesterday I am quite confident in saying that a building which is not able to arouse in its inhabitants some kind of positive emotion, cannot be beautiful or interesting.
So, I was in an architectural limbo if not properly in a labyrinth with no way out, when all the different inputs I got from my wanderings started to fall in the right place and things eventually changed for good.[5]
My originary interest in the aesthetical side of architecture and, most of all, the lack of aesthetic qualities that I attributed to my first projects soon pushed me to investigate the field of knowledge known as aesthetics to see if I could get some useful indication for my projects, and improve their quality. Aesthetics has a double meaning: it is a philosophical inquiry into sensuous perception — a basic meaning derived from Kant’s philosophy; but it is also ‘the criticism of the beautiful or to the theory of taste’, which is a more common sense today, derived from A. T. Baumgarten’s philosophical theory ‘Aesthetica’ — the term aesthetic deriving from the Greek word aisthētikós, from the verb aisthanesthai, which means ‘to perceive’.[6] It is because of the latter sense of the term, the one derived from Baumgarten, that we immediately associate the term ‘aesthetic’ to ‘beauty’. And it is because of the first sense that we can associate beauty with sensuous perception. The field of inquiry concerning aesthetics, which has an immediate philosophical horizon, inevitably took me to other connected domains of interest, which were decisive for me to understand the architectural phenomenon: psychology (and especially the field of psychology known as the psychology of form, or Gestalt, with authors like Wertheimer, Koffka, Köhler, Arnheim, etc.) physiology, art, and a specific branch of philosophy — phenomenology. The reason is evident: all of those disciplines are intimately connected with questions of perception; aesthetics is related to sensuous perception, and, as the theory of taste, to beauty; therefore — I thought — if I investigated the mechanisms of perception, the chance for me to understand the mechanisms of beauty would have improved and the quality of my projects increased. So, I started to investigate the relations between those different disciplinary fields, the mechanisms of perception, and architecture.
This conceptual choice had the following major consequence: I started to shift my focus from the thing (i.e., architecture — facades, volumes, symmetries and rhythms of elements, etc.) to the perceiving body, which, as the inhabitant of architecture, is the subject of perceptions, the subject that perceives the thing (architecture or the physical objects that constitute the overall environment). This means that I was shifting my attention from architecture as an external fact controlled from above and from the ‘outside’ (me/the architect/designer as a deus ex machina) to the human body, the perceiving body, which is the ultimate inhabitant of architecture, the real ‘subject’ of architecture, acting, within architecture, from below, at the level of the things. At that moment, I still did not know that this perceiving subject could directly ‘write’ or ‘draw’ architectures from below, starting from the record of the traces left by his actions, or movements, and perceptions — just like a seismograph —, which is what I discovered later, through the archi-textures; but, in a way or another, that was already implicated in the shift of focus from the thing (architecture, the built artefact perceived/imagined by the architect/designer as an ‘external’ agent or from the outside) to the body (the inhabitant that perceives architecture from the inside and from the outside, i.e., from below, as an ‘internal’ agent). To put it otherwise, basically, that was a huge leap from an abstract and symbolic, or figurative, understanding of architecture to a more concrete, biologically-oriented understanding of it (that is, oriented by physiological and psychological factors in the realm of actual experience and perception).
But, of course, this was just the beginning of a process, and nothing was clear to me in architectural terms: how could I translate those new findings and readings into projects? I still did not know; however, most importantly, now, I had a plan. This had an inestimable value, which at that time I did not fully realize: if you have a plan (whatever this plan consists of) the things that you’ve done in the past (books you have read, things that you have seen, experiences you had, etc.) or that you are going to do in the future will be sensitive to that plan, which will function as a catalyst or a sieve, selecting things according to its nature, and therefore, giving them unity (that is, a discernible, or ‘organic’ form… which is different from the chaotic juxtaposition of elements — unity, or coherence, as I said above, was certainly lacking to my first projects).
Among the many different books that I read during my theoretical detours (i.e., books which were not included in the bibliographies of the exams I had to take, but were included in my new custom-made ‘plan’), one had a particular effect on me: ‘Body, Memory and Architecture’ by Charles Moore and Kent Bloomer:[7] that book struck the right chord at the right moment, taking my mind back to those naïve architectural experiences I had when I was a child (which I just mentioned in the opening part, and which I spoke about more diffusely in the article, On Architecture), and to some analogous highly intense bodily experiences that I had during to my architectural tours across Europe, as a student of architecture.
Gallery 2 (clockwise, Image 4, 5, 6): Dipoli, Espoo, FI, architects: Reima and Raili Pietilä (1961-1966), Renovation by ALA Architects. Photography by Toumas Uusheimo.
Gallery 3 (clockwise, Image 7, 8, 9): Max Planck Institute, Berlin, DE. Architects: Hermann Fehling und Daniel Gogel (1965–74).
That book, like many others that I read concerning the importance of body and perception for architecture, by offering a key to decipher those personal architectural experiences reinforced my belief that the inquiry into body and perception was a stable ground on which I could build the foundations of my architectural conception, and — I was going to discover soon — a highly profitable procedure of designing. To put it bluntly, I definitely understood that I had to shift my focus from drawing facades, rhythms of windows, pillars or doors in the wall, external perspectives, etc. to the sensations aroused by the elements of a building in the perceiving subject, through perception; that is, I had to shift my focus on the human body and perception as the epicentre of the architectural phenomenon. It is the body that inhabits a certain space or place, the body of inhabitants, that causes the disposition of the architectural elements (walls, windows, doors, floors, ceilings etc.) in that space or place, not the architect from his/her desk (so, before being designers, architects must be the first inhabitants of a space or place, the first that inhabit a space with their imagination, a space created by their imagination before all others can appropriate the product of their creation); in the first case the body acts like an active agent — an internal agent, I’ve said before — for designing a building; in the second case, it is a passive agent that will likely suffer the choices of the architect, from the outside and from above (i.e., from a desk in a distant office).
1.1 The turn from matter to body and space
The information I got from my new tailor-made bibliography dictated by the different disciplines related to aesthetics and associated with the recollection of my personal experiences (experiences which fundamentally consisted in perceiving the materiality of buildings and moving through/around their physical extensions), put me definitely on the right track to understand the phenomenon of architecture; or, to put it differently, I found an appropriate key to attribute a coherent meaning and order to the huge amount of architectural information that I had acquired until that moment. Ultimately, I found an instrument to separate the wheat from the chaff, that is, I found a framework through which accepting, rejecting, or questioning any architectural information: a guiding idea — architecture as a perceptual experience engaging with all the senses and the capabilities of one’s body to move through space — to take me out of a never-ending architectural maze of theories, styles, opinions, schools of thought, etc. By following such a firm idea, I would have been able to close the gap between abstract architectural conceptualizations made of words, conceptual drawings, schemes, diagrams, programmatic sketches, norms to follow, etc. and their formalization into aesthetically pleasant or interesting architectural forms. Obviously, my new awareness about architecture promoted by the different types of readings of my alternative plan grew in parallel with the various academic courses offered at the Politecnico.
Eventually, I encountered a philosophical mode of thinking that could take account of all my previous naive architectural experiences as well as my newly acquired understanding of architecture through books, magazines, lessons, etc.; a mode of thinking that could also take account of my interest for different artistic expressions (visual arts, above all), which I thought could contribute to my understanding of aesthetic phenomena in general; but, most of all, that philosophical mode of thinking, by appealing to the fundamental role of the body and perception, could offer a safe theoretical foundation to knowledge, in general: that philosophical mode of thinking was ‘phenomenology’. Very briefly, and almost literally, phenomenology is the study of that which appears in relation to the totality of the modes of perception of a body, while moving and experiencing the world around, i.e., the physical environment. Literally, ‘that which appears’ is the sense behind the term ‘phenomenon’ from the Greek root, phaínomai, a term derivingfrom the verb phaino, which means ‘to become evident’, ‘to be brought forth into the light, ‘to come to view’, ‘to appear’.
For the sake of precision, I must point out an important aspect of the phenomenological procedure, which comes before all: for me, in a period of great confusion, before even realizing the convergence between body, perception, physiology, psychology, aesthetics and architecture, my early encounter with Husserl’s phenomenology was critical. By means of Husserl’s phenomenological approach I could obtain what I was fundamentally searching for: a firm ground on which I could build knowledge at first, and, therefore, knowledge of architecture, as a consequence.[8] As a matter of fact, Husserl’s basic insight concerning our return to the things themselves as given in experience to set a stable ground for knowledge was probably the real sparkle that fired my successive interest toward these arguments or disciplines. This is what I thought: since the subjectivist, direct approach to reality is universal (i.e., an approach based on body and perception through which we can have direct cognizance of the world), it means that I could apply the same principle to architecture, which is a part of reality. So, my early encounter with Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology was even more fundamental than all subsequent specific readings. However, I had to pass through Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and different types of readings in the field of psychology and physiology before I could translate all this fundamental phenomenological insight, concerning body and perception, into a viable architectural procedure or method.
Phenomenology was a real turning point because it definitely allowed me to change my perspective on architecture: rather than thinking about the figurative composition of architectural elements such as walls, roofs, windows, doors, etc. by means of plans, sections, elevations or perspectives, I started to think about the way our body acts, moves, and perceives the physical environment: from perception, we obtain the basic information to understand the world around, hence we also obtain the necessary information to understand architecture, which is an intrinsic part of the physical environment. Translated into architectural language, that meant that I had to think about the function of a building in terms of the way a body physically moves in space, between the things, and behaves since the movements of the body are directly tied to the spatial distribution of volumes or floor areas, required by a building to function (a school is different from an office, a house is different from a school, etc.). Moreover, that also meant that I had to think about the physical presence of the building itself in terms of the complex material configurations of all the elements of the building that enhance not just visual perception, but also tactile, auditory and olfactory perceptions. That was another huge architectural leap forward for me: the passage from a purovisibilist approach to architecture (based on form and other aspects directly related to the sense of sight) to a more integrated conception of the architectural phenomenon based on the full potentialities of the body acting in it (its kinesthesis, and all the senses involved in perception).
This new awareness paid another important reward, from a specific architectural perspective; in this way, that is by way of the body, I could directly link function (i.e., the utility of a building) to form (i.e., beauty), because the two are ultimately referred to the body through motion and perception: on the one side, we have movements, actions and behaviours of bodies that are directly related to the configuration of the areas, or the disposition of the spaces according to the required function of a building (every action requires a spatial budget, a thing I also understood from the Russian film director Sergej M. Ejzenstejn after his pioneering studies on the scenography of films — see image 12 in Back to the Origins of Space and Place —, from the pioneering studies on dance by Rudolf Laban — see image 13 in the same article — and from the pioneering studies on proxemics by Edward T. Hall);[9] on the other side, we have the physical elements of a building (walls, floors, doors, ceilings, windows, columns, facades, etc.) which is what we see, touch, hear, smell, and feel when we move or rest in a building — this fact implying physiology and psychology being fundamental assets for architecture.
