This article is a critical response to a conventional mode of interpreting architecture, which goes back to the XIX century and which takes ‘space’ as the most relevant interpretative key for the discipline.[1] This long-established traditional vision overshadows the not-often recognized fact that for any space to exist (either architectural, sociocultural, or pseudo-physical) place must be already on the stage. Precisely, I am arguing at RSaP, that stage – the stage for matter, life, and their variegated phenomena, from physical to symbolic – is ‘place’, as the now-forgotten classical Greek tradition asserts through the validity of the Archytian Axiom: ‘to be at all is to be in place’. Therefore, place, not space, is the primaeval and natural stage for architecture. If we think that ‘architectural space’, as a concept, is an invention of the second half of the XIX century, and that ‘three-dimensional space’, as a recognized entity of geometrical and physical origins, had capillary diffusion only after Descartes and Newton, we should be suspicious about traditional histories of architecture and interpretations that retrospectively analyze the phenomenon of pre-modern architecture in terms of space. Hence, my preference for ‘place’ and the ‘processes’ that give place a structure as the interpretative key for architecture.
The title of this series of articles on place and architecture plays with a well-documented and critical anthology of architecture written by the Danish architectural historian Lars Marcussen, in 2002 (Danish edition): The Architecture of Space The Space of Architecture: A Historical Survey.[2] If Marcussen, in the title, gives priority to ‘The Architecture of Space’, where ‘space’, in the first part, suggests a cultural construction, in the title of this article, first part, I give priority to ‘The Place of Architecture’, where ‘place’ is the fundamental physical substrate that offers a ground to all other things – included sociocultural and symbolic narratives of place as the focus of architecture, i.e., ‘The Architecture of Place’. Similarly to Professor Marcussen, my vision is evolutionary and non-dualistic (which means that one part in the title complements the other to form an omni-comprehensive whole, while the initial division is just for the purpose of analysis),even if the perspective is different: place rather than space, in the attempt to escape the pitfall of anachronistic spatial interpretations. Then, analogously to Marcussen, but from the complementary perspective of place,[3] the absence of the conjunctive ‘and’ between the two propositions in the title – 1) The Place of Architecture 2) The Architecture of Place –[4] is a way to express the seamless continuity and complementarity between two facets of the same phenomenon: the physical and the cultural aspects of reality. Two facets which establish ‘a self-perpetuating circuit’, a whole: reality.[5] Differently from Marcussen, who believes that this self-perpetuating circuit is a human product – a subjective stance that paves the way for an anthropocentric vision of the existent (he speaks of ‘an external world of our own making’ and that’s why, in the title, he gives priority to the Architecture of Space rather than to the Space of Architecture),[6] for me the world can exist by itself and by other selves apart from the humans (things, plants, animals), thereby I reject the primacy of anthropocentric metaphysics, on the base of a processual and organic vision, such as the one suggested by Alfred N. Whitehead in the first part of the past century. I believe this different perspective on anthropocentrism is intrinsic to the difference between place and space: while I hold that space is a tailor-made concept that suits human purposes and explanations (at representational or descriptive levels), place is an all-embracing concept: I go so far as to say that place is ‘the principle of existence’ (archè, ἀρχή), and this is especially evident in the reformed placial (place-based) perspective I propose when I say that ‘everything is a place – a place of processes’ (Places Everywhere). To recognize that difference between place and space we must give up traditional spatial knowledge which is often haunted by suppositions that never question the very nature of what is being discussed, taking it as self-evident (in this case, taking the concepts of place and space as ‘self-evident’ means taking the ordinary concepts of space and place for granted and making theorizations without investigating the logical/philosophical, linguistic and historical grounds of their nature): fundamentally, this is a shirt-sighted approach to knowledge, a known issue concerning the transmission of knowledge in the passage from generation to generation (on this regard, see On the Methodological Principles of Science). I believe transdisciplinary research, when it questions the very source of concepts’ meaning, helps inquire into traditional knowledge and, therefore, spatial knowledge as well, offering a fresh view to the analysis of complex phenomena such as architecture and place.
Concerning my understanding of place, there’s no room for mere physical determinism, neither in general nor in an architectural sense; that is, there is no reduction of phenomena to place as a physical or geographical determinant; similarly, there’s no room for social or cultural determinism, that is, no reduction of phenomena to place as an exclusive socio-cultural product, given that, for me, place is an all-embracing structure – a system – which dynamically holds together its parts (it is constituted by the interplay of): physicochemical, biological, ecological, socio-cultural and symbolic aspects, which are all complementary aspects of the self-perpetuating circuit – the parts of a whole. Reality is a place. The fundamental question is to understand the continuous tension between those different parts to have a better insight into the nature of phenomena; parts which are often in contrast to each other (On the Structure of Reality). This type of holistic understanding, which recognizes the impact of human activities on the environment at geological levels and timescales, is necessary at the dawn of a new era – the Anthropocene. Seeking a new balance between the forces that regulate the relationship between men and the environment is a critical issue of modernity. To do that a redefinition of our understanding of spatial concepts is mandatory. The reconsideration of the concept of place implies the reconsideration of the concept of space since the two concepts are correlated.
So, now, we ask: How did architects engage with the relationship between architecture and place as a deliberate research subject in the past? How do they approach this in the present time?
1. Architecture, Planning, and the Place of Social Processes
Very often, since the 1960s, the interest of architects and planners for place as a direct focus of their research was influenced by social processes: to have an interest in place implied having an interest in the social interactions – customs, rites and practices – existing in that place, rather than (or before than) considering the physical characters of that place. Since then, the aim of many architectural and urban interventions sensitive to place has been preserving or ameliorating human customs, practices, and rites, or creating new opportunities for social interaction, whenever possible. Here, the common and highly accepted distinction between place and space comes to the fore – a distinction which architects and planners mainly derived from the Social Sciences: place is considered the stage for personal and social practices, interactions, attached meanings and memories; without social practices, interactions, and meanings, we would better call that stage ‘space’. Then, according to that vision, we could turn the anonymous space of a street or square, an anonymous urban district, or even the space of neutral and anonymous architecture into a place, if we give that space a possibility for human interaction and personal projection of experiences and memories. Ultimately, architects and planners considered place the nurturer of meaningful human experiences. Fundamentally, that view of place – which is correct but, I will argue, too limited – still holds.
Alongside architects and urban planners, that mode of thinking about place and space was the bedrock of social scientists. Since the 1960s, there has been a natural alliance between architects, planners and social scientists converging to a similar understanding of the meanings of place and space. At the beginning of his book ‘Place – A Short Introduction’, geographer Tim Cresswell, from the specific perspective of the social scientist, is explicit about that commonly-shared vision concerning the difference between place and space we have anticipated in a passage above: places – Cresswell says – are ‘spaces which people have made meaningful… This is the most straightforward definition of place – a meaningful location.’[7] Again, after some passages we read: ‘Space has been seen in distinction to place as a realm without meaning […]. When humans invest meaning in a portion of space and then becomes attached to it in some way […] it becomes a place. This basic dualism of space and place runs through much of human geography since the 1970s.’[8]
Even if many architects and planners agreed with this socially constructed version of place and space (and many of them still agree), this perspective should be especially relevant for social scientists rather than for architects and urban planners; as such, it cannot be taken to be exhaustive or, even less, it cannot be considered an all-embracing perspective, without even mentioning the ontological and epistemological shortcomings behind a vision that believes ‘places are spaces’.[9] Cresswell is aware of this partial, sectorial vision, not only within the realm of the social sciences – ‘place is a contested concept’ Cresswell says before presenting different versions of place in the domain of the social sciences –,[10] but also outside of it. In the final part of the book, Cresswell offers us a glimpse into other possible perspectives on the phenomenon of place, e.g., the ecological perspective, the intellectual or symbolic perspective (that is, the perspective of scholars on place, from the social sciences to philosophy passing through the arts, sports, politics, etc.), and, as I have anticipated in the initial part of this paragraph, the perspective of architects and urban planners. With their works – Cresswell concluded – architects and planners gave ‘a practical sense’ to the research and theorization of social scientists.[11] On this point, and more generally, on the fact that there are many different visions on space and place (even within the single discipline, and very often contrasting each other) we all agree with Cresswell.
Turning back to the specific perspective of architecture and urban planning, this social mode of understanding places, which aimed to connect people, architecture, and the urban environment, is often seen as the byproduct of a general reaction against the strict principles of rationalism and functionalism, which, apart from being the principles of an entire epoch, were also the mainstream principles of architectural design and planning since the first decades of the past century: ‘A house is a machine for living in’, architect Le Corbusier said presenting his view of Modern Architecture in the 1920s;[12] a vision which had a direct connection with Avant-guards and artistic movements of that epoch (Futurism above all others artistic movements, with its direct reference to the epoch of the machine, and the associated ideas of speed, movement, industrialization, etc.). Such utilitarian and functional principles had a deep social and aesthetic impact on the built environment.
Image 01: Niemeyer and Costa, Brasilia, 1956-63. The plan for Brasilia was the monument to an abstract, rational and functional approach that especially characterized modernism in architecture and planning in the period between the 1930s and the 1960s. Photograph by Fabio Colombini.