Ultimately, I began to understand the materiality and spatiality of architecture as active entities, participating together with me — as the perceiving subject — in the constitution of the physical environment, rather than as passive entities, whose static forms and extensions/dimensions I had to create in virtue of my ‘external’ agency of designing architect. This was a sort of inversion in the process of designing architecture: from a top-down to a bottom-up approach.[10] From the architect-creator to the architect-perceiver and user. Or, to put it with a more technical, phenomenological language: from the architect as a subject in the face of things, alienated from the world of life, to the architect as a subject among subjects, that is, as a thing among things, embedded together with the things themselves in the world of life, in complete solidarity with them. This new mode of understanding buildings had a final, critical consequence for me: the silent physical extension or circumambient flux — what we usually call and understood as ‘space’ — which surrounds all things and keeps them together and related (in the case of architecture those ‘things’ were my body and the other solid bodies around me – floors, ceilings, walls, windows, trees, streets, fences, etc.), became the ultimate subject of my research when I understood that it was by means of that unifying flux or volumetric extension that materiality — the things that we see, hear, touch, smell/taste, that is floors, ceilings, walls, trees, streets etc. — is conveyed (a medium between matter and body). This fact entailed a further shift of focus for my research: from the body to space.
So, I wrote the word ‘SPACE’ in my notebook and I went to the library of the Politecnico:[11] from architects to physicists, from artists to psychologists and physiologists, from sociologists to anthropologists, from philosophers to geographers, I wanted to learn as much as I could on the subject ‘space’ — my new direct subject of inquiry: the medium between body and matter.
Image 10: This passage, from one of the first notebooks I used since my years as a student of architecture, reports my first clear statement on the fundamental role of space for architecture: ‘Plans, elevations, sections… What plans! What elevations! What sections! It is space: space for our body – the relationship between us and the world!!!’
Concerning space as a direct subject of inquiry for architecture, I have to say that many important modern and contemporary architects, other than notable contemporary critics and historians, such as Sigfried Giedion and Bruno Zevi, stressed the importance of understanding architecture as a discipline of space (in this regard see the Appendix ‘Architecture as Art and Science of Space’ in the article On the Ambiguous Language of Space); yet, one thing is to read and understand a message, another thing is to assimilate or metabolize that message (that is, let that message be part of you) and use it as the core asset of your research: I believe there is a different level of awareness between the two conditions, at least that’s what happened to me. Therefore, despite the fact that I already knew the important works of those architects or critics on the spatial value of architecture, my ‘metabolization’ or ‘assimilation’ of that important message could not occur until I had a very personal experience with ‘space’, which I am going to tell you.
My real turn from thinking about material forms to thinking about space as a circumambient flux – the vehicle of material information (through the agency of the body), was not directly suggested to me by a particular reading, a particular project of architecture, or by phenomenology itself: those and other vicissitudes certainly contributed to creating in me the appropriate ground to develop a certain approach, at both conscious and unconscious level. However, before all, for me, the turn from material forms to space, was a sort of Eureka moment, or, as psychologists also say, a peak experience: there was a precise illuminating moment in my life when everything suddenly changed, when certain readings and architectural experiences that I had done in the past, found the right sequence within my head; as if you understand the exact combination to put the pieces of a puzzle scattered all over the table into the right place to combine the finite picture, without no more trials and errors. I suspect you need many conscious and unconscious ingredients for an epiphany to reveal: but you have to be ready when it occurs. And that’s what happened to me while I was comfortably sitting in a deck chair, on the outdoor terrace of my old home, peacefully enjoying the warm sun in the crystalline clear and cold air of a bright sunny day, in late October. It was a bit windy, early in the afternoon. The leaves dancing in the air, carried by the wind, and the Brownian motes of the dust particles, suspended in the air and illuminated by the continuous interplay of shadows and lights generated by the sun shafts filtering through the lattice of a wooden pergola, suddenly awakened in me the awareness that space or ‘empty’ space — i.e., the space surrounding me — was not empty at all. Quite the contrary: I was observing that such a space, such an extended expanse all around my body, was an explosion of activity – a living flux surrounding everything.
Image 11: Brownian motes of suspended particles in an indoor environment
I literally saw the space all around me as the medium that allowed particles and physical bodies to move, and also allowed light, heat, sounds or odours to pass from one physical body to another at a distance; that volumetric extension surrounding me, that circumambient flux I felt I belonged to, was the medium that conjoined my perceiving body with the physical environment made of streets, walls, trees, etc., all around me, and conveying different information that I interpreted as colours, formal boundaries, textures, conveying heat or cold by touch or at a distance, or producing sounds, emitting pleasant scents or unpleasant odours. At that precise moment, I understood that it was such a distance or extension, that gave physical continuity and a coherent unity to reality, allowing a unifying relation between objects and subjects. For the first time I was thinking about reality as a physical continuum, a plenum, truly a material flux surrounding and penetrating everything, an invisible and continuous glue between me and the world of forms forming an encompassing, seamless unity.[12] So, by a sort of illuminating perceptual inversion, I started to see the invisible ‘glue’ or ‘flux’, i.e., the ‘space’ — space as a vehicle of information joining me to the world around —, instead of the physical forms of the things all around me. It is as if I was looking at another world: the space between things rather than the things themselves.[13] It was just an instant, a flash, as long as the blink of an eye, but that was enough to see the real nature of what was surrounding me.[14]
Image 12: Things or space between things?
Immediately after that experience, I rushed inside my home, sat at the desk, and I started making drawings or, better, negative drawings for the examination project of interior design I was working on, at that time. Inspired by the previous instantaneous perceptual inversion, instead of drawing lines representing the forms of positive matter, like walls or objects, I started to draw the space between, and inside, positive matter (see Image 12, above; Image 13a, 13b, below; see also Image 89). Black lines on a white paper, one attached to the other, hundreds of parallel and intersecting lines one next to the other, like in a sort of Piranesi’s etching.
Image 13a-13b: The Well, etching from the series: Imaginary Prisons, by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778); Drawing, Pencil on paper, Alessandro Calvi Rollino (1994).
Similarly, on the ground plan, from the blank spaces on the paper emerging from the ocean of black lines, one could see the architectural sequences of walls, windows, doors, and objects… And most of all, while I was ‘drawing space’, I was not thinking about the form, or the colour of walls, roof and floor, since they were not my primary focus at that moment: I was just thinking about the sensation that I wanted those walls, floor and roof to communicate through ‘space’, and the overall ‘film sequence’ through which the bodies within those spaces could behave, act and move. I understood that sensation is not a question of vision, only: all other senses and body kinēsis/movements are equally important. In those precise moments, I realized that it was space —as the continuum between and within solid bodies — that really counted, not the things and their forms: it was through space that the flux information was conveyed (space itself was the flux of information!); so, I had to put my focus on the information conveyed through space, and nothing else. This was the conclusion I draw at that time: in architecture, walls are subordinate to space; the wall is to be understood as an epi-phenomenon, deriving from space and not the other way around.[15] That’s what I learned from that illuminating experience.
After that episode, I could effectively say that I finally understood things that I did not fully realize before, such as when architects and critics talked about architecture as a discipline of space (see the Appendix in the article On the Ambiguous Language of Space). I must confess, it was in that precise moment, when I saw the nature of ‘space’ watching the Brownian motes of particles in a windy and sunny late October day that I, like a novel Paul Klee on his way to Kairouan, had the immediate awareness to be an architect, independently of any degree or certification.[16] Ultimately, I had learned what ‘space’ was, by a direct, striking, illuminating experience.[17]
So, the following step of my research was to understand what kind of information exactly was conveyed through space, and, very relevant to my research, I had to understand how to translate my newly acquired knowledge into coherent and interesting if not properly beautiful, architectural forms and spaces.
What kind of information is conveyed through the extensive continuum for architectural purposes? How to translate that information into coherent and interesting architectural forms and spaces?
Image 14: Archi-texture, study model for a library in Legnano, IT, Alessandro Calvi Rollino Architetto (2009).
2. Archi-textures
Archi-textures represent vectorial forces of our physical presence in and sensory experience of specific situations and places.
Coming back to the period in which I was developing this new awareness about space and architecture, the thing that really counted for me was that, after so many efforts and almost no results, I was finally satisfied with the coherent unity of utility and beauty that I was able to express in my new projects. Soon after having realized that architecture was not the figurative production of material forms and volumes deployed from above by the architect as a deus ex machina, but was a question of information, exchanged between emitting and perceiving bodies (the physical environment and the subject in it) and conveyed through space and time, I felt very limited by the canonical tools through which architecture was represented and also produced, e.g., technical drawings and traditional models (CAD design was merely at the beginning and not diffused yet). ‘If architecture is a discipline that conveys information in space and time, between the subject and the physical environment, how can I visualize and translate such information and its inherent tetra-dimensionality into projects?’ Usual drawings and models could not be the answer; neither was I satisfied by representing space via negative drawings only (which, in the meanwhile, to save time, I simply transformed into ‘positive’ white lines drawn on black papers – the black paper representing space). After all, by means of negative drawings, I could only visualize a generic space understood as a ‘physical’ extension and not the specific kind of perceptual information (visual, auditory, olfactory, haptic or tactile) conveyed through space and exchanged between bodies and objects — whether volumes or surfaces. So, I started to think that I had to find a true tetra-dimensional correspondent to my early negative drawings à la Piranesi. How could I spatially represent my understanding of physical reality as a ‘plenum’? A ‘plenum’, an all-embracing physical continuum which was the vehicle of the actions of bodies (i.e., the movements of people and their kinesthesis) and of perceptual information exchanged between the bodies and the physical world around them (visual, auditory, tactile or haptic, and olfactory information)? It took me a couple of years of intense interdisciplinary research (which, in the meanwhile, I extended to physics and topology to investigate the phenomenon of space from even more different perspectives) before I could finally find and develop a coherent architectural answer – a mode of design approach emerging from the ground up – through what I eventually called archi-textures (a term I discovered a few years later, after I got my degree, reading Henry Lefebvre’s The Production of Space),[18] which are peculiar tetra-dimensional models, through which I was able to represent space, tracking and tracing the movements of people and their exchange of information with (i.e., perception of) the physical environment – the surrounding context.
Archi-textures are tetra-dimensional models through which I represent space by tracking and tracing the movements of people and their sensory perception of the physical environment – i.e., the surrounding context (visual, auditory, olfactory, and tactile or haptic spheres of perceptions). This is the physical and metaphysical backbone for the emergence of architectural space, giving it topological direction and differentiation before, at a later stage, geometrical considerations may enter into play.