The reaction against those principles aimed to put human interactions and relationships back to the core of design and planning proposals, especially in the ‘60s and ‘70s: that was immediately evident in the works of architects and planners like Alison and Peter Smithson, Aldo van Eyck, Jacob Bakema, or Giancarlo De Carlo – the most active members of the so-called Team X (Team Ten), named after the tenth CIAM, Congres Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne.
Images 02, 03: A. and P. Smithson with P. Sigmond, project for Berlin-Haupstadt, 1958. According to their plan, a division between pedestrian and vehicle networks offered new possibilities for social encounters and a more liveable city to be experienced in continuity with parks, gardens, and green areas.
The idea of place was a key issue for the so-called ‘structuralists’. This term, commonly used in architectural discussions, is often juxtaposed with the members of Team X and their supporters. It originally comes from linguistics but was borrowed from anthropology, particularly referencing the contributions of the French anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.
I arrived at the conclusion that whatever space and time mean, place and occasion mean more, for space in the image of man is place, and time in the image of man is occasion. Split apart by the schizophrenic mechanism of determinist thinking, time and space remain frozen abstractions… A house should therefore be a bunch of places – a city a bunch of places no less.
Aldo van Eyck, Writings: Collected Articles and Other Writings
Image 04: Centraal Beheer Offices, Apeldoorn, NL, 1972. Architect: Herman Hertzberger.
The ‘social approach’ to place maintained by architects and planners since the ‘60s was not the only direct reference to the importance of place in architecture and planning: other approaches which had place as a direct subject of inquiry, were formalized and followed by different groups of architects and planners. Those ‘placial’ strands, which we are going to consider in the following paragraphs, were often meant to counteract the principles of rationalism and functionalism reified by the architectures of the first modernism – the so-called International Style. From an almost opposite position, more concrete and pragmatic rather than ideal and symbolic, the appeal to ‘place’ overshadowed the obsessing reference that architects and planners, until that moment, reserved for space. ‘Space’ was the hallmark of functionalists and technicists, à la Le Corbusier, in the first period of his career, and Mies van der Rohe. ‘Space’, since the second part of the XIX century, has been the representative concept of the new architecture which tried to break ties with the tradition and old styles; a remarkable working tool which produced highly recognizable symbolic and aesthetic outcomes (see the Appendix in the article On the Ambiguous Language of Space).
Images 05,06: on the left, the model for the Georg Schaefer Museum, by Mies van der Rohe, Schweinfurt, DE (project 1960–1963); on the right, the New National Gallery by Mies van der Rohe, Berlin, DE, after completion, in 1968, (project, 1961). Significantly, those are just two negligible variations of the same design concept conceived by Mies in the 1950s, for the Head Quarter of Bacardi, in Cuba. Concerning the New National Gallery in Berlin, architect David Chipperfield, author of its recent refurbishment, said: ‘There was a general suspicion that this was a building Mies had wanted to build elsewhere for a long time, and he finally got to land it in Berlin”.[13] This is the quintessence of what I call a ‘space-based approach to architecture’, an approach which, in this case, rejects place and its actual processes as the real stage for architecture and life. Here, the abstract symbolism of architecture is all in the mind of the architect, and space, which is evidently considered an abstract substitute for place, is the perfect backbone for structuring such abstract modes of thinking.
Let’s explore other place-based strategies that architects and planners have developed to diverge from, contrast with, or criticize the mainstream movement of modern architecture commonly referred to as The International Style.
2. ‘Regionalisms’, ‘Vernacular Architecture’, ‘Existential and Phenomenological Approaches’: The Place of Physical, Biological, Sociocultural and Symbolic Processes
The return to place and humanism in architecture and planning we have considered in the previous paragraph was a reaction against global underlying long-run sociocultural and economic processes: the diffusion of rationalism, functionalism, and derived technologies associated with industrialization, the market economy, and unrestricted modes of capitalistic production, distribution and consumption. Such aspects implied diffused forms of standardization and the erosion of particularities (and, consequently, of the principle of locality) as propulsive drivers for developing a new model of society. I believe the concept of space, with its intrinsic neutrality and indifference to particularity, places or locales, was instrumental in cultivating and diffusing such universal, almost flattening aspects of modernity: if the tie with place and the local is broken we can act wherever we want, that is in any place, as a tabula rasa, without being conditioned by the nature, climate, history, sociality or culture of that place (the diffusion of the concepts of ‘space’ and ‘site’, with their intrinsically abstract and neutral connotations, were functional to that plan – concerning the word ‘site’, see the article On Place and Site). The modern zeitgeist driven by unregulated forms of industrial capitalism was disrespectful of limits the same way the concept of space is: it seems to me the two perspectives – the economic and the spatial – were (and still are) seamlessly interlaced and supportive of each other (I tried to render some of the aspects of that relationship through the phenomenon that I referred to as Spatiophilia). No limits to development, that is no limits to industrial, agricultural, and economic growth; no limits to the exploitation of natural resources, that is, no limits to their depletion. The prevailing expansionistic logic of modern economy coupled with our understanding of the physical world – i.e. Planet Earth – as a neutral space (which is, by definition, unlimited and indifferent to the specificity of places), produced a universal civilization which is the situation we are currently living, such is globalization.
2.1 Architecture, Place and the Spirit of Time: Different Forms of Regionalism
This phenomenon of universalization and the way certain modes of architectural production could react against it by appealing to ‘placial concepts’ – i.e., concepts of place, environment, region, bioregion, etc. – rather than appealing to the concept of space was caught, at the beginning of the ‘80s, by the British critic and historian of architecture Kenneth Frampton, who commenced his well-known 1983-essay ‘Towards Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance’ introducing a long quote from Paul Ricoeur, taken from ‘History and Truth’, 1965. Ricoeur offered a general frame to the global situation modern society was living in that particular historical moment: the French philosopher characterized the ongoing ‘phenomenon of universalization [i.e., ‘globalization’]… an advancement of mankind’ and, at the same time, ‘a sort of subtle destruction, not only of traditional cultures […] but also of […] the ethical and mythical nucleus of mankind.’[14] So, according to Ricoeur, we were facing a paradox: ‘how to become modern and to return to sources; how to revive an old dormant civilization and take part in universal civilization.’ [15] The possible solution to that paradox, at least in architectural terms, had a name: ‘Critical Regionalism’ – Kenneth Frampton proposed, borrowing the expression from architects Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre,[16] who were also exploring an approach to architecture sensitive to place, that is, sensitive to local geography, climate, and culture, while, at the same time, warning against the risk of backward tendencies of chauvinisms and populism often associated with traditional narratives of place. This latter aspect associated the architecture of Critical Regionalism with ‘vaguely politicized’ messages, trying to eschew ‘both the placeless homogeneity of much mainstream modernism and the superficial historicism of so much postmodern work’, Professor of Architectural History L. Eggener said.[17] In Frampton’s own words, Critical Regionalism, by critically promoting the encounter between specific world cultures and universal civilization, guaranteed ‘a place-conscious poetic’ for architecture, ‘without falling into sentimentality’ or too idealistic and narrow conceptions of place.[18]
Image 07: Boa Nova Tea House, Porto, Portugal, 1958-63 – Architect Alvaro Siza Vieira. Siza is one of the architects whose architecture is often categorized as an exemplary case of Critical Regionalism. Image source: Nelson Garrido (see Image Credits, below, for details).
In another important essay on Critical Regionalism – Prospects for a Critical Regionalism, 1983 – Frampton wrote: ‘If any central principle of critical regionalism can be isolated then it is surely a commitment to “place” rather than “space”, or, in Heideggerian terminology, to the nearness of “raum”, rather than the distance of “spatium”… Critical Regionalism would seem to offer the sole possibility of resisting the rapacity of this tendency [globalization]. Its salient cultural precept is “place” creation; the general model to be employed in all future development is the “enclave” – that is to say, the bounded fragment against which the ceaseless inundation of a place-less, alienating consumerism will find itself momentarily checked.’[19] As far as I remember, nowhere the clash between place and space as instruments of architecture has been thematized so clearly, with so direct and concise words.
Also, Tzonis and Lefaivre, in the article that gave the name to the phenomenon of Critical Regionalism – The Grid and the pathway. An Introduction to the work of Dimitris and Susana Antonakakis. With Prolegomena to a history of the culture of modern Greek architecture –[20] confronted with concepts of space and place in a way that I would define as ‘correlative’ or ‘complementary’ rather than ‘mutually exclusive’, as the position expressed by Frampton might appear at first sight. In their first characterization of the phenomenon of Critical Regionalism, Tzonis and Lefaivre, in parallel with an attention to local dynamics, also offered an abstract spatial interpretation of architecture (the use of ‘the grid’ in architecture is the reference to such abstract dimension – i.e., space)[21] which is somehow overshadowed in the Critical Regionalism proposed by Frampton, being space, in the Heideggerian reference made by Frampton, responsible for those abstract and flattening aspects of universalization that regionalism wanted to resist (and that’s why Frampton proposes that the architecture of critical regionalism requires ‘a commitment to “place” rather than “space”). That was not a negligible difference between the main actors that sponsored the same concept – Critical Regionalism – since space and place, apart from their apparent architectural roles as ‘physical’ and/or ‘geographical’ notions, are drivers of different social and ideological, or political values which need careful inspection and elucidation. It was properly on one of those latter aspects – the geo-political aspect – that Tzonis and Lefaivre distinguished from other interpretative models aiming at elucidating the nature of regionalism in architecture.[22]
Slideshow 01, Images 08-10: Residential Complex of a mining company in Distomo, GR, 1969. Architects: Atelier 66 – Dimitris and Suzana Antonakakis.
Image 11 Xenia Motel, Kalambaka, GR, 1960. Architect: Aris Konstantinidis.
Before continuing with other strands of regionalism in architecture, I want to highlight a couple of important questions immediately identified and synthesized by Frampton in his points and prospects for Critical Regionalism. First, we immediately see the echo of the important connection between sociocultural processes, place and architecture, which we have considered in the previous paragraph: Frampton’s appeal to place for a new architecture and a return to humanism (using a place-based terminology such as ‘place creation’, ‘place-lessness’, or ‘the enclave’) was in perfect tune with the spirit of that time, which favoured the alliance between architects, planners, and social scientists; an alliance which converged into a socially constructed notion of place.
Second, a question which runs underneath many historical and critical articles on this website: the belief that concepts of space and place have always been functional to promote the worldview of a certain epoch, since the time Aristotle posed the spatial question for the first time, through his systematic formulation of the concept of place (topos). Actually, we’d better call it a ‘placial’ question, that is a ‘place-based question’, rather than a ‘spatial question’: by this ‘swap’ of attributes we should remark the difference between space and place, and the necessity to attribute place a primacy, in both physical (i.e., territorial or geographical) and existential sense, since place – we know from the Archytian Axiom, from Aristotle, as well as from Heidegger – is primary and cannot be subsumed to space; rather the contrary is true. The necessary paradigm shift I called for a decade ago in my paper From Space to Place: A Necessary Paradigm Shift in Architecture is nothing other than the observation of a diffuse reaction that different actors have been having for decades against the phenomenon of universalization and its main drawbacks – ecological, economic and social questions. I am sustaining that the global phenomenon of universalization or universal civilization, as Ricoeur called it, has been overtly structured on the concept of space overshadowing placial dynamics (i.e., dynamics of place), that is: it was structured on the idea that the world has been considered an unlimited and neutral realm – a passive container – available to host human processes without interfering with such processes. That view had its final realization in the common habit of people to understand and describe the physical world and its processes – i.e., the environment – in terms of space rather than place (that habit or tendency I have called Spatiophilia). However, we have quite recently discovered that the world – Planet Earth – is everything but a passive container: without the need to get into the scientific details of the Gaia hypothesis, anthropic factors have been so pervasive in the last few centuries that they contributed to change the momentum of global physicochemical, biological, and ecological processes at planetary scale. That means that the world – ‘the where’ of processes – is everything but a passive container, everything but a space. On the contrary, it is an active, responsive container which responds to human processes (social, cultural, and symbolic) via positive and negative feedback at physicochemical, biological, and ecological levels. The most cogent questions of modernity – climate change and global environmental issues such as desertification, biological diversity, depletion of natural resources, and ozone issues – regard those fundamental levels of reality. The idea that the Cosmos is an active container is, after all, the conceptualization behind the Aristotelian notion of place and conception of the physical Universe, where places have active roles in determining the behaviour, i.e., the movements, of matter (see Aristotle on the Concept of Place and Space and Place: A Scientific History – Part One). So, even in the original sense of the word derived from Aristotle, we can consider the world, that is Planet Earth – our Cosmos or Universe –, a place. This is to say that we’d better understand ‘the where’ of processes – that which surrounds us and which we are part of – in terms of place, an active environment by definition, before than or rather than in terms of space – a passive container by definition, albeit in the last decades, not to say in the last century, we witnessed many different attempts, in different disciplines, to transform that passive container in an active container preserving the name ‘space’ (therefore contributing to raising an aura of con-fusion between place and space). In its fundamental contours and consequences, that dichotomic question between space and place was intuited by Frampton, when he introduced the issue of Critical Regionalism relying on Ricoeur’s long quote about universalization: the necessity of a commitment to “place” rather than “space” responds to the necessity of reacting against the flattening tendency of universalization, that is, the flattening modern tendency of considering processes (economic, urban, architectural, etc.) as if they happen within an unresponsive container. That abstract mode of thinking about the territory and the environment made use of the concept of space as a trojan horse to conquer actual places and territories, one after the other, as in a real territorial battle (and that’s why it became a universal process, globalization), erasing any form of locality or particularity – erasing place, ultimately. For Frampton, the necessity of a commitment to place rather than space, was a response to such process, a response to universalization; a mode to invert a trend from abstraction back to concreteness (in specific architectural terms, this research would have led Frampton to embrace the hypothesis known as ‘tectonic’).[23] A commitment to place I am also calling for, reconsidering its traditional meaning and its relationship with space.
However, this is not, tout court, a plea for place against space, at least not for me, and not even for Frampton or Lefaivre and Tzonis: space and place are the two sides of the same coin. So, at any rate, this return to place should be carefully analyzed and critically scrutinized: as both Frampton, Tzonis and Lefaivre, and many scholars interested in the relationship between architecture and regionalism have said, we must beware of any form of backwardness, chauvinism, provincialism or populism that are often associated with traditional narratives of place and locale. That’s why – I’m saying – the very concept of place should be subject to a critical revision, which is the hypothesis I am following at RSaP, by proposing an alternative, all-embracing vision of place – place as a system of processes – which is a conceptualization that extends the horizons of traditional conceptions of place usually based on narrow or exclusive narratives (either geographical, psychological, socially constructed or cultural narratives), rather than on wider and more inclusive narratives.
Image 12 Jean-Marie-Tjibaou-Cultural-Center, Nouméa, NC, 1991-98. Architect: Renzo Piano. Image source: Gollings Photography (see Image Credits, below, for details).
Now, I want to expand the vision on ‘critical regionalism’ a bit more, shifting the focus on the more general concept of ‘regionalism’ in its connection with architecture and urban phenomena. A vision that projects us far back in time with respect to the limited range of the International Style.
Regionalism is a conceptualization structured on the notions of ‘place’ and ‘locality’. The interest in the idea of regionalism in architecture and planning as an alternative to or contrast against the ‘phenomenon of universalization’ was by far precedent the ‘80s, when the concept of Critical Regionalism distinctly emerged from architectural circles. As a matter of fact, the first explicit, theoretically relevant appeal to regionalism and place as an interpretative model for modern urban phenomena dates back to the end of the XIX century and the first decades of the XX century, when the Scottish biologist, sociologist and urban planner Patrick Geddes presented his pioneering theses on the interlaced evolution of societies and places. I have dedicated an article to his work – On the Modernity of Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) – so, here I will only remind readers that the innovation of his thinking on the connection between human and territorial questions concerned his adoption of a systemic or organic perspective, which was, at the same time, local and global. So, in a certain sense, one hundred years in advance of the central issues thematized by Critical Regionalism Geddes offered a possible way out of the paradox between the clash of local and global instances of modernity. Geddes’ groundbreaking ideas on the need for ‘regional surveys’ (an instrument necessary for planning), the interpretative model of the ‘valley section’ (which correlated human occupations and technologies with the specific physiographic profile of a region or territory), and, more generally, his interpretation of the nature of a territory resulting as the interaction of geographical, biological, ecological and sociocultural processes acting at both local and global levels (an idea which he presented to the public in a permanent exhibition at the Outlook Tower, in Edinburgh, since the end of the XIX century) were the main contributes of his research on the elucidation of territorial phenomena in association with human dynamics. Those concepts devised by Geddes had nothing to share with traditional territorial narratives. Geddes’ regionalism was a modern form of regionalism that would have set itself in contrast with two of the most popular strands of regionalist movements that resurfaced over and over again during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: ‘romantic regionalism’ and ‘nationalist romanticism’ – a true geographical extension of the former and, in many cases, its ideological deterioration.[24] According to Lefaivre and Tzonis, exemplary cases of ‘romantic regionalism’ were to be found in England and Germany since the end of the XVIII century, while the deterioration of regionalism into ‘commercial’ forms – as Alexander Tzonis put it –[25] or even worst, into cultural and political models co-opted by totalitarian regimes was a diffused occurrence in the last century, especially.[26]
Another form of modern regionalism and, therefore, another appeal to a narrative of place which wanted to eschew degeneration into romantic forms or trivial association with nationalist movements was the one proposed by Lewis Mumford, a disciple of Patrick Geddes. Influenced by the pioneering visions of his Master, Mumford embraced an interpretation of the world and of historical occurrences in regional terms since the publication of his book ‘The Story of Utopias’ (1922).[27] Mumford, in the course of his prolific career as a writer and critics of sociocultural phenomena, refined the contours of his regional approach becoming a referential figure for the matter. A mature culmination of his regional approach is evident in the book ‘The South in Architecture’ (1941), which was defined by Professor Eggener as the ‘Ur-text of critical regionalism’, speaking of Mumford’s regional approach in terms of ‘self-reflexive regionalism’.[28] Overall, Mumford’s perspective on regionalism was an elaboration, refinement and variation of the main principles advanced by Geddes, decades before. However, more directly and efficiently than Geddes did, Mumford was able to connect this regional vision – this attention to ‘inclusive’ rather than ‘exclusive’ local dynamics – to the specific realm of architecture.[29] Mumford’s ability as an architectural critics led him to formulate a history of Modern American Architecture in books such as ‘Stick and Stones’ (1924) and the already mentioned ‘The South in Architecture’ (1941), which were regional interpretations of modern American architecture. Mumford identified Henry Hobson Richardson (1838–1886), as the first American regionalist architect whose regional approach, later, spread on the East Coast and, as Lefaivre and Tzonis noted, was also ‘appropriated and refashioned by the three main modern architects of the time: Frank Lloyd Wright, Greene and Greene, and Bernard Maybeck.’[30] According to the American architect and historian Anthony Alofsin, a former collaborator of Tzonis, to those and other American architects (including Louis Sullivan) ‘Mumford’s ideas of regionalism could be applied as an architecture that both follows local traditions and transforms them, that employs local materials and colors, and marries itself to the landscape while searching for an architectural expression in universal architecture forms.’[31] Again, we see at work one of the most important principles of modern regionalism, one that is grounded on the local (place-based dynamics) and aims at transcending it into more universal and symbolic forms of expression (space-based dynamics).