Regarding those models, I have used the expression ‘tetra-dimensional’ instead of three-dimensional to point out that since the temporal factor was, for me, an essential factor for architecture (the human body, the real creator of the architectural phenomenon, moves around and perceives the physical environment creating sequences that are spatial and temporal, at the same time) so the models, somehow, had to communicate the temporal factor, in addition to space. Those three-dimensional models were not created to appreciate the three-dimensional result of a finished project or an architectural idea, independently of how defined or undefined that idea was; those models were the reification of sequences of people moving and perceiving space with their senses and kinesthesis: it was those sequences of perception (especially expressed by means of cotton threads, spaghetti, metallic wires, or even 2D lines, etc.) that created the space of the project; it was the model during the process of its construction that created the idea of the project, or the architectural idea to be developed into a definite form, not the other way around; so that, when I drew a line or stretched a cotton thread from a pin to another, that line or thread represented the movements of people and different sequences of visual, auditory, olfactory, and tactile or haptic perceptions; that is, actions, behaviours and perceptions that happen in/through time and space. That’s why I’ve spoken in terms of tetra-dimensionality: before all, those models were devised as processual models (representing processes, i.e., lines or fields of perceptions, movements, etc.) and not as representative models (that is, representations of actual architectural forms). Those models were the expression of a realm of potentiality (a container of possible architectural forms to be developed on the basis of certain processes and not of others — a choice, of course, that depends on the architect) before the realm of actuality where architecture (or the project of architecture) was already crystallized into definite forms (concerning the emergence of an architectural form starting from these processual models, or archi-textures, see the video Chōra).
Image 15: Archi-textures evolved from tetra-dimensional, processual models representing movements and perceptions of subjects in/through space and time. The model above, which represents one of the techniques I also used for producing my archi-textures, is by Andreas Mavrakis: Tensile Overhead Plane Architectural Concept.
I wanted to avoid starting reasoning on projects from two-dimensional drawings, that’s why I directly began by making ‘a dimensional upgrade’ to usual two-dimensional drawings: actually, archi-textures were nothing other than real 3D drawings representing movements of people (behaviours) and their perceptions. By means of those threads, everything was connected within a primordial environment, where every division between the perceiving subjects and the objects – the sources of stimuli (i.e., the physical environment including buildings) – was removed, and only relations remained. A sort of metaphysical environment. Relations reified by cotton threads or thin metallic wires (in my first models, I also used spaghetti, strands of hair, sticks of wood, or whatever I had present at hand) floating in a 3D space instead of two-dimensional lines drawn on the paper. I just used two-dimensional drawings to make diagrams, while I made systematic use of two-dimensional drawings (sections and plans especially) in the advanced phases of design when the architectural form was already drawn out from those heuristic and processual models. By considering space the core subject of the architectural activity, I was inverting the traditional procedure by reasoning about architecture directly from 3D models (or 4D if we consider the temporal aspect intrinsic to archi-textures). At that time, I believed the spatial conceptualization of a building couldn’t be conditioned or restricted by the intrinsic limits of two-dimensional representations. I believed I could miss some important information if my starting point had a reduced dimensionality with respect to reality; that’s why I started to think directly in three/four dimensions by means of archi-textures.
Slideshow 1 (Images 16-19): Archi-textures, study models and final rendering for the Ydañez Museum, in Puente de Genave, ES, by Alessandro Calvi Rollino Architetto, in collaboration with architect Sandro Panarese, 2011. Project shortlisted for the World Architecture Community Awards, 2011; published in Creative Diagram In Architecture (Beijing: IfengSpace), 2012.
One of the advantages that archi-textures could offer me was that I was able to represent and specify the type of information (whether movements or visual, auditory, haptic, olfactive perceptions) exchanged between the human body and the physical environment made of streets, buildings, trees, the sun path, winds… that is, the actual place or context of a project. Ultimately, by means of archi-textures, it was space that I was able to represent and visualize through physical models; it was space the medium through which architecture could arise in a continuous process of concretion: model after model, it seemed to me that from space matter (that is, architecture as a sequence of walls, roof, floors, balconies, etc.) could almost spontaneously arise. Like in the collision chamber of the Large Hadron Collider, where the tracks left by subatomic particles after a collision are visualized, through those models I was able to visualize what is usually hidden to the naked eye: the path left behind by people moving through space, as well as the perceptual fields inherent to the way people perceive the physical environment: lines of sight towards certain objects, buildings or parts of the landscape; sources of noise, or, anyway, sounds symbolically represented by wires rather than by sound waves as it should be; again, sources of tactile or olfactory stimuli linking the body to the source of those stimuli, be those sources odoriferous plants, the path of the sun or cold winds coming from a certain direction. In this way, I could immediately visualize and decide what particular aspect of the physical environment to enhance or dismiss in the relation between a body and the physical environment for creating architecture.[19] By means of wires, or threads, I was annihilating the distance between the perceiving subject and objects (the physical environment, buildings included) showing that the two were indissolubly connected: the perceiving subject being one thing with the external world, and, correlatively, the building one thing with the landscape. An unbounded whole. It was on this new awareness that, almost a decade later, I hypothesized the fundamental solidarity between man (the perceiving subject) and the world (the physical environment, i.e., landscape and buildings) on an ecological basis, shifting my interest from space to place (i.e., physical reality understood as the place of processes).
Slideshow 2 (Images 20-24): Archi-textures, study models and final renderings for a Cultural Center in Bergamo, IT, by Alessandro Calvi Rollino Architetto, in collaboration with architect Sandro Panarese, 2004.
2.1 The art of occupying space
How did I arrive at envisioning the spatial language of archi-textures? Here, we are entering into what, in a passage before, I called qualitative determinants regarding the nature of things. Devising those models was a laborious process which required a few steps and a couple of years more after I had identified 1) space as the main subject of architecture (that is, after my epiphany with space). Other important steps were necessary: 2) to identify the motion of bodies (i.e., the movements of people), their behaviours and actions as the basic generators of space. Regarding this point, I wrote in one of my notebooks: ‘In order for a design to be space-oriented, you need to think about actions’ — this is what I pointed out as ‘PRIMARY PHASE’, remarking on the basic importance of the following sequence: ‘body> behaviour> action> movement> space> architecture’. This issue is directly related to the ‘function’ or ‘programme’ of architecture considered as the thoughtful disposition or arrangement of spaces related to the different functional requirements of a building on the basis of activity diagrams; 3) to identify the work of artists and architects that had assonance, either visible or merely theoretical, with questions of space and perception. In my notebooks this issue was formalized under the proposition ‘L’ARTE DI OCCUPARE LO SPAZIO’ — ‘THE ART OF OCCUPYING SPACE’; concerning this point, the experience of the Bauhaus school (with the theoretical and practical works of Gropius, Kandinsky, Klee, and Moholy-Nagy) had a huge influence on my thinking; 4) to implement into physical models the specific type of perceptual information exchanged between bodies and the physical environment (this meant attributing space a material consistency by reifying the process of perception through lines, wires, threads, surfaces, etc. This decisive step was a consequence of my epiphany with space, which I understood as a plenum rather than as a void, i.e., empty space); finally, 5) to organize the spatial information thus obtained on the base of topological considerations — being topological space the trait d’union between perceptual space and architectural/geometrical space.
Slideshow 3 (Images 25-27): Primitive forms of archi-textures, in-between art and architecture: these models had ‘space’ as their conceptual motor (c. 1994). The spatial value of those models eventually developed into the mature language of archi-textures as soon as I was able to combine the movements/actions of people (Slideshows 4 and 12) and their perceptions (Slideshows 7 to 11) to space.
Concerning the important connection between body, action or movement, and space (point 2, above) this was the overall sequence that I had in mind to generate architecture: A) body> B) action > C) space > D) architecture, that is: the human body, which is the main subject of architecture — the reason for which we build architectures in order to satisfy biological, social, and symbolic/aesthetic needs — acts, behaves and moves; actions, behaviours and movements require space; space projected for bodies, i.e., space for dwelling, whether confined or partly confined, generates architecture. In Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception I found a stable philosophical ground for developing the first part of that conceptual sequence body> action/movement> space.[20] In my first spatial models — see Slideshow 4, below — ‘action’, i.e., the actions or movements of people/bodies, that is their behaviours (e.g., the movement from a living room to the bedroom, the movement from a chair to the desk, etc.), was represented by cotton threads: specifically, those cotton threads, extended from a pin, needle, or nail to another, were representative of the movements of people between different areas/spaces, with regard to the specific programme of architecture (functional connections between different areas); while ‘space’, in those early models, was represented spaghetti or wooden sticks, which I made after the models made of cotton threads, by selecting certain configurations of movements rather than others (that is connections or movements of users between different areas); as such, the entire spatial structure made of spaghetti or wooden sticks (or, later, metallic wires) could also represent beams or pillars, adding a functional, structural layer to those models: finally, on that hybrid spatial structure (hybrid in the sense that it was in the middle phase between the processual model indicating mere actions of people and the final architectural model with volumes/spaces already defined) closures and partition representing walls, roofs, floors, etc. and enucleating the ensemble of movements could generate ‘architecture’ defining or delimiting specific areas (entrance, living room, bedrooms, etc.).
Slideshow 4 (Images 28-32): architectural studies (1995), where the threads of cotton represented the movements or actions of people between different areas/spaces; once ‘covered’ with planes, the trajectories of such movements/actions defined specific spaces (hall, living room, bedrooms, etc.), which generated a fragmentary architecture. Among the other notes, on the Image 28, you can read ‘ESAUTORARE LA FORMA ATTRAVERSO IL MOVIMENTO (DELLE PERSONE NELLO SPAZIO)’, that is: ‘DEPRIVE FORM OF ITS POWER BY WAY OF MOVEMENT (OF PEOPLE IN SPACE).’
Fundamentally, all of the decisive passages mentioned above — 1) the individuation of space as the focus of architecture, 2) the individuation of actions/movements/behaviours of bodies as generators of space, 3) the identification of architectural and artistic examples focused on space and perception, 4) the identification of the specific perceptual information exchanged between bodies and the environment, and 5) the identification of topological space as the missing link between perceptual space and architectural space —, after which I could devise archi-textures as a consistent mode of architectural production, were the result of my reflection and criticism on the relation between architecture and ‘cognate’ disciplines (aesthetics, art, psychology, phenomenology, the social sciences, etc.) considered through the lenses of space and the human body-the central focus of actions/behaviours and perceptions. I have listed those five fundamental points preserving a certain logical order, but, as far as I remember, and with the contribution of my notebooks of that period, there was often a parallel processing of acquired information and, therefore, a certain superposition or intersection between different information regarding each point, and especially regarding points 2 (the role of actions, movements, or behaviours for the creation of space) and 3 (different contemporary aesthetic expressions that had a special spatial value for me). Envisioning and formalizing archi-textures was a laborious and time-demanding task for me because it required combining different inputs from different disciplines into an organic whole (an architecturally-oriented whole).
In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain.
From a mountainside, camping with their house-hold goods, Ersilia’s refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing.
They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still farther away.
Thus, when travelling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of the abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spider-webs of intricate relationships seeking a form.