Image 13: John J. Glessner House, Chicago, Illinois, USA, 1885-87. Architect: Henry Hobson Richardson. Image source: Eric Allix Rogers (see Image Credits, below, for details).
Image 14: Sturges House, Chicago, Illinois, USA, 1939. Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright
Also, Mumford, through his articles in the Sky Line column of The New Yorker (since 1931), sponsored the existence of a modern architectural regionalism alternative to The International Style, delineating the contours of a ‘Bay Regional Style or School’ at work on the East American Coast, where architecture was ‘a free yet unobtrusive expression of the terrain, the climate, and the way of life on the Coast […] calling attention to […] the fact that, though it was thoroughly modern, it was not tied to the tags and clichés of the so-called International Style.’[32]
Fundamentally, these modern perspectives on regionalism aired by Geddes and given a consistent architectural form by Mumford mixed attention towards tradition with an optimistic and welcoming view of the future: they did not refuse a priori technological and industrial aspects and also mixed local and global or universal instances, elucidating one important aspect of what is often, and sometimes inappropriately framed as a battle between tradition and modernity: regionalism – in the Geddesian or ‘self-reflexive’ form proposed by Mumford – was not a reaction of tradition against modernity, or it was not an alternative model to modernism; rather, it was an alternative model of modernism, a different mode of seeing modernity, but, at any rate, a form of modernism. That model selected some aspects of the tradition (which are inevitably connected to place, region and locality) and combined past, present and future expectations into a new perspective (a future which is open and inevitably connected to the space of potentiality, imagination, projections, etc.). For many aspects, the Critical Regionalism of the ‘80s was a contemporary answer to, or an evolution of those models of regionalism expressed by Geddes and Mumford decades before. These tantalizing analogies caused Lefaivre and Tzonis to regard Mumford’s regionalism as an ante litteram form of ‘Critical Regionalism’ in their book ‘Critical Regionalism’ (2003).[33]
These alternative visions of regionalism (alternative to romantic forms and their nationalist or chauvinist deteriorations), where traditional and modern elements could coexist, were not immediately caught in the first decades of the XX century. The tendency of Avant-gardes movements and the mainstream architectural circles was to neglect traditional or local aspects in favour of an overt acceptance of the new canons promoted by the International Style: that meant an abrupt break with the past, with locality (place), and with those specific aesthetic elements (form, mass, colour, decoration, etc.) that could be seen in continuity with the tradition. In opposition to those elements, the acceptance of a completely new aesthetics: volume as space, white colours, minimalism, pure forms… However, that situation – the triumph of modern architecture exclusively seen through the lenses of The International Style and sponsored through the activity of the first CIAM congresses – was soon subjected to a critical revision (at least in its more immediate formal terms), in the sense that even those important cultural actors – notable architects, planners and historians – that initially contrasted any form of regional architecture, with the time passing by, they began to appreciate certain elements and regionalism began to be declined in many different forms within the stream of modernity. So, for instance, architectural historian and critic Sigfried Giedion, one of the most influential advocates of The International Style, in an article published in the magazine Architectural Record, in 1954, nearly repudiated that expression — The International Style — which he contributed to diffuse in his former texts. Concerning the new phenomenon represented by architects sensitive to both traditional and modern aspects, in balance between the alluring promises of open space and the reassuring presence of place, Giedion said: ‘This is no international phantom that is appearing everywhere today… I would like to give a name to the method of approach employed by the best contemporary architects when they have to solve a specific regional problem — such as a building for the tropics or for the West Coast, for India or for South America — whether it is for a house, a government center, or a problem in urbanism. This name is the New Regional Approach…’.[34] Significant of this shift of vision, the work of Alvar Aalto which was initially excluded from the first edition of Giedion’s successful book ‘Space, Time, and Architecture: The Growth of A New Tradition’ (1941), was included in the following editions (Aalto was one of the most brilliant and important architects of the past century, who always mixed with exceptional ability and sensitiveness local and global instances, elements of tradition with modernity, place with space ultimately).
Giedion’s case was exemplary of a change of vision or, at least, of a different sensibility with which the contrast between the International Style and regionalism would have been interpreted in the coming decades. The ongoing change of paradigm between space and place among architects is also a derivation of that confrontation between different phenomena, given that ‘space’ was the conceptual tool embraced by The International Style, while ‘place’ was the core concept of modern regionalist argumentations.
Image 15: Säynätsalo Town Hall, Jyväskylä, FI, 1949-1952. Architect: Alvar Aalto.
In the second post-war period, the sharp contrast between modernism and regionalism faded a bit. Some ‘regional’ instances and the correspondent interest for place and place-based questions in architecture and planning, were embraced by Team X, whose work we have already seen in the previous paragraph, under the synthetic heading ‘the place of social processes’. However, the issue of regionalism in combination with an interest in place-based questions in architecture never went out of radars completely. It was in coincidence with the coming into the scene of the phenomenon of postmodernism in the ‘70s and ‘80s especially, that regionalism resurfaced overbearingly in the form of critical regionalism. The mix of different issues such as the question of universalization, the exhausted propulsive aesthetic and conceptual force of the first modern movement – the International Style – in a society that was changing, and the coming into the scene of post-modern culture, which, not dissimilarly from past degenerative regional tendencies, appropriated history and placial instances in an instrumental and somewhat superficial way, promoted ‘critical regionalism’ as a new propulsive force, at the centre of the architectural debate. A propulsive force which, for many aspects, is still alive (apart from its name as we understand from the title of Lefaivre and Tzonis’ book Architecture of Regionalism).
Having witnessed the conclusion of the twentieth century, I have asked myself: ‘What really categorized that century?’ Put simply, I believe that it was the process by which the single idea of modernism homogenized the world… This rapid homogenization of the world dissolved distinct regional cultures that had developed over generations, robbing people of a truly affluent life. Today, people seek both modernity and a sense of place, which are difficult to achieve simultaneously… Whatever your involvement in architecture, discussions on internationalism and regionalism are inevitable.
Tadao Ando, Conversations with Students
Returning to Frampton’s seminal essays or points for Critical Regionalism, they allow me to move on with the argumentation of this article and introduce two other strands that interpreted architecture relative to place: one more universal and diffused throughout human history – the vernacular approach (some crucial elements of it are listed in the ‘Point 5’ of Frampton’s Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance: those elements are ‘Topography, Context, Climate, Light and Tectonic Form’). The other strand is more specific and contemporary, even if it has many intersections with the former point: I am speaking of the existential and phenomenological approach to architecture which had an important theoretical source in Heidegger’s writings, and was later developed on specific architectural grounds by the Norwegian architect, critic, and historian of architecture Christian Norberg-Schulz. That approach to architecture and place can be traced back to Point 4 – The Resistance of the Place-Form – and Point 6 of Frampton’s essay – The Visual Versus the Tactile.
2.2 The Place of Vernacular Architecture
As an introductory note, to better understand the meaning of the word ‘vernacular’ we should look at its etymology. The term comes from the Latin attribute ‘vernaculus’ which means ‘native’, from the substantive ‘verna’, which, in the Ancient Roman world, indicated a home-borne slave; thereby, the term passed to denote something ‘belonging to one’s own country’, or ‘pertinent to the native language’.[35]
All architects know that the close relationship between architecture and place, in the traditional, geographical sense of physical environment, was already recognized in the very first known treatise about architecture – De Architectura (27- 23 B.C.). The Roman architect Vitruvius, the author of the treatise, writes about the important choice of the proper place for founding a city, according to some geographical and biological principles related to the health of humans and animals, which the author thought was determined by the exposure to the sun and prevailing winds, the presence of water, the levels of temperature, humidity, etc. This was the traditional rule of thumb according to Vitruvius: if wild animals and the vegetal kingdom were in good condition and healthy, it meant the place was good enough for human dwelling. Here, Hippocrates’ treatise ‘On Air, Waters and Places’ comes to our mind, and surely also came to the mind of Vitruvius when he made those wise observations: in fact, he knew Hippocrates’ work and he mentioned it in the first book of De Architectura since, among many other skills, Vitruvius believed that the profession of the architect also required some knowledge of medicine. An architect, according to Vitruvius, ought to be a jack of all trades… (en passant, we have discovered who was the first known transdisciplinary architect).
That was traditional wisdom as old as architecture and intuitive town planning: such wisdom has its basis in the millenary tradition of vernacular architecture – what the Austrian American architect Bernard Rudofsky defined ‘Architecture Without Architects’, in an exhibition held at MOMA in 1964. That exposition was accompanied by a seminal publication with the same title which is very well known among architects. That phenomenon – vernacular architecture – was variably called ‘non-pedigreed’, ‘communal’, ‘primitive’, ‘anonymous’, ‘spontaneous’, ‘indigenous’, ‘rural’ architecture – that is an ‘architecture produced not by specialists but by the spontaneous and continuing activity of a whole people with a common heritage, acting within a community of experience.’[36] With that exhibition and the book-catalogue,[37] for the first time in the history of architecture, Rudofsky tried to break a consolidated tradition regarding a narrow conception of the art of building (traditionally, only ‘high-style’ buildings were considered by historians) ‘introducing the unfamiliar world of nonpedigreed architecture’, i.e., vernacular architecture.[38] It is true that before that exhibition the vernacular phenomenon was already associated with architecture, especially in terms of domestic architecture (e.g. by Mumford in regional American terms, by Sybil Moholy-Nagy, who wrote a book on the Genius of American ‘anonymous architecture’ in 1957, or, even before, by Giles Gilbert Scott who., in 1857, focused on the aspects of British vernacular architecture in his ‘Remarks on Gothic Architecture’),[39] however, from that moment on, vernacular architecture became a specific field of inquiry which stepped into the limelight for the community of architects, historian and critics; the new terminology – vernacular architecture – became diffused overshadowing alternative definitions.
Image 16: Architecture Without Architects, exhibition at MOMA, New York, 1964. Architect: Bernard Rudofsky. Photograph by Rolf Petersen.
As Rudofsky’s different naming of the phenomenon suggested from the beginning, that label – vernacular architecture – was quite comprehensive and variable, other than ambiguous. So, for instance, if compared with ‘regionalism’ or ‘regional architecture’ we could ask where one begins and the other ends; or if one (the vernacular) is also indicative of the other (the regional) or vice versa. Or if, in the developed world especially, it still has a sense to speak about vernacular architecture where the presence of specialists – architects and engineers – is necessary for construction. In those cases, can regional architecture be considered the contemporary evolutionary form of vernacular architecture –its replacement in the linguistic and architectural terms of the future? In one of his essays on Critical Regionalism, concerning the fuzzy relationship between regionalism and the vernacular, Frampton posed the following distinction, relying on a quotation from Adolf Loos: ‘The peasant builds a roof. Is it a beautiful roof or an ugly roof? He doesn’t know—it is the roof. It is the roof as his father, grandfather, and great grandfather had built the roof before him’;[40] in the background, a question of style and aesthetic appreciation even if, according to Frampton, they shouldn’t be the essence of critical regionalism, which ‘should lie beyond style [and] devote itself in the last analysis to the establishment of bounded domains and tactile presences with which to resist the dissolution of the late-modern world.’[41] As we already said, there were ‘vaguely politicized’ messages looming behind critical regionalism, contrarily to genuine examples of vernacular architecture.
Concerning this important semantic question between adjacent categories, the architect and interdisciplinary scholar Amos Rapoport was one of the first to understand the importance of defining the linguistic boundaries of the phenomenon – vernacular architecture – with specific reference to the meaning of the word ‘vernacular’. Rapoport understood the concept ‘vernacular’ as the characters of an environment in contraposition with ‘primitive’ (preliterate), ‘popular’ and ‘high-style’ environments, which respectively produced primitive, vernacular, popular, and high-style architectures. So, instead of focusing on a single character or variable for the term ‘vernacular’ (e.g., ‘place-specific’ according to Swaim, ‘unselfconscious’ according to Alexander, or ‘without architects’ according to Rudofsky, etc.) he proposed a model related to different variables (e.g., cultural and place-specificity, formal qualities, use of materials, relation to landscape, response to climate, efficiency in the use of resources, etc.,), which were perceived differently according to each of the four environmental and temporal categories he devised.[42] That was a dynamic and innovative mode of understanding and analysing the vernacular phenomenon, which had the explicit merit of trying a systematic analyses of a specific field of enquiry, which was often not even addressed as a linguistic question or taken as self-evident, and, therefore, left within an area of ambiguity and uncertainty.
In the context of these semantic questions concerning the discipline of architecture in general and vernacular architecture in particular immediately comes to the mind of architects Nikolaus Pevsner’s very much debated distinction between buildings (popular and functional constructions) and architectures: a never settled conundrum…
A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture. Nearly everything that encloses space on a scale sufficient for a human being to move in is a building; the term architecture applies only to buildings designed with a view to aesthetic appeal.
Nikolaus Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture
If, in many examples of vernacular buildings illustrated by Rudofsky, it is easy to find traces of the ‘aesthetic appeal’ requested by Pevsner for being qualified as architectures (even if at rudimentary levels, as in the case of some anthropomorphic decorations applied to the adobe walls of certain African granaries), in other cases it is not, or, at least, it is not so easily detectable the presence of ‘aesthetic appeal’ with the judging eyes of foreign biased cultures. One thing is plain: when we confront vernacular architecture we are confronted with dwelling and the origins of architecture, whose constructive principles are as old as humanity. In those origins, place – The Place of Architecture – had always a basic consideration: firstly, due to the choice of the appropriate location for building in terms of accessibility, safety or defence, appropriate climate, food resources (exogenous/environmental factors), but even as a request for beauty (endogenous/human factors), thereby keeping high the vessel of vernacular architecture against mere physical, or geographical determinism: ‘Whereas immature reflection tends to judge by usefulness alone, a discriminating mind may ask its share of beauty. Neither privations nor danger will deter man from selecting a spot that provides him with the exhilaration generated by a superb landscape’, Rudofsky observed.[43] Secondly, place was also a central factor, a continuous reference, since it requested a specific response in terms of architectural form and appearance: a direct response to topography, climate, and the presence (and type) of construction materials. All those were constraints that contributed to forging the shape of a building, its roof, the presence and disposition of doors, windows, the material used, etc.
Image 17: Archaeological site of Ancient Thera, GR.
Here, the important question concerning whether the physical constraints of place (climate, topography, accessibility, materials, etc.) are determinative for the great variety of forms of architecture resurfaces powerfully. That issue was directly addressed by the aforementioned architect Amos Rapoport, in the book House, Form and Culture:[44] even if he had a certain bias for the primary role that sociocultural processes played in determining the choice of the formal appearance of buildings or architectures (economics, religion, symbolism, social relationships, etc.), at a certain point, he moves so far as to say that the ‘exclusive, or inevitable, action of cultural factors is equally as untenable as any other single determinant and we need to recognize a valid middle ground. The need to consider many factors is, in the final analysis, the main argument against any determinist view.’[45]
I certainly include physical factors among those ‘many factors’. As I said in an opening passage presenting this article, my attempt to conceive of a notion of place that is simultaneously receptive to physical, biological, ecological, socio-cultural and symbolic instances is consistent with the idea of the primacy of place – place as archè, the ultimate principle – and, at the same time, that notion is an antidote against any simple-minded determinist theory of knowledge given that the concept of place I am suggesting is an all-embracing structure, simultaneously universal and particular: there is no a priori primacy of the physical over the cultural or the symbolic (or vice versa), granted the obvious consideration of their different presentation and development in the course of evolution: the physical comes before the biological – i.e., emerged before -, the biological comes before the social, and so on, but the two plans of discussion, the ontological, or metaphysical, and the evolutive, cannot be confused. My place-based vision concerning architecture is plainly anti-reductionist and, therefore, against any simple-minded form of determinism: architecture is the result of a tension between many factors – physicochemical, biological, sociocultural, intellectual/symbolic – and it cannot be reduced to any of those factors taken singularly. Ultimately, this vision of mine is different from Rapoport’s vision since, despite the good intentions shown in the quotation above, in the end, he moved the origins of vernacular architecture from physical to sociocultural instances, a vision very much in vogue in the ‘60s and the ‘70s, when Rapoport theories gained some interest at international level.
Coming back to Rudofsky’s Architecture without Architects, similarly to what the author did in the initial pages of the catalogue, when he briefly dealt with the origins of architecture in biblical terms, hypothesizing the first human hut was ‘probably put together with some of the Ark’s lumber’,[46] the critic and historian of architecture Joseph Rykwert, dedicated an interesting dissertation to that question, from a more erudite perspective: like Rudofsky, he traced back the origins of architecture – the source of all thinking about architecture, either modern, contemporary or antique –to the ‘primitive hut’ in biblical terms (On Adam’s House in Paradise, 1972).[47] However, concerning place as the basic existential realm of architecture, the author imagined the primitive hut existing in a different kind of place, literally, a ‘non-place’, an Utopia: such is the aboriginal place of all religions, ‘whose location cannot be found on any map’: Paradise.[48] Again, the origin of architecture is one thing with the origin of man and religious or mythical thinking; and, as usual, place is the stage that offers things the possibility to exist, either we consider those things ‘physical’ (geographical places) or ‘symbolic’ (Paradise and Cosmogonies).