ITALO CALVINO, Invisible Cities
Image 33: L’ARTE DI OCCUPARE LO SPAZIO / THE ART OF OCCUPYING SPACE. This image is taken from one of my first notebooks when I already had understood that space was the primary focus of architecture – the medium of human behaviours but I was still looking for a spatial language into which translating that principle (in the phrase above, on the left, I wrote: ‘for a design to be space-oriented, you need to think about people’s actions’; this generates the following sequence MAN> ACTION, i.e., MOVEMENTS AND BEHAVIOURS> SPACE> ARCHITECTURE). The image on the right, which represents a human figure, typical of Alberto Giacometti, consumed by space, almost pulled by space, revealed my interest for aesthetic expressions that could evoke a strong sense of space or spatiality through plastic forms.
Slideshow 5 (Images 34-45): A selection of works of art which, during my years as a student of architecture, nourished my interest in aesthetical representations of space and greatly contributed to finding my own spatial language (for details, see the section Image Credits, at the end of the article).
From the specific perspective of architecture, it is certainly true that in the mid ‘90s (the years of my formation as a student of architecture) I could count on the work of architects like, for instance, Richard Maier, Bernard Tschumi, or Gunther Behnisch for aspects regarding the film sequence of bodies moving through the space of buildings; the very early Zaha Hadid, for the possibility to draw within projects some factors regarding the relation between the landscape around a building and the perceiving body moving in the space of the building; and I could also count on Coop-Himmelblau or Peter Eisenmann, for certain important mechanisms of deconstruction of traditional architectural forms (e.g., the simple stereometry of platonic solids), which were an essential fuel for my research against the classical understanding of architecture as ‘positive stereometric forms’ — stereometric forms which seemed to me deployed from above by the creative gesture of a skilled architect rather than the procedural construction of space ‘built’ from below by the body of the inhabitants of such space; at that time, that ‘deconstructive’ conception, that is the destruction of form and its reconstruction from below, through the action of the body in space, was an important principle of my architectural conception (ironically the deconstructive movement in architecture, regardless its promising beginnings, finished being as formal as the postmodern movement that it wanted to contrast, if not even more formal than it); or, again, I could count on Steven Holl’s successful efforts to translate a phenomenological-oriented research into concrete examples of built architectures; or, on a more theoretical level, I could also count on the seminal work of Christian Norberg Schultz who connected architecture, phenomenology and considerations on the value of space and place to Heidegger’s conceptualization of dwelling, a basic issue for architecture.
Slideshow 6 (Images 46-52): A selection of architectures/architects which, during my years as a student, nourished my interest in space and perception at both practical and conceptual levels (for details, see the section Image Credits, at the end of the article).
Despite those precious architectural allies, given that, through my spatial research, I had to put together very different elements, from architecture to art, from psychology to physiology, from philosophy and the social sciences to physics and topology, I needed to encounter the work of a pioneer in environmental psychology (James Jerome Gibson) before I could eventually formalize, both theoretically and practically, my understanding of architecture as archi-texture, a mode of expression through which architecture, by way of space, could transcend its physical limits and boundaries and extend into the wider physical environment or context, the same way the human body did by way of perception and movement. Ultimately, all of those inputs from different disciplines were translated into what, at that time, I believed was the univocal language of architecture: space.
2.2 The perception of space and the topological organization of perceptual data
Through Gibson’s work, and specifically using an architectural-oriented interpretation of The Senses Considered as a Perceptual System, 1966, [21] I was finally able to finalize a sort of ecological or environmental aesthetics for my models by visualizing the information that a perceiving body could actively obtain from the environment; I also understood that body, through the senses, proprioception, and oriented movements is a projection of the self into the circumambient world, i.e., the physical environment. I realized that there was a reciprocity, an intrinsic withness or sense of unity between the body and the physical environment, and, by applying the principles of perception to the creation of space, I believed I could also extend the principle of unity between the subject and the environment to the object (architecture). So, space (reified by means of vector lines indicating the movements and perception of bodies in a physical environment) became the unifying agent (the glue, the flux…) between the body and the surrounding environment, which had architecture as one of its many facets.
Images 53, 54: extension of the body into the surrounding space through movements and perceptions. Removing the body, only vectors symbolizing the information exchanged between the body and the physical environment remain. In this way, I was able to reify space as a vehicle of information for architecture, just like I had envisioned years before, with my epiphany concerning space. On the right, The Stick Dance, choreography and costume by Oskar Schlemmer, Bauhaus courses, c. 1927.
By investigating the mechanisms of perception, Gibson pointed out those elements that define the spatial and material properties of objects (i.e., the physical environment) in their relationship with the perceiving body. He considered the senses as perceptual systems, cooperating with each other as ‘ways of seeking and extracting information about the environment from the flowing array of ambient energy’.[22] What is the environmental information picked up by the human body while moving and perceiving the physical world around that I could finally translate into architectural models?
On the basis of Gibson’s work, The Senses Considered as a Perceptual System, what is the environmental information picked up by the human body while moving and perceiving the physical world around?
1) the orientation of the body with respect to the ground (postural orientation) and the world around (oriented locomotion, e.g., orientation of one’s body with respect to points of interests such as landmarks, or other meaningful things, e.g., trees, sun, source of rumours, etc.), which are detected by what Gibson called ‘the basic orienting system’; 2) mechanical disturbances that are continuous (such as waterfalls),intermittent, (such as wind or air frictions), or abrupt (such as the rolling, rubbing, colliding or breaking of solids); the vocals of animals, the speech and musical performances of man, and machine sounds (the sounds of technological civilization) which are all detected by ‘the auditory system’; 3) the information detected by ‘the haptic system’ — the term “haptic”, from the Greek, meaning “able to lay hold of” — [23] the system literally in touch with the environment through skin receptors, tissues, muscles, tendons, bones; therefore a system which also offers information about the body (kinesthesis and proprioception) other than information about the physical environment such as the exposure to the sun and winds (touch temperature and air temperature), differences such as indoor/outdoor or above/below position, the texture of objects, the surface of the ground, etc.; 4) information detected by ‘the taste-smell system’, which indicates particular natural odors (e.g., trees, flowers, sea, etc.) or artificial odors from technological civilization (e.g., smog, cars, industries, etc.); 5) the borders of things or objects (ambient array), the inclination of their faces or facets (differential facing), the chemical combination that determine their colors (reflectance), and the existence of attached and casted shadows (shadowing), which are detected by ‘the visual system’.
The slideshows below show a series of models-manifest that I made on the basis of Gibson’s indications on the perception of the environment: initially, those models served as an immediate guide to remind me of the different types of perceptual information exchanged between the body and the physical environment – information that I had to consider when I started a new project.
Slideshow 7 (Images 55-58): The Basic Orienting System. The inclination of the ground and oriented locomotion (e.g., the presence of a landmark, or a recognizable element in a landscape) are important vessels of perceptual information, as Gibson explained. That spatial information, in my models, constitutes the ‘orienting field or space’, symbolized by the red lines (in the final Image 58 any material source is removed and only spatial information remains).
Slideshow 8 (Images 59-61): The Auditory System. Continuous, intermittent, or abrupt sounds (such as waterfalls, wind or air frictions, the breaking of solids), the vocals of animals, the speech and musical performances of man, and machine sounds (the sounds of technological civilization) are the types of auditory information detected by ‘the auditory system’. In the model, the yellow lines that associate the body with each source of such auditory stimuli constitute what I called ‘auditory field or space’ (the car on the left, the windmill above, the metallic solids at the center, the group of people talking next the representation of a river, on the right, are the specific sources of stimuli listed by Gibson).
Slideshow 9 (Images 62-64): The Haptic System: the exposure to the sun and winds, differences such as indoor/outdoor location, above/below position, the texture of objects, and the texture of the ground determine basic perceptual information of bodies in touch with the world i.e., information that we commonly associate to the sense of touch. In the model above, the violet wires are symbols for the ‘haptic field or space’ (that is, they indicate the specific relationship between the body and the different sources of stimuli, such as rough terrain, the differences between levels, the peculiar textures of walls or roofs, etc.).
Slideshow 10 (Images 65-67): The Taste-Smell System. Architecturally wise, the information detected by ‘the taste-smell system’ may offer indications on the decision to allow the diffusion of particular natural odours (e.g., trees – the prismatic volumes in the model above – flowers, sea, etc.) or protect from the presence of artificial bad odours of technological civilization (e.g., smog or smoke deriving from cars – like the one on the left, in the model – industries, etc.).
Slideshow 11 (Images 68-70): The Visual System. Borders of objects (whether imponent buildings or simple objects), the inclination of their faces or facets, their colours and casted shadows, determine the visual attractiveness of a space, according to Gibson. That information constitutes the ‘visual field or space’, in my models above, symbolized by the blue wires.
Of course, as I said in a few passages above, an important factor for the generation of space was the movement, action or behaviour of people or bodies. Even if Gibson included kinesthesis and proprioception (which are anyway ‘categories’ regarding the movement of bodies) within what he called ‘the haptic system’, given my architecturally-oriented interpretation of his work, I dedicated a specific section regarding the movement and action of bodies to what I called ‘space (or field) of actions’, see the slideshow below. As a matter of fact, this characterizing aspect of space and architecture had great importance for the final disposition of the spaces of a project: it is from the specific translation of a body from one place to another place (locomotion) that successive sequences of perceptions (visual, haptic…) are generated.
Slideshow 12 (Images 71-73): The Space (or Field) of Actions. The movement of a body through space leaves traces that constitute a text or better a texture, as Lefebvre said, which can offer indications on the use of space or can also be used to produce (create) a new space that gives a direction to future behaviours inviting to certain directions instead of others.
The sum of the different inputs of perception and motion in a certain environment, symbolized by three-dimensional wires and/or two-dimensional lines, rendered the final spatial configuration of that environment on which the new (project of) architecture was going to be built or designed. Eventually, I think I was able to find a way to transform the relationship between the body and the surrounding environment into a spatial structure conveying the complexity of what it means to be in the world, on the basis of a phenomenological approach very much indebted to the messages of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Bachelard.
Images 74-75: the human body as a generator of ‘space’, by means of perception and actions, or movements (i.e., behaviour).
Slideshow 13 (Images 76-80) Archi-textures: perceptual diagrams, activity diagrams, study models and final rendering of the Rainbow School, Prato, IT, by Alessandro Calvi Rollino Architetto, 2009. Project winner of the World Architecture Community Awards, 2009; project published in Architecture+Conception (Shanghai: IfengSpace), 2011; Eden for Boys & Girls (Hong Kong: Designerbooks), 2012. A videoclip on the construction of the archi-textures regarding this specific project can be seen on the You Tube page of RSaP.