… the origin of architecture is one thing with the origin of man and religious or mythical thinking; and, as usual, place is the stage that offers things the possibility to exist, either we consider those things ‘physical’ (geographical places) or ‘symbolic’ (Paradise and Cosmogonies).
Leaving behind the symbolism and mythopoesis, Rudofsky advanced a possible scientific hypothesis on the origin of the first human forms of architecture, following Darwinian evolutionism and indications: he imagined the first men following similar habits and behaviours of anthropomorphic apes, who built platforms for sleeping on the trees where they lived and covered themselves with leaves. That habit, due to a similar instinct between contiguous species, was possibly translated into the first primitive huts built on the ground by ‘the early progenitors of man.’[49] In this way, Rudofsky, via Darwin, linked biological processes, the genetic structures of the mind (which determines habits and customs), place – i.e., the physical environment and its resources – and architecture in a possible primordial scenario.
Image 18: The Origins of Architecture, Joseph Michael Gandy, 1830. Photograph: Sir John Soane’s Museum, London.
But the connection between place, dwelling and architecture comes even before this aboriginal human possibility worked out on evolutionary basis: here directly comes into play nature itself as a builder, a master architect, which uses the strength of physicochemical processes in a specific place – i.e., geological and climate forces through the relentless action of the earth, the sun, the winds, water and fire – to erect wonderful structures available to man as a repair, or shelter, or offering him a possibility for dwelling with relative effort, carving out accommodations from soft rocks, the fruit of million thousands years-old geological processes. Here place and architecture are fused in One entity.
Image 19: La Ciudad Encantada, geological site near Cuenca, ES.
Image 20: I Sassi, cave dwellings, Matera, IT.
Image 21: Troglodyte or cave dwellings, Göreme, TR.
Such fundamental issue of vernacular architecture which connects dwelling to place was the subject of a seminal book on the argument, written by the English architectural historian Paul Oliver in 1987 – Dwellings: The Vernacular House World Wide, a sort of compendium of traditional architecture, which he later developed into The Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World, a three-volume encyclopedia published in 1997.[50] That book – Dwellings – is important since it offers what I consider the appropriate approach to the subject, vernacular architecture, putting architecture under the more extended compass of dwelling – an existential compass of Heideggerian origin. From the perspective of dwelling, the importance of place is immediate both as a geographical notion and as an existential conceptualization: to dwell ‘signifies to remain, to stay in place’ a linguistic form traceable back to the basic form of being, or human existence, that is: I am. To dwell is to be, Heidegger noted, and to be – as we know from the ancient truth behind the Archytian Axiom – is always to be in place.[51] By means of dwelling – ‘to dwell is to make one’s abode: to live in, or at, or on, or about a place’ Oliver says – we understand that to reside ‘for many people implies a permanent structure, for some it means temporary accommodation, while for others is simply where [i.e., the place] they live even if there is little evidence of building.’[52] This nearly-absence of buildings but possible presence of dwelling, is significatively illustrated in Images 19, 20, 21, above, and in many other images that immediately come to our mind: from caves to grottos and naturally protected shelters that were inhabited by troglodytes, i.e., the inhabitants of caves (from the Greek ‘trogle’ which means hole) across different epochs. All other forms of dwellings, that is all other more structured forms of human dwelling (see the slideshow below) – from A] the shelters of nomads, to B] the huts of the first human settlements and C] their subsequent fixation into more stable formal canons and types (e.g., ‘nuraghi’ in Sardinia, ‘trulli’ in Apulia, ‘dammusi’ in Sicily, Balearic ‘talyots’, just to name a few traditional typologies of buildings in the Mediterranean area) that could be built from the ground (mud, adobe, rocks, etc.), or from resources that grow (lumber, branches, leaves, grass, trunks, etc.), to D] more permanent and enduring buildings – substantiate the same dwelling principle, ultimately; that is, they substantiate ‘the bond between [people] and the place where they live [which] transcends the physical frame of their habitation. It is this double significance of dwelling – dwelling as the activity of living and residing, and dwelling as the place or built form – which encompasses its manifold cultural and material aspects.’[53]
Slideshow 02: Forms of dwelling increasing in complexity, from nomadic shelters to stable structures. Image 22 – the ‘Min’, is the mobile shelter of the Rendille, a nomadic people who live in the semi-desert land between Lake Turkana and the Ndoto mountains, KE, Africa; Image 23 – San Bushmen tribe of Southern African regions; Image 24 – Abandoned Trullo, Alberobello, IT; Image 25 – Vaulted ceilings, Village of Oia, (formerly Apanomeria), GR.
Even if Paul Oliver does not explicitly mention it, the way in which he structured dwelling and place reminds us of Heidegger’s famous inquiry, at least famous for architects, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, where the philosopher ‘traces building back into the domain to which everything that “Is” belongs’, that is, an existential domain.[54] Similarly, about ‘dwelling’, Oliver says that ‘is more than the site it occupies, the materials of which it is made, the know-how of its construction, the labour that has gone into building, the cost in time and money that has been expended upon it. The dwelling is the theatre of our lives, where the major dramas of birth and death, of procreation and recreation are played out, and in which the succession of scenes of daily living are enacted, and re-enacted in the process of dwelling. Yet plays can be performed without stages [i.e., without human-built structures or recognizable architectures]… there are virtually no cultures in the world for whom a form of shelter does not exist.’[55] Fundamentally, here, what interests Oliver is the existential value of dwelling which needs a place to be performed, rather than a space, or a specific location (a site), or even a recognizable, permanent structure – i.e., ‘the stage’. In virtue of this existential insight, we understand that the all-embracing compass of dwelling, which may extend from ‘natural architectures’ (Images 19, 20, 21) to ‘primitive’, ‘vernacular’, ‘popular’ and ‘high-style’ architectures, is substantiated by the constant presence of place. Ultimately, it is the fundamental structure of place comprised of interplaying physicochemical, biological, sociocultural, and symbolic processes that we must look at, if we aim to understand architecture or buildings as a basic form of dwelling. Again, the analogy with Heidegger’s famous essay on building and dwelling is striking, suffice to recall to our mind the example of ‘the farmhouse in the Black Forest’ which we could appoint as the quintessence of vernacular architecture, where pragmatic and highly symbolic, not to say sacred, determinations coexist.
Fundamentally, by relying on the study of vernacular architecture with its immediate response to external and internal factors (environmental factors on the one side, and human factors, that is, biological, sociocultural and symbolic factors, on the other side), that is, by understanding the tension between the entire gamut of place-based factors that give buildings a concrete shape – climate and location, economies and settlements types, material resources and processes of construction (technology), spatial organization and utilization (i.e., social ‘spatialization’), cultural and intellectual aspects through decoration and symbolism – we may be more effective in understanding the meaning of dwelling (even in the deepest sense called for by Heidegger, which we will consider more in detail in the following paragraph)[56] ‘meeting the housing demands of the future’ as in the wishes expressed by Oliver.[57] Place acts as the equilibrating factor of the hetero-directed forces coming from man and the environment. Place absorbs those tensions, preserving the unity between man and the environment.
In the projective activity to imagine future scenarios, there are a few doubts that the resurgent interest in vernacular architecture and the regional approach is due to the emergence of environmental questions which are redefining the relationship between man and nature. We will especially see that in paragraph 3. For the moment, Oliver’s appeal to the questions of place and dwelling, through his popular book on vernacular architecture – ‘Dwellings’ -, directly introduces us to the next paragraph on the existential/phenomenological approach to architecture and place, which was initially worked out by Martin Heidegger and later perfected by other phenomenological thinkers, including architects.
2.3 Presence and the Human Body: Existential and Phenomenological Approaches to the Architecture of Place
In the book The Fate of Place, philosopher Edward Casey asked how ‘the special nonmetric properties and unsited virtues of Place’ could be rediscovered in the modern epoch, after the absolutist and relativist visions of Gassendi, Newton, Locke and Leibniz, which reduced place to a part of space, a simple location or site, down to its ultimate disintegration into point-like locations in space.[58] Casey showed that the restoration of the ancient, philosophically and dynamically relevant dimensions of place (dimensions that went back to ancient cosmogonies, to the Archytian Axiom, and to Aristotle’s physical theory) happened ‘by way of body’, thanks to thinkers such as Kant, Whitehead, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and by ‘a via media between body and mind’, which was the ‘indirect’ philosophical route to place chosen by Heidegger.[59] On the importance that place had for Heidegger as a central topic of inquiry, philosopher Jeff Malpas is more explicit: ‘I would argue that Heidegger’s work provides us with perhaps the most important and sustained inquiry into place to be found in the history of Western thought’, Malpas said.[60] I agree with Malpas: in some articles and commentaries on Heidegger, I tried to show how central is a place-based interpretation of Heidegger’s thinking to understand the nature of spatial concepts and of things in general, being aware that, as an architect, architecture is one of such things (What Is a Thing?, The Place of Being and Becoming, Being as Place: Introduction to Metaphysics – Part One and Part Two). Many fundamental Heideggerian insights on the nature of the thing, of place and space, contributed to giving me confidence in delineating the metaphysical, existential, and phenomenological boundaries within which I structured my understanding of the concept of place, space and architecture in processual and systemic, or organic, terms, trying to go beyond Heidegger’s secure path. An understanding of place which, in turn, contributed to shifting my understanding of architecture from a space-based to a place-based phenomenon.