Of course, there was a degree of freedom in my interpretation of Gibson’s work, since my scope was to translate some of the perceptual inputs individuated by Gibson into a specific architectural language; so, as the slideshows above show (see Slideshows 7-12), starting from Gibson’s considerations, I associated different elements of the physical environment (volumes and/or surfaces of streets, houses, trees, or physical bodies like the sun, the moon, a river, etc.) perceived by the different perceptual systems of the body (visual, haptic, olfactory, auditory, orienting systems), to different metallic wires connecting the perceiving subject to the perceived object (elements in the landscape, i.e. the physical environments); in addition to such definite perceptual inputs, I also considered what I had already individuated as a major determinant for generating the space of architecture: the actions or movements of people (see Slideshow 4, above). As a result, at the moment when I had to study the real physical location where I had to make a project of architecture, I could obtain a three-dimensional web of relations concerning the perceptual values of that location (the physical environment), and the actions or movements associated to that location on the base of the programme of architecture (whether a house, a school, a church etc. and the requested spaces for the building to function, conformed with respect to the specific perceptual values of that location); that is, I obtained a three-dimensional web of perceptual information and information concerning movements or behaviours of people (connections between different areas) conveyed through space; that ‘pure and basic’ information, translated into a space that I could visualize and on which I could reason, was a sort of framework to generate and modify the space of the emerging architecture, according to the different perceptual and functional inputs that I wanted to include, improve or dismiss in my project. In this way, for me, space became a way to connect the body, with all of its senses and the ability to move, to the surrounding environment abstractly represented by lines, wires, surfaces, etc., — i.e., the physical environment intended both as the indoor space of the building I was designing and the outdoor space beyond it — rather than a way to deploy architectural forms from above as an act of external creation, the creation of the architect as a deus ex machina.
Images 81-82: From the web of spatial relations generated by the body perceiving and moving around a certain place I could derive the space of architecture by enhancing or dismissing certain inputs concerning perceptions and motions. At the beginning of the design process, the spatial structure made of wire is an analysis of the perceptual values of the physical environment (the perceptual analysis of the place or site of the project), associated with the actions, behaviours and movements that are possible in that environment on the basis of the architectural programme (diagrams of activity, i.e., areas/spaces necessary for a building to function). Images above: Archi-texture, study models for a library in Legnano, IT, Alessandro Calvi Rollino Architetto (2009).
Slideshow 14 (Images 83-85): Archi-texture, study model and final rendering for a library in Legnano, IT, Alessandro Calvi Rollino Architetto (2009).
As I mentioned above, in the opening section of paragraph 2.1, there was another important and final step (point 5, from the list) before I could envision a mature architectural language which eventually evolved into archi-textures: it regarded the conceptualization and organization of topological space as a prelude to the development and definition of architectural space. The formalization of this final step was suggested to me by the seminal work of the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, even if I was already attracted by topological studies in architecture and I already appreciated their practical use, especially for devising activity diagrams concerning the actions of people and connections between different areas/spaces.[24] In The Child’s Conception of Space Piaget explained the relation between perception and oriented actions (movements) and the various phases through which humans develop a sense of space on the base of the combination of such perceptions and movements.[25] Very important for questions of space and architecture, I understood that the information of the surrounding world we obtain by means of our senses and motor activity is at first cognitively organized on the base of topological relations, and only after topological relations of percepts are apprehended and established are projective relations (i.e., geometrical relations) formed in our minds; this means that geometrical relations, on which the concept of space is formed, are the final stage of the development of perceptual information organized on the basis of topological relations of proximity, separation, continuity, discontinuity, order, enclosure, etc. To put it differently, space, or representational space (which is the type of geometrical space on which the concept of architectural space is formed) is built on a more primary form of topological space. On the basis of these and other considerations that I got from the use of topology,[26] I envisioned the following sequence to approach the various phases of architectural design: perceptual space > topological space> architectural space. Fundamentally, these three phases were the basic determinants of archi-textures.
Slideshow 15 (Images 86-88): MAC Milano (Museum of Contemporary Art), in Milano, IT, Alessandro Calvi Rollino Architetto, 1997-98. Within the domain of archi-textures, perceptual space, or the space of the senses (Image 86), topological space (Image 87), and architectural space constitute the sequence on which the space of architecture can be generated.
By means of archi-textures, I was able to represent space as the fundamental sustaining medium for architecture, not just the medium for conveying perceptual and environmental information. It was on the basis of such representative models (actually for me, following Lefebvre’s intuition, they were texts, or, rather, textures, because their intricate three-dimensional aspect reminded me of a three-dimensional texture), which represented the fabric of space at the human scale, that I could start reasoning about architecture. From archi-textures — as abstract spatial models — to architecture — as concrete architectural models — the step is short, not just from a linguistic perspective: from archi-textures, architectures derived by creating topological boundaries which, in reality, defined open or closed spaces, covered or exposed spaces, indoor or outdoor spaces, relations of continuity or discontinuity between different areas, etc. Within the realm of an ‘abstract’ 3D/4D model, by means of such boundaries, thresholds, and divisions, which initially had a topological value — the forerunners of architectural walls, roofs, or floors — I could enhance or dwindle the sense of belonging to a certain place, by firing certain perceptual sensations rather than others according to my sensibility of architect linking an imaginary or abstract space (the space of the project) to the real place, in a choral yet still representative domain (in the context of those abstract models, by ‘firing a certain perceptual sensations’ or information, I meant the possibility to keep, multiply, or remove the metallic wires representing a piece of specific information, such as the visual field on a beautiful landscape from a certain point of observation, or an auditory field generated by birds singing on trees, or even the less attracting auditory inputs generated by a motorway or a busy road nearby the area of the project).
To put it briefly, by means of archi-textures I could eventually turn my understanding of architecture from matter to space: from what we see (walls, floors, pillars, beams, ceilings, windows, roofs, etc.) to the invisible information conveyed through space by those architectural elements which our bodies are engaged with by means of movements, behaviours and all of the perceptual systems; architectural elements whose dispositions allow, or deny, our body to actively move, or rest, enjoy or refuse a certain physical environment. Fundamentally, archi-textures are relational models, in which matter receded with respect to space and time. During my crossing of disciplinary boundaries, I also discovered that this interpretation of reality was consistent with the premises of modern physics, from relativity to quantum mechanics: this physical interpretation of reality in a relative and relational sense gave me further confidence about the robustness of my theoretical models, which that moment on, for me, acquired a universal validity.[27]
When I finished my courses and I finally got my degree, I was aware that architecture was basically an exchange of information between buildings and bodies via space — a real text communicated through space — and not the production of forms, which is what I believed when I enrolled at the school of architecture; the key to deciphering that text (i.e., the information) was the human body, the inhabitant of space, through its abilities to perform actions and movements, (behaviour) across the physical extension of a building, and to perceive that extension with all the senses, not just vision.
Slideshow 16 (Images 89-94): On Space and Man, archi-textures from my final thesis work at the School of Architecture, Politecnico di Milano, ‘Offanengo: La Giostra dello Sport’, A.A. 1997-1998, with architect Davide Benini. That conception of space was a consequence of my phenomenological readings. Later, when I extended my research on spatial concepts to other disciplines and philosophical doctrines, I reconsidered the ultimate truth of that conception (see the forthcoming paragraph 3).
3. From space to the physical environment, i.e., the place of processes
To rethink space as place – and not the reverse as in the early modern era – is the urgent task…
EDWARD S. CASEY, The Fate of Place
I am approaching the end of this article: I have finished my narration about how I envisioned that particular architectural language which I called ‘archi-texture’, which had space as its main focus. Now, I will explain why I changed my understanding of space as a concept, which, at that time, I believed was the vehicle of information exchanged between humans and their physical environment: space as the essence of architecture (and of archi-textures as well).
Up to now, in this narration, I have used the same spatial vocabulary I used at the time I was pursuing my research on the relationship between body, space and architecture, during my years at the university. That was a traditional or common spatial vocabulary (a common-use sense of the term/concept space) which I began to question more than a decade after having envisioned my first archi-textures. For me, the necessity to reconsider the role of spatial concepts in architecture was a consequence of a major shift of interest: the reconsideration of the role of architecture at the beginning of the new millennium, after the emergence of the environmental question and the diffusion of ecological principles, which is now an issue, a primary issue, beyond discussion in the field of architecture. That shift of focus of architecture, from the exclusive and highly-disciplinary language of space (as I said in the Appendix of the article On the Ambiguous Language of Space, space has been the focus of architecture since the second part of the XIX century) to the more concrete and systemic notion of the physical environment, inevitably led the discipline itself to question spatial concepts, whether from a more direct theoretical perspective (as in my case), or from a more practical perspective (the majority of cases, which regard practical examples of built architectures in the last two decades). Fundamentally, to anticipate conclusions, what is happening is that architects are rethinking space as place. However, I am arguing from the pages of this website (see also my paper From Space to Place: A Necessary Paradigm Shift in Architecture) it should be better if this change be accompanied by a reconsideration of the traditional meaning of spatial concepts – space and place – and the elucidation of their semantic boundaries, and not simply by transferring the characteristic aspects of one concept into the other. Why call ‘space’ what, in reality, is the place of physical, chemical, biological, social and symbolic processes? I believe archi-textures already contained that piece of truth, in-between space and place, even if I did not realize that immediately: like most people or scholars, I was calling ‘space’ what, in many circumstances, I discovered was ‘place’, actually. In the following sections, I will tell you how did I realize that I was falling into that fallacy (the fallacy of misplaced concreteness — e.g., when you mistake what is concrete, place, for what is abstract, space), and, consequently, how did I also change my vision on spatial concepts.
What is space? What is space, really? It is curious: everybody, and architects before all, speak about space, but almost nobody defines what space really is. As I showed in the articles Concepts of Place, Space, and the Nature of Physical Existence, Place, Space and the Philosophy of Nature, and Place, Space, and a New Conception of Nature, space is taken as an undisputed notion, which is, after all, an unclarified notion. The definitions given by vocabularies are just frozen abstractions, definitions that say nothing about the history and, ultimately, the real meaning of the concept of space. Because if we should stop for one moment and see what space really is by studying the complex, millennial histories behind spatial concepts (place, space, the void, and their Greek and Latin variations) and without being conditioned by contemporary thinking only, we would probably stop using ambiguous expressions such as ‘perception of space’ (e.g., see James J. Gibson on the Concept of Space) or ‘bodies moving through space’ or simply ‘body in space’ and the likes, when we refer to the analysis or description of real physical situations or the experience of real environments and real happenings. Simply because space is not physical. It is a fallacy to believe the contrary; and contrarily to common presuppositions, there is nothing ‘out there’ that corresponds to what we call ‘space’, apart from an abstract idea of mathematical origin. Yet, an abstract idea, any idea actually, is located ‘in here’ (in our minds), that’s why we’d better reason in terms of the correlation that exists between what is ‘out there’ and what is ‘in here’, before we say that space is ‘out there’. ‘Space’ is an abstract entity, and since concrete physical bodies or entities do not concretely exist and move in abstract entities, but they concretely exist and move in concrete places, made of concrete things (the ground, the atmosphere, the sun, cars, persons, trees, rocks, buildings…), to refer to such concrete places, things or entities as if they were concretely ‘contained in space’ can be misleading and foreboding errors. An ancient Chinese saying attributed to Confucius says that: ‘If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If names be not correct, affairs cannot be carried on to success.’[28] I have dedicated the above-mentioned articles to unveil the modern, erroneous presuppositions behind the concept of space, which haunt common language and expressions; presuppositions on which we have conformed our traditional understanding of space. Every time we speak about concrete situations we should be speaking in terms of ‘place’, or ‘elemental things-place’ as Casey suggested, not in terms of space. As Edward Casey also observed ‘to be physical is to be in place’, not in space – I add.[29]
To be physical is to be in place.
I’ve also argued that the usual certainties behind space considered as a metaphorical notion are illusory: that illusion serves to keep on using an ambiguous term or unclarified notion such as space, in the right situation — the analysis of concrete situations, happenings, or environments. I was also a victim of such modern presupposition concerning our understanding of the concept of space — the idea that ‘space’ is a container or the background of actual happenings, the so-called ‘arena of things’; as we have seen on many occasions, there was no such idea of background space in antiquity — see note [18] in Place, Space, and the Fabric of Reality, Image 1 and note [11] in Concepts of Place, Space, and the Nature of Physical Existence, or note [5] in Back to the Origins of Space and Place. As soon as I understood that there was something unconvincing behind the indiscriminate usage of space in either physical or ideal (mental) domains, I resisted the temptation to refuge behind the metaphorical understanding of space to save the appearances of my work, which was based on what, at that time, I believed was space. So, I began a specific study on spatial concepts which eventually took me to reconsider their traditional meanings. I have used the expression ‘victim of modern presupposition’ concerning the meaning of space because, as observed in recent articles at RSaP, presuppositions are difficult to detect since they have their roots in the common language and we usually take common language and expressions for granted. So, I needed specific historical training to go to the source of the meaning of spatial concepts; I needed to follow their complex histories through different epochs to exit from the labyrinth of many different and often contrasting interpretations. It became clear to me that one cannot simply rely on what famous figures like Newton, Einstein, Kant or Hegel said, nor can one build theories starting from what common language says about spatial concepts. This applies to any discipline that deals with spatial concepts, including physics, philosophy, architecture, art, and the social and biological sciences. When I embarked on my journey into the histories of spatial concepts following their vicissitudes through different epochs, I realized that in my architectural models — archi-textures — I was partially misplacing place (the concrete) for space (the abstract). At that time I almost exclusively spoke in terms of space, without distinguishing between the realm of actual happenings and physical backgrounds (which was my starting point: the perceptual analysis of the real physical environment), and the realm of ideas and imagination (which was the abstract, imaginary territory in which I transformed those physical and biological data concerning perception into abstract topological and architectural models). I learned that any actual or concrete physical environment is a place, and any real extension is an extension of concrete objects or places, and not of ‘space’, which is a non-entity (a non-corporeal or non-bodily entity). Conversely, the realm of the project, the imaginary or ideal realm in which the architect imagines and creates architectural spaces, is a realm of space properly.
The biggest obstacle I found to realizing the difference between place and space (place, to begin with, considered as a physical/corporeal notion, while space as an exclusive abstract/ideal notion) and questioning the reality of space (that is to realize that space was not physical, therefore, that it had nothing to do concretely with the movements of bodies and their perception of the surrounding environment) was represented by the very discipline that initially allowed me to offer a ‘stable’ ground to my understanding of architecture as a discipline based on space: phenomenology, or, better, my interpretation of phenomenology with specific reference to Merleau-Ponty’s work, which, at that time, I almost understood as a concrete apology of body, perception, and space — three terms that I immediately associated to the flesh of reality, its concrete side. Later, I understood that the flesh of reality and also the opposite, the idea of reality, the abstract side of reality, are both represented by body, and perception on the one side, and space on the other (it is on the dynamic tension of opposites as correlatives that we can understand reality as a whole encompassing domain of existence — where the actual and the potential, the physical and the ideal, being and becoming are present). That is an issue that would require an extended and separated discussion; so, rather than elucidating the ambiguous spatial language of phenomenology, I prefer to focus on one of the first sparkles (one between many) that fired my curiosity against the reality of space (by this expression I mean the possibility to understand space as the arena of things, that is a concrete notion, what physicist called ‘absolute space’ after Newton or called ‘spacetime’ after Einstein).
From the very beginning of my personal experience with space — my Eureka moment which I narrated above — I saw space as something material: in just one word, I saw space as a thing, a concrete thing (I think this was the main reason why I enthusiastically embraced ‘phenomenology’, which, according to traditional interpretations, considered space as a tangible presence indivisible from the body). In that experience, for me space was the all-embracing name for particles dancing in the air and, for electromagnetic waves at different lengths, for mechanical vibrations (of air), and chemical diffusion of substances (through the air) reaching me and firing my body and brain receptors from distant sources. Then, that distance was filled by concrete entities behind which we find names such as colours, textures, rumours, odours, hot, cold, and so on. For me, at that time, that was enough: I thought I understood what was surrounding me and I understood that what was surrounding me was the real content of architecture; through that which surrounded me (what at that time I knew as ‘space’), walls, doors, floors, ceilings, windows, etc. could speak to me. That allowed me to shift my focus from the forms of matter to what I believed was the medium through which matter spoke to me: space.
Now, after so many years, if I reflect on that experience and on the words that I have used to describe it, I have come to realize there is no concrete trace of ‘space’. Apart from the name, the concrete traces of that experience were traces of physical/corporeal entities such as, on the one side, my body, and on the other side, electromagnetic waves at different wavelengths (which are responsible for colours, the discrimination of light and shadows, hot/cold sensations, etc. — what Gibson identified as the visual system and haptic system) and chemical elements or substances (responsible of odour, taste, and, if we consider the mechanical friction of air elements, sound — what Gibson identified as the taste-smell system and the auditory system). This is what really exists, that is, concretely. Stop. As a matter of fact, I have also spoken in terms of a ‘distance’ between me/my body and the source of stimuli; yet, that ‘distance’ is not something different from the extended presence of physical elements (electromagnetic waves responsible of what we see and feel) and chemical elements (whose diffusion or vibrations through the air are responsible for what we smell, taste and hear). It is obvious that space is just a name for that distance, therefore a representational notion, a symbol, something abstract. But if, as it is evident, space is something abstract (by the way, if we want to usurp the ether of its name and say that it is ‘space’, the famous Michelson–Morley experiment denied the physical existence of the ether), why we say that we perceive space, that we live in space, that we move through space and so forth, which are all concrete situations, situations that refer to concrete experiences of the physical environment? Is space the correct name to identify that distance when we speak of physical situations or concrete happenings? If space is the name of a distance or of a volumetric extension, and if that distance or volumetric extension has no specific reference to the things (electromagnetic waves, chemical elements or substances, etc.) or to the place (the place of electromagnetic waves, the place of chemical elements or substances, etc.) conveyed by that distance/extension, why do we keep on associating that concrete distance or volumetric extension with space? Isn’t there another name, a more concrete name than space, which gives us specific information about both distance or volumetric extension and the things that such a distance or volumetric extension is said to convey? I think there is another name, a more appropriate name. That name is ‘place’ in the reformed sense I am proposing at RSaP.
When I discovered James Gibson’s book, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, which I used to give an almost definite form to my archi-textures, I was content with the possibility of translating the perceptual information exchanged between body and the physical environment into space (or, better, into what at that time I believe it was ‘space’) because ‘space’, for me, was the trait d’union between body, architecture and the perception of the environment. For me, at that time, the perception of space and the perception of the physical environment (in the sense of ‘configuration’ of the background) were almost synonymous. However, when I read that book, I didn’t notice an important point, made by Gibson, which I would have noted later; a point on which I would have grounded the possibility of questioning the reality of our traditional understanding of space: even if The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966) is a book about perception, Gibson spoke about the perception of space just on a few occasions, and he did it with ‘reluctance’. Fundamentally, going against a consolidated centuries-old tradition, he denied the existence of space as a direct object of perception (that is, he denied space as a physical entity grasped by the senses) since space is something that cannot be perceived but just imagined, created, or if you prefer, invented by our mind, which means that space is not ‘there’ or ‘out there’.[30]
But it was not until the publication of The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, more than a decade later (1979) that Gibson’s understanding of space and the so-called perception of space became so clear and outspoken without the possibility of erroneous interpretations:
… the concept of space has nothing to do with perception. Geometrical space is a pure abstraction. Outer space can be visualized but cannot be seen. The cues for depth refer only to paintings, nothing more. 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. All that sounds very strange, no doubt, but I urge the reader to entertain the hypothesis. For if you agree to abandon the dogma that “percepts without concepts are blind,” as Kant put it, a deep theoretical mess, a genuine quagmire, will dry up.
JAMES J. GIBSON, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception
I have used Gibson’s work to question the reality of (physical) space and the so-called perception of space because I used his work as a precious source of architectural information for my spatial models. Now, after a decade of specific studies on spatial concepts from a transdisciplinary perspective, I could use the works of many other scholars, physicists or philosophers, to question the reality of space, i.e., its concreteness: from Ernst Mach who defined space ‘a conceptual monstrosity’ (for the sake of precision Mach’s target was ‘absolute space’ which is anyway the traditional form of space that we usually refer to when we describe real happenings at the human scale), to Max Jammer who, using Einstein’s words, called space ‘an illusion although… a very fruitful illusion’, from Thomas Hobbes, who defined space ‘a phantasm of the existent’, to Immanuel Kant, who defined space a ‘non-entity’, a pertinence to ‘the world of fable’, from George Berkeley, who said that space was ‘a mere verbal expression of a state of empirical facts… a false hypostatization of an abstraction which occasioned infinite mistakes’, to William James who hold that ‘real space’ was ‘a very incomplete and vague conception’, or to Leibniz and Whitehead who believed space was an abstract notion, but also Newton, whose thinking about the reality of space was heavily distorted by later interpretations, as we have seen in Leclerc’s works.[31]
Then, space is just a nominal attribution for the physical medium (a concrete, actual entity) which is one thing with the atmosphere of the physical environment. This is something that Gibson understood immediately: ‘The atmosphere, then, is a medium. A medium permits more or less unhindered movements of animals and displacements of objects. Fundamentally, I suggest, this is what is meant by “space.” But a medium has other equally important properties. It also permits the flow of information…’.[32] Then, we should ask: Is that attribution appropriate? Not for me, neither for Gibson nor for a long list of seminal thinkers – we have just seen. The atmosphere that allows movements and the flow of information (not just physicochemical information, but also biological, social, and, eventually, symbolic information) is what I also understand as ‘place’ — fundamentally, it is a constituent part of place, whether we understand it as a cosmic or atomic, infinitesimal entity (see Figure 01 in the article The Place of Architecture The Architecture of Place – Part II). Space, I am arguing at RSaP, is a too abstract notion to convey all such different forms of information; from correlated linguistic and historical perspectives, I am showing that space is not the appropriate term to express that ‘flow’ of information. When Aristotle posed the ‘spatial’ question for the first time, with his systematic analysis, wondering what ‘topos’ was — what is place? — topos/place (not space – to translate Aristotle’s topos as ‘space’ is a fallacy, an anachronism, other than a physical error, that is an error concerning Physics – the Physics of Aristotle) was the name chosen and necessary to describe fundamental happenings regarding the physical reality (the location and the movement of bodies). Reality, the physical reality, was understood as a plenum, as an explosion of processes, i.e., a place, not as a void extension or distance, which are illogical notions when applied to the explanation of concrete physical facts: the void is an idea, such as space is. They are ‘abstract’ notions and, as such, they cannot be ‘physical’. From Plato to Aristotle, from Descartes to Kant, from Leibniz to Whitehead, including Newton and Einstein, whose spatial doctrines were often misinterpreted, it is long the list of those who rejected the physical existence of spatial notions based on the abstracting character of simple extension or simple location. Using space as a descriptive term of physical circumstances (in expressions such as ‘perception of space’, ‘physical bodies moving in/through space’, and so on) is a possibility of language, but we risk falling into fallacious thinking: this is the risk behind the use of spatial metaphors, misplacing the concrete (the environment-as-place, which is characterized by physical, chemical, biological, social and symbolic processes actualized into their respective entities) for the abstract (a mere extension — whether linear, superficial or volumetric — or a simple location, that is something detached from the things and the processes in it). I have dedicated a specific article to that question — The Treachery of Space.