Both philosophical perspectives related to place and the body (body as the ‘instrument’ to access the phenomenon of place), were intercepted by architects in the last three decades of the past century, and, for the case – i.e., the specific recovery of the concept of place in architecture – the impact of Heidegger’s theories, mediated by the interpretative work of the Norwegian architect, historian and critic Christian Norberg-Schulz, had paramount importance. New ways of architectural expressions related to our understanding of place and the immediate environment emerged, and architecture since the ‘60s entered existential and phenomenological domains through philosophical thinking. Here, I will sketch some meaningful moments of that passage from philosophy to architecture, which revealed place and the body as the prime motors for architecture.
We already introduced some connections between architecture, place, and Heideggerian thinking, in the previous paragraphs. First, in Paragraph 2.1, by means of a couple of references made by Kenneth Frampton on Critical Regionalism: ‘If any central principle of critical regionalism can be isolated then it is surely a commitment to “place” rather than “space”, or, in Heideggerian terminology, to the nearness of “raum”, rather than the distance of “spatium”,’ Frampton suggested; later, Frampton also recalled Heidegger’s placial conception when he mentioned the ‘loss of nearness’, in his points on architectural regionalism. Second, in Paragraph 2.2, when we introduced the work of Paul Oliver on vernacular architecture through his text ‘Dwellings’. In both cases, we found a connection between architecture and Heidegger’s famous essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, (originally delivered as a lecture at Darmstadt, in 1951) which put some light on the existential dimension of architecture, building, and their connections with place and space.
Let’s consider a bit closer Heidegger’s thinking on spatiality since we can draw some important indications on the reasons why we should consider architecture ‘a place-based discipline’ before than a discipline based on space, as traditionally modern interpretations of architecture suggest.
As we read from Edward Casey’s The Fate of Place (which I have presented in the article Place and Space: A Philosophical History), the existential structure of place was already at work in Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’ (1927), where the German philosopher presented the structure of being in the form of ‘Dasein’, literally rendered by ‘being-there’, the form of being-in-the-world that was peculiar to human beings: the hyphenated suffix ‘-there’ immediately refers to a placial, or place-based dimension of existence. With respect to the later essay, ‘An Introduction to Metaphysics’ (1935) – which I have presented in the articles Being as Place: Introduction to Metaphysics – Part One and Part Two – Edward Casey noted that ‘Heidegger – belatedly – underlines the placial significance of Dasein’ when the German philosopher pointed out that ‘Dasein should be understood, within the question of Being, as the place (Stätte) which Being requires in order to disclose itself.’[61] Similarly, in the article What Is a Thing?, I’ve tried to show the intrinsically placial orientation of Heidegger’s existential thinking expressed in the lecture course What is a Thing? (1935-36). In that article, with the contribution of a series of images (Images 1-7), I showed how our understanding of the thing is inextricably connected with the place of processes that allow such a thing to disclose itself to the world as a thing properly (by the proposition ‘place of processes’ I mean the interplaying processual dynamics between the perceiving subject and the perceived object, i.e., the thing). That reference to the ‘thing’ in general, to its structure and meaning, is important for architects since we should consider architecture ‘a particular thing’. Therefore, by understanding the general structure of a thing and its universal value, we could have some clues on the meaning of particular things such as architecture. The mutual, existential aspect of things and places was further elaborated by Heidegger in the essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ (1951), where, through the architectural example of the bridge, Heidegger went as far as to say that place is not a pre-existing instance of spatiality but emerges contextually to the presence of the thing, or, as Casey put it: place ‘arises with the bridge regarded as a thing.’[62] In that essay, Heidegger unveiled the structure of spatiality, that is he unveiled the meaning and relationship between place, space and the things in place. Also, very important, especially for architects, Casey, in the wake of Heidegger’s later essay Art and Space (1969), says that ‘things [and, as I’ve said, among things we should include buildings or architectures] are themselves places and do not just belong to a place, much less merely occupy positions in an empty homogeneous space’.[63]
Things are themselves places and do not just belong to a place, much less merely occupy positions in an empty homogeneous space.
Edward Casey, The Fate of Place
That is the main existential and architectural thesis I am maintaining at RSaP-Rethinking Space and Place: things are places and architecture, a thing, can be understood as one of such places. In the end, architecture is a place, i.e. a question of place, before being a question of space, as modern architectural critics and historians tried to convince us. An important corollary follows from Heidegger’s conception of spatiality, which is also explicit in an often-quoted passage from the essay on dwelling: ‘spaces receive their beings from places and not from space’, which means that space is subordinated to place and, therefore, there is no such thing like a pre-constituted space that allows the existence of things.[64] That is an inversion of traditional, modern spatial thinking. That also means that we cannot have complete and appropriate access to the phenomena of architecture if we do not put place and space (and the meaning of the thing) into the correct perspective: one, space, emerging from the other, place; and place tantamount to the thing in place. This is the fundamental message behind the name of this website: we need to rethink the traditional meaning of space and place and their relationship starting from the inversion of meaning suggested, among others, by Heidegger. Actually, that inversion of meaning, as Edward Casey clearly showed in The Fate of Place, is a return to the original Greek and Latin meanings of the two concepts: place as topos and space as spatium, in the sense illustrated by Heidegger in Building Dwelling Thinking.
Apart from the example of the bridge, which was useful to elucidate the relation between, place, space and the thing in place, the existential relation between building and dwelling was also explained by Heidegger, at first, in linguistic terms: he showed that ‘building’ was linguistically related to ‘dwelling’ and ‘dwelling’ to ‘being’ (in the ‘Old High German’ building meant to dwell, and to dwell meant to stay in a place, and, ultimately, to be). Then, Heidegger also worked out the relationship between building and dwelling in apparently plain architectural terms with the example of the farmhouse in the Black Forest, ‘placed… on the wind-sheltered mountain slope, looking south, among the meadows close to the spring’, with ‘the wide overhanging shingle roof whose proper slope bears up under the burden of snow…’, with ‘the altar corner… and the tree of the dead’ – a farmhouse built with ‘a craft that itself sprung from dwelling [and] still uses its tools and its gear as things’.[65] That example has been frequently interpreted in a too narrow architectural sense, or, even worst, manipulated in cultural and political senses, rather than interpreted in its fundamental existential aspect, as it should be: on the one hand, place and space, on the other (emerging from the space afforded by place) the natural environment and man are the fundamental existential aspects of dwelling we should focus on, one complementary to the other. The environment as the conveyor of inorganic and organic processes on the one side (they represent the Heideggerian dyad earth/sky); man, who complements those natural processes in a social and symbolic sense, on the other side (the other Heideggerian dyad mortals/divinities); all together they are gathered into, and recompose what Heidegger called ‘the fourfold’: earth and sky, mortals and divinities. Architecture as a place-based discipline (i.e., the result of physicochemical, biological, sociocultural and symbolic processes) should regard each of those aspects. Then, the concept of place I am advocating for at RSaP can be seen as another way to look at the Heideggerian ‘fourfould’, by considering reality as a system of places – the place of places – based on four basic categories of processes or entities as actualized processes (four existential levels) out of which all else emerges: physicochemical or inorganic processes/entities (things), biological processes/entities (life), social processes/entities (societies) and symbolic or intellectual processes/entities (thought) – see On the Structure of Reality. This means that ecological, political, economic, architectural, planning and all other existing processes/entities derive or emerge from the intertwined dynamics between those four basic existential levels of reality (that is my ‘fourfold’ on which I am structuring the concept of place and, consequently, the concept of space). That is the way I suggest architects look at the Heideggerian ‘fourfold’, preserving its practical as well as its symbolic meaning.
Following Casey’s trajectory delineated in The Fate of Place, we understand that this ‘incremental turn’ to place operated by Heidegger continues in his later works: in ‘Time and Being’ (1962), Heidegger considers the possibility to include temporality within place – at any rate, an ‘implacement of time’: ‘Where is time? Is time at all and does it have a place?’ Heidegger asks;[66] while in Heidegger’s last major text on the argument – ‘Art and Space’ (1969) – Heidegger finally asks the Question: ‘Still, what is place?’, drawing the crucial conclusion: ‘Place opens a region by every time gathering things into their belonging together… Place is not found in pre-given space construed as physical-technological space. Space unfolds only from the free reign (Walten) enjoyed by the places of a region.’[67] Edward Casey takes this insight further, making another illuminating remark for the benefit of architects and artists: ‘Even the empty spaces in a building or piece of sculpture count as places, and, more generally, the plastic arts represent the embodiment of places.’[68] Space belongs to place, in the end: that represents an inversion of what occurred since the Renaissance period and was later finalized in the modern epoch, conditioning our present understanding of place and space, where place is understood and often described as space (apart from the article dedicated to Casey’s The Fate of Place – Place and Space: A Philosophical History –, I’ve also dealt with this argument in the articles dedicated to Ivor Leclerc – Concepts of Place, Space, and the Nature of Physical Existence and Place, Space, and the New Conception of Nature –, one of the few scholars, apart from Casey, who clearly understood and narrated that historical process concerning the inversions of meanings and roles between place and space. Concerning the innumerable cases of places understood and described as spaces, see my photographic report Spatiophilia).
Even the empty spaces in a building or piece of sculpture count as place.
Edward Casey, The Fate of Place
‘Space as place…’. As a personal kind of experience, to support the thesis advanced by Casey,[69] I can say that I realized to be an architect (as an inner form of awareness and not as the outer fulfilment of academic or institutional examinations) as soon as I metabolized the meaning of space as a plenum, and therefore when I understood space as place, ultimately (see the article Archi-textures). However, here, a contradiction or a linguistic short-circuit begins to loom which complicates things and our understanding of spatiality a bit: if space is a plenum, if space is the conveyor of qualitative and concrete values, as also phenomenologists say, and, most of all, if we know the historical meaning, the philosophical and physical vicissitudes of space and place, it means that entity – that ‘plenum’ – is not space, and should be considered a place, as in the origin of Western thinking and as Aristotle and Heidegger showed us.[70] But if space is place, then, why keep calling it space instead of place? And most of all: then, what is space? It is my contention that Heidegger showed the most appropriate modern answer to solve that ‘Gordian knot’, when, in Building Dwelling Thinking, with a razorlike interpretation that almost admits no ambiguities, relegated space and place to their original complementary meanings and values: qualitative and primary, or ‘existential’, is the nature of place which allows the existence and presence of (offers the room to) things as concrete, qualitative facts, according to original Greek meaning ‘topos’; quantitative and subordinate, or ‘dimensional’ is the nature of space – a measure, interval, or extension according to the Latin meaning ‘spatium’ or ‘extensio’.[71]
… qualitative and primary, or ‘existential’, is the nature of place; quantitative and subordinate, or ‘dimensional’ is the nature of space.
The two natures – the existential and the dimensional – are correlated, which means that we cannot understand one without thinking about the other (e.g., see Image 4 in Place, Space and the Fabric of Reality).
This is an overview of the existential value of place and its relationship with space and the thing expressed in philosophical terms, taking a clue from Heidegger’s writings. Yet, we should ask: how did those abstract and insightful philosophical remarks on place, space and the thing (i.e., through the Heideggerian examples of the bridge, the temple, or the jug) pass into the realm of architecture, becoming a frequent intellectual reference for architects? Reading Heidegger is not an easy task, especially for outsiders. A few intermediate passages were necessary: we are going to consider those passages to see how architecture became concerned with questions of place as a direct topic of inquiry, through philosophical critics in existential and phenomenological terms.
The purpose of architecture is to give order to certain aspects of our environment.
Christian Norberg-Schulz, Intentions in Architecture
At this point, we need to introduce the lifetime work of the Norwegian architect, historian and critic of architecture Christian Norberg-Schulz – a messenger between the existentialism of Heidegger, the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard and Bollnow, on the one side, and architects, on the other. I am going to dedicate a specific article on the theoretical work of Norberg-Schulz since his writings are directly connected with the core arguments of this website – the interpretation of the main concepts through which we express our understanding of spatiality, or, better, their re-interpretation if we argue against the traditionally modern understanding of space and place. So, here, I will especially focus on the main passages of his theorization showing how his turn from space to place happened, contributing to taking back into the limelight the concept of place in architecture and urban planning.
In his first major work, Intentions in Architecture (1965), Norberg-Schulz expressed his interest in the psychological and figurative factors that shape buildings. He understood architecture as a specific language, a totality of functional and symbolic aspects concerning the relationship between man and the environment. This commitment to the modalities through which the language of architecture is expressed and interpreted in figurative terms was pursued by the author for the entire career. In Intentions in Architecture, Norberg-Schulz criticized the popular interpretation of architecture as an art of space, given that he considered the concept of space a fuzzy concept, an imprecise use of language leading to meaningless formulations; at this regards, Norberg-Schulz said: ‘Above all we have in mind the use of the word “space”, which is employed without making clear if one refers to a physical or psychological space, or perhaps to some undefinable metaphysical entity’.[72] If space is an imprecise use of language, how can architecture be grounded on it? My interest in deepening the spatial question originated exactly from the same type of considerations and perplexities raised by Norberg-Schulz.
Image 26: Sacred family church, Salerno, IT. Architect Paolo Portoghesi. Image source: Cédric Dasesson (see Image Credits, below, for details).
Norberg-Schulz’s scepticism concerning the traditional understanding of space led him to reassess spatial terms in his following major work, Existence, Space, and Architecture (1971), where he proposed a new approach to architecture and space introducing the concept of ‘existential space’, after he became acquainted with the thinking of Heidegger and phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard and, most of all, Bollnow.[73] For the moment, apart from traditional geographical and social considerations which we already analyzed in the preceding paragraphs, no clear articulation of place, as well as no meaningful ontological distinction between space and place appears. Space, as the title says, was still the focus of his concern even if a couple of years before, he published an article titled The Concept of Place (1969). As a matter of fact, that article was an anticipation of the concept of ‘existential space’, while the relation between space and place was still framed within the traditionally modern Newtonian perspective: space was described as ‘a system of places’ (that is, he believed place belonged to space, fundamentally).[74]
According to Norberg-Schulz, by introducing the concept of ‘existential space’, space could regain a central position in architectural theory since previous spatial references to the dimensionality of buildings (i.e., physical-geometrical space) and their perception (i.e., perceptual space, which was traditionally limited to visual perception) only grasped superficial aspects of the discipline.[75] His concept of existential space was structured on the base of existential, phenomenological, psychological, figurative and urban knowledge; the main authors or theories he referred to were Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Bollnow, Piaget, Gestalt theory and Lynch, respectively.[76]
Norberg-Schulz’s new focus on the concept of space and, most of all, his awareness of the existential interpretation of spatiality after Heidegger had an important consequence: a shift of his interest from space to place for the interpretation of the phenomenon of architecture, as it is especially evident from the titles of his subsequent major theoretical works: Genius Loci (1980), and Architecture: Presence, Language, Place (1996, the Italian edition). It is my contention that with this turn, Norberg-Schulz raised to the role of the first architect or architectural historian to have attempted a specific and systematic analysis of the phenomenon of place, and, therefore, the first to have pursued a theory of place directly available to architects and planners.[77]
If in Existence, Space, and Architecture Norberg-Schulz espoused the existential meaning of spatiality with a specific focus on the concept of space, in the article The Phenomenon of Place (1976),[78] he covers another important aspect contained in Heidegger’s lesson: the phenomenological side of the spatial question, with a specific interest in the every-day life world in which man and things participate. This took Norberg-Schulz to express, for the first time in his works, the need for a phenomenology of architecture, an issue which has still great potential for architects after so many decades. [79]
Being qualitative totalities of a complex nature, places cannot be described by means of analytic, ‘scientific’ concepts… What is lost […] is the everyday life-world, which ought to be the real concern of man in general and planners and architects in particular. Fortunately, a way out of the impasse exists, that is, the method known as ‘phenomenology […] a return to things’ as opposed to abstractions and mental constructions… A few pioneer works exist but they hardly contain any direct reference to architecture. A phenomenology of architecture is therefore urgently needed.
Christian Norberg-Schulz, The Phenomenon of Place
Now, amidst this world of concretely experienced things, the concept of place becomes the core subject of Norberg-Schulz’s investigation, and the reason is clear: similarly to what Heidegger did in the essay Art and Space, Norberg-Schulz points out the close correlation between things and places, so, when he asks, ‘What, then, do we mean with the word “place”?’, he answers that, beyond the classical and reductive meaning of place as ‘abstract location’, by place we mean ‘a totality made up of concrete things having material substance, shape, texture, and colour. Together these things determine an “environmental character” which is the essence of place. In general, a place is given as such a character or “atmosphere.” A place is therefore a qualitative, “total” phenomenon, which we cannot reduce to any of its properties, such as spatial relationships, without losing its concrete nature out of sight.’[80]
What, then, do we mean with the word “place”? … a totality made up of concrete things having material substance, shape, texture, and colour. Together these things determine an “environmental character” which is the essence of place. In general, a place is given as such a character or “atmosphere.” A place is therefore a qualitative, “total” phenomenon, which we cannot reduce to any of its properties, such as spatial relationships, without losing its concrete nature out of sight.
Christian Norberg-Schulz, The Phenomenon of Place
Some important considerations can be drawn from those meaningful passages: first, the structure of place that Norberg-Schulz delineates concretizes as a ‘totalizing environmental phenomenon’, analyzable by means of ‘character’ and ‘space’: ‘character’ denotes the entire gamut of qualitative elements or things that determine the general atmosphere of a place – its ‘most comprehensive property’ –, ‘whereas space denotes the three-dimensional organization of the elements which make up a place’.[81] Therefore, here, space is the quantitative determinant of a place, it is the measure of extension of a place or the measure of extension between the things in place. Here, we are in perfect agreement with Heidegger’s notion of spatiality which wants space emerging from place – therefore a derived entity (subsidiary/auxiliary) with respect to place. Moreover, it is evident that when we speak of ‘atmosphere’ we should be speaking of place not space: ‘atmosphere’ is the quality of a place, not the quality of space, which is the extensive, measurable component of a place (see Figure 1, below). That’s why Norberg-Schulz says that places, because of their complex nature