space is the most obsessing of metaphors in today’s languages…
MICHEL FOUCAULT, The Language of Space [33]
Coming back to my archi-textures, at that time, I called space what now, after a decade of specific research on spatial questions, I acknowledge as the dimensionality that is intrinsic to any place, which means that the vehicle of any actual experience and information is always a place, not space; space, being a mental abstraction, an abstract notion, has nothing to do directly with the physicochemical and biological processes that relate the human body to the physical environment, as Gibson showed. Now I consider ‘space’ the name for an abstract extension, an ideal extension, which has nothing to do with that which is physical or material, or with perception (so, the expression ‘perception of space’ is just one of the many deceiving metaphorical expressions that are now accepted in common language and not even questioned by scholars anymore). At RSaP I am explaining that it is less misleading to interpret any physical extension as the intrinsic character of a place, i.e., the dimensionality that is intrinsic to the entities considered as the place of processes. Concerning the important relation between matter and space or place, elucidated at philosophical and scientific levels, I suggest you read the following articles: Place, Space and the Philosophy of Nature, and Place, Space, and a New Conception of Nature especially.
Slideshow 16 (Images 95-100) Archi-textures: study models and final rendering for the Vaxjo Tennis Hall, Vaxjo, SE, by Alessandro Calvi Rollino Architetto, 2010. Project winner of the World Architecture Community Awards, 2013. Project published in: Tennis Hall of the Future (Vaxjo: Davidsons Tryckeri), 2010; Everything about Green Buildings (New Delhi: EA Building PVT Ltd), 2011.
4. Conclusions: the spatial and placial principles of design and architecture
Many years after the conceptualization of archi-textures, if I re-exam their production, I cannot help but notice that what was wrong with them was not the overall conceptualization, which considered both the physical environment, i.e., the place where perceptions and movement happen, and the space where such perceptions and movements are abstractly and creatively organized (by the architect’s mind on the base of topological and architectural principles); what was wrong was the spatial language with which I described them: a language which was almost exclusively based on the concept of space, without discerning, with a more appropriate and richer spatial language, the interplay of physical/placial (concrete) and ideal/spatial (abstract) constraints that are typical of any architectural or design production. As a matter of fact, even if concealed behind what I now consider an inappropriate descriptive spatial language, my current belief that architecture is the creation of space and the modification of existing places for dwelling was already there, in those models: space the domain of creativity and potentiality, on the one side; place the realm of actuality — the real environment where potentiality is overcome by the actuality of physicochemical, biological, social and symbolic structures, which are themselves places — on the other side.
This takes us to the conclusion and return to the reasons which took me to reconsider the meaning of traditional spatial concepts after the emergence of climatic and ecological issues (those issues are questioning the role and the meaning of architecture, since the beginning of the new millennium): architecture is not a question of space, as I believed at the time when I envisioned my first archi-textures, and as architects, historians and critics maintained since the second part of the XIX century; it is now evident that architecture should be considered as a question of space-and-place, at the same time: ‘place’ should be thought of as the alternative term for the environment, the concrete, material realm of actualized physical, biological, social, and symbolic processes (such as architectural processes), as I am maintaining at RSaP; this means that place is also structured on an intrinsic ecological horizon, deriving from the structural coupling of physicochemical and biological processes, which we, as architects and human beings, must necessarily consider, given that architectural processes, from the ideal creation of buildings to their physical construction and, eventually, their dismission, inevitably interact with such ecological horizon. Conversely, space should be considered as the ideal, immaterial, correlative principle of place — the purely extensive and abstract domain of thinking where the architect organizes the possibility for architectural processes to become real according to both material and immaterial configurations created through the power of imagination, suggestions, remembrances, desires, acquired knowledge, etc., which are all immaterial aspects.
Image 101: Archi-textures – Spazio 1999, ONIRIDEA, sand installation. With architects Davide Benini and Elena Puccio, for Studio Associato Mario Antonio Arnaboldi & Partners, Viareggio, IT, 1999. Published in L’Arca, n° 144, 2000.
Notes
[1] I have used the term ‘image’ next to ‘understanding’ because the tendency to reduce the phenomenon of architecture to a mere image is very high, especially among young students. A lot of material has been written on the exclusive role that vision always played in architecture. Obviously, the phenomenon of architecture is so complex that it cannot be reduced to a question of ‘image’ only: if we limit ourselves to questions of perception, all the other senses have to be considered. The hegemony of vision in the Western world is something that goes back in time to the beginning of Greek philosophy as Hans Jonas explained very well in the essay The Nobility of Sight: A Study in the Phenomenology of the Senses (in: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 14, No. 4, Jun., 1954). The linguistic evidence of this preference for the sense of sight is that ‘to see’ is a synonym for understanding.
[2] Between the lines you can read two important connected assets of architecture I’ve learned in that period: 1) architecture — I mean good architecture — is a poised state between art and science. This is directly connected to 2) an old saying regarding architecture, by the Roman architect Vitruvius, who lived in the first century B.C.: beauty and utility, or, as we usually say today form and function are universal conditions for architecture. A third basic principle, solidity, was also considered by Vitruvius, which is something obvious today (see also the paragraph Vitruvius, De Architectura Libri Decem in the article Concepts of Space in Vitruvius).
[3] This is a quotation from Robert M. Pirsig: see On the Structure of Reality.
[4] Extending that kind of insight to our days, after more than two decades, I can confirm that engineering, technological and, in general, normative aspects concerning architecture are important and necessary, but they are not sufficient if utility and beauty, form and function, have to transcend the ordinary sense of building construction. As universals, terms such as ‘utility’ or ‘function’, are open enough to accept different declinations through different times: therefore, the utility of a building, or its function, is not merely intended with respect to the very nature of the building — a house, a museum, a school, etc., which is due to answer certain requested activities — but also with respect to biological, i.e., psychological and physiological, social, cultural, or other factors; the case for ecology is a recent example. The same variability holds with respect to universals such as ‘beauty’ or ‘form’.
[5] To reconstruct the following passages, I crossed my memories with the notebooks that accompanied my architectural journey since the beginning of my career as a student of architecture.
[6] in, The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, edited by C.T. Onions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 16.
[7] Kent C. Bloomer and Charles W. Moore, Body, Memory, and Architecture (New York: Yale University Press, 1977).
[8] Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern university Press, 1978).
[9] Edward.T Hall, The Hidden Dimension (New York: Anchor Books Editions, 1990); Sergej M. Ejzenstejn, Lezioni di Regia (Torino: Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi, 1973); on Rudof Laban, see: Ann Hutchinson, Labanotation (New York: A Theatre Arts Book, 1977).
[10] With hindsight, and after experience accumulated making projects and designing buildings, I’ve learned that the two procedures coexist: yet, I believe it is preferable to use a top-down approach when the bottom-up approach has already entered the stage.
[11] Actually, from a certain moment onward, space became the most used term, present on any page of my notebooks; the moment in which I understood what space really meant for architecture I wrote the following words: ‘Plans? Elevations? Sections? No way! It is space: space for our body, the relation between us and the world!!!’
[12] Later, I discovered that such a ‘glue’ was called ‘pneuma’ by the Stoics, or even ‘the ether’ by the ancient Greeks, and now I think this ‘glue’, between and within physical bodies, is nothing other than what modern physicists call ‘physical fields’ at the subatomic level, and which I now call ‘place’: physical fields are just another name for describing physical states of place.
[13] A few times after that experience I became acquainted with Merleau-Ponty’s work, which also spoke about that sort of perceptual inversion in the following terms: ‘our perceptual field is made up of “things” and “spaces between things”… If we set ourselves to see as things the intervals between them, the appearance of the world would be […] altered… There would not be simply the same elements differently related […], but in truth another world’, in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge Classics, 2002), 18.
[14] At that time, I called that circumambient world ‘space’, just like the tradition wants. Today, I call it ‘place’, because it is fundamentally an extension, and, in the physical world, any extension is a property of place (anything, actually, is a place: a place of processes – at the fundamental level, things and places coincide, I’m arguing for at RSaP). Space is an abstract extension, and, as such it belongs to the world of ideas, not to the concrete world of facts, happenings or perceptions of the physical world. Of course, there is a circularity between the two; any elucidation of the concepts of place and space regards our approach to that circularity. This is what I am trying to explain at RSaP.
[15] I have used the spatial vocabulary as I understood it at that time; now, after a decade of specific studies dedicated to spatial questions, I know that ‘space’ is just a term (the name for an abstract extension) which has nothing to do with that which is physical or material, or with perception (so, the expression ‘perception of space’ is just one of the many deceiving metaphorical expressions that are now accepted in common language and not even questioned by scholars anymore). Rather, at RSaP I am explaining that it is less misleading to interpret any extension as the intrinsic character of a place, that is the dimensionality that is intrinsic to entities considered as the place of processes. Concerning the important relation between matter and space or place, elucidated at philosophical and scientific levels, I suggest you read the latest articles I devoted to the argument: Place, Space and the Philosophy of Nature, and Place, Space, and a New Conception of Nature especially.
[16] I was deeply impressed when I became acquainted with Paul Klee’s legendary turning-point experience he had in Tunis: on April 16, 1914, Klee wrote in his notebook: ‘Colour has taken possession of me (Die Farbe hat mich); no longer do I have to chase after it. I know that it has hold of me forever. I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: colour and I are one. I am a painter’. ‘Space and I are one. I am an architect’ — I immediately thought when I became acquainted with Klee’s episode, which reminded me of my epiphany with space.
[17] However, at that time, I called ‘space’ what now, after a decade of specific research on spatial questions and concepts, I acknowledge as the dimensionality that is intrinsic to any place, which means that the real vehicle of any actual experience is always a place, the concrete world in which we live, not space; as also psychologist James J. Gibson believed, after his pioneering studies and experiments in environmental perception, space is a mental abstraction, an abstract conceptualization which has nothing to do, directly, with the immediate reality/actuality of physicochemical and biological processes linking, in a physical flux, the human body to the physical environment. But this is another, more complicated question, which is the extended subject of many articles at RSaP.
[18] This is the complete quotation: ‘One might say that practical activity writes upon nature, albeit in a scrawling hand, and that this writing implies a particular representation of space. Places are marked, noted, named. Between them, within the ‘holes in the net’, are blank or marginal spaces. Besides Holzwege, or woodland paths, there are paths through fields and pastures. Paths are more important than the traffic they bear, because they are what endures in the form of the reticular patterns left by animals, both wild and domestic, and by people (in and around the houses of village or small town, as in the town’s immediate environs). Always distinct and dearly indicated, such traces embody the ‘values’ assigned to particular routes: danger, safety, waiting, promise. This graphic aspect, which was obviously not apparent to the original ‘actors’ but which becomes quite dear with the aid of modern-day cartography, has more in common with a spider’s web than with a drawing or plan. Could it be called a text, or a message? Possibly, but the analogy would serve no particularly useful purpose, and it would make more sense to speak of texture rather than of texts in this connection. Similarly, it is helpful to think of architectures as ‘archi-textures’, to treat each monument or building, viewed in its surroundings and context, in the populated area and associated networks in which it is set down, as part of a particular production of space. In Henry Lefebvre, The Production of Space, translated by D. Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, Inc., 1991), 118.
[19] Of course, within the space of the models, the universe of people is synthetically represented by a single person: myself. It was my perception, my perspective, and my sensibility in reading the characters of places that became a decisive factor. It is the duty of architects to offer people, through their sensibility, a way to look at things according to a certain perspective, which is inevitably the perspective of the architect or of the group of design. Sometimes the perspective offered is good and sometimes is not. Or, even worst, sometimes buildings offer no perspective at all to understand the nature of places. There is much to be done in setting the coordinates to read a place or a landscape, architecturally-wise: the first thing is to have a definition of place, which is the route I am pursuing at RSaP.
[20] e.g.: ‘Each voluntary movement takes place in a setting, against a background which is determined by the movement itself. . . We perform our movements in a space which is not “empty” or unrelated to them, but which on the contrary, bears a highly determinate relation to them: movement and background are, in fact, only artificially separated stages of a unique totality’, in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge Classics, 2002), 159.
Years later, I made a short video clip to explain the important connection between the movements of the body in space and architecture: see Kastrup Sea Bath.
[21] James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1966).
[22] Ibid., 5.
[23] Ibid., 97.
[24] e.g., Attilio Marcolli, Teoria del Campo: Corso di Educazione alla Visione (Firenze: Sansoni Editore, 1987); Jean Cousin, Topological Organization of Architectural Space, in Architectural Design (October 1970): 491-493; Anna Sgrosso, Topologia e Architettura. In Op. Cit., n. 45, (1979), pp., 4-16. See also Paolo Portoghesi’s works, where topological principles of organization are used to generate the configuration of plans and planimetry.
[25] Jean Piaget and Barbel Inhelder, The Child’s Conception of Space (New York: Norton& Company Inc., 1967).
[26] See also, Kurt Lewin, Principles of Psychological Topology (New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, 1936); Jean and Simonne Sauvy, The Childs Discovery of Space (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974).
[27] My interest in the discipline of physics grew exponentially when I realized that a parallel between physics and architecture was possible on the basis of the elucidation of fundamental concepts such as matter and space, which are common to the two disciplines. My first enthusiastic encounter with physics (which at High School was not one of my favourite subjects) as a possible way to influence architecture was due to Fritjiof Capra’s The Tao of Physics. In a certain sense I found a powerful ally to my relational models, which were a visible web of relations and interconnections, when I was reading phrases like: ‘… nature […] appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole. These relations always include the observer in an essential way… the properties of a particle can only be understood in terms of its activity-of its interaction with the surrounding environment-and that the particle, therefore, cannot be seen as an isolated entity, but has to be understood as an integrated part of the whole… Thus modern physics shows us […] that material objects are not distinct entities, but are inseparably linked to their environment…’, in Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics (Boulder: Shambhala Publications, Inc, 1975).
Some of the connections between physics, metaphysics and archi-textures are also suggested in the articles Place, Space, and the Fabric of Reality, and Space and Place: A Scientific History – Part One (final part of paragraph 11).
[28] See the post On name and Things.
[29] Edward Casey, The Fate of Place, 289. This is the reformulation of the traditional Archytian Axiom — ‘to be is to be in place’.
[30] Gibson, in The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, used the term ‘perception’ 392 times, while the expressions ‘perception of space’ or ‘space perception’ were used on less than ten occasions, the most meaningful are the following ones: ‘…we will consider the simplest kind of orientation, to the direction up-down and to the plane of the ground. Along with this goes a basic type of perception on which other perceptions depend, that is, the detection of the stable permanent framework of the environment. This is sometimes called the perception of “space,” but that term implies something abstract and intellectual, whereas what is meant is something concrete and primitive – a dim, underlying, and ceaseless awareness of what is permanent in the world’ (page 59); some pages later we read: ‘The perception of external space, the dimensions of the vertical and horizontal and the third dimension, distance, is an accompaniment of the fact of body posture and equilibrium – that is, of orientation to the constants of the earth that have existed over millions of years of life’ (page 72); yet,Gibson’s scepticism concerning ‘the reality of space’ and the ‘perception of space’ is especially evident in the following quotation, in a paragraph on the haptic system: ‘The question involves the perceiving of both the general layout of environmental surfaces and the particular layout of the surfaces of an object being manipulated. The question is clearly related to that of so-called space perception. I have argued that the perception of the layout of surfaces is the perception of space (…). Completely empty space is unperceivable. There are dimensions or axes of empty space, to be sure, but they are embodied in a solid environment having a north-south, an east-west, and an up-down. This is the space to which an individual is oriented, with respect to which the posture and equilibrium of his body is maintained. The body itself, with its main axes of right-left, front-back, and head-foot, must never be confused with it. I called this a “vector space” on an earlier page, but it is not really a space’ (pages 112-113).
[31] all those definitions of space are contained in Max Jammer, Concepts of Space, The History of Theories of Space in Physics (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1993) and in Ivor Leclerc, The Philosophy of Nature (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1986).
[32] Gibson, James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1966), 14.
[33] Michel, Foucault. ‘The language of space’. In: Geography, History and Social Sciences, edited by G.B. Benko, U. Strohmayer (Dordrecht: Springer, 1995), 51.
Works Cited
Bloomer, Kent C. and Moore, Charles W. Body, Memory, and Architecture. New York: Yale University Press, 1977.
Capra, Fritjof. The Tao of Physics. Boulder: Shambhala Publications, Inc, 1975.
Casey, Edward S. The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
Cousin, Jean. Topological Organization of Architectural Space. In Architectural Design, October 1970, 491-493
Ejzenstejn, Sergej M. Lezioni di Regia. Torino: Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi, 1973.
Foucault, Michel. ‘The language of space’. In: Geography, History and Social Sciences, edited by Benko,G.B. and Strohmayer U. Dordrecht: Springer, 1995.
Gibson, James J. The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1966.
—. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. New York: Psychology Press Classic Editions, 2015.
Jonas, Hans. The Nobility of Sight: A Study in the Phenomenology of the Senses. In: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 14, No. 4, Jun. 1954.
Hall, Edward. T. The Hidden Dimension. New York: Anchor Books Editions, 1990.
Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern university Press, 1978
Hutchinson, Ann. Labanotation. New York: A Theatre Arts Book, 1977.
Jammer, Max. Concepts of Space – The History of Theories of Space in Physics. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1993.
Leclerc, Ivor. The Philosophy of Nature. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1986.
Lefebvre, Henry. The Production of Space, translated by D. Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, Inc., 1991.
Lewin, Kurt. Principles of Psychological Topology. New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, 1936
Marcolli, Attilio. Teoria del Campo: Corso di Educazione alla Visione. Firenze: Sansoni Editore, 1987.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge Classics, 2002.
Piaget, Jean and Inhelder, Barbel. The Child’s Conception of Space. New York: Norton& Company Inc., 1967.
Sauvy Jean and Simonne. The Childs Discovery of Space. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974.
Sgrosso, Anna. Topologia e Architettura. In Op. Cit., n. 45, 1979, pp., 4-16.
The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, edited by C.T. Onions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Image Credits
Featured Image, Archi-texture, study model for the Växjö Tennis Hall, by Alessandro Calvi Rollino Architetto.
Image 1, Laon Cathedral, on wikimedia.org
Image 2, Mapping Gothic France, Laon Cathedral, by Andrew J. Tallon
Image 3, Laon Cathedral, on The Web Gallery of Art
Images 4, 5, 6, by Toumas Uusheimo, on uusheimo.com
Image 7, 9, Max Planck Institute for Human Development on mpib-berlin.mpg.de
Image 8, Max Planck Institute for Human Development on twitter
Image 13, The Well, by G.B. Piranesi on wikiart.org
Image 15 (source), Tensile Overhead Plane Architectural Conceptby Andreas Mavrakis on mavcon.co.za
Image 34, Mother and Child, by Henry Moore, 1939
Image 35, Graphisme en fer, by Robert Julius Jacobsen, 1949-50
Image 36, Sculpture, by Berto Lardera, c. 1952
Image 37, Plans mobiles, by Pol Bury, 1953-55
Image 38, Antennae with Red and Blue Dots, by Alexander Calder, c. 1953
Image 39, Spatiodynamique 19, by Nicolas Schöffer, 1953
Image 40, Sculpture in Metal and Bronze, by André Bloc, c. 1960
Image 41, Penetrables, by Jesús Rafael Soto, since 1969
Image 42, Critical Holder Chart 2, by Arakawa and Madeline Gins, c. 1991
Image 43, Diagram 9, Line: The thin lines hold their own in the presence of the heavy point, from Point and Line to Surface, 1926, by Wassily Kansinsky
Image 44, Santa A et B, Pen and pencil drawingby Paul Klee,1929
Image 45, Space modulator, by László Moholy-Nagy, 1945
Image 46, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia, US, by Richard Meier, 1980-83.
Image 47, Parc de la Villette, Paris, FR, by Bernard Tschumi, 1982-98.
Image 48, Akademie der Kunste, Berlin, DE, by Günter Behnisch, 1997-2005 (Photo: Andreas FranzXaver Süß).
Image 49, LF One, Wheil am Rhein, DE, by Zaha Hadid, 1996-99.
Image 50, Rooftop Remodeling, Vienna, AT, by Coop Himmelb(l)au, 1983-87.
Image 51, Biblioteque de l’Ihuel, Geneve, CH, by Peter Eisenman, 1996-97.
Image 52, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, FI, by Steven Holl, 1998.
Image 54, The Stick Dance, choreography and costume by Oskar Schlemmer, Bauhaus courses, c. 1927.
All other images by Alessandro Calvi Rollino, CC BY-NC-SA.
2 Comments
Ching-Lee Ho
Well done, my friend: impressive style and hybridization of architectural drawings and models.
Alessandro Calvi Rollino
Hello, I’m glad that you liked it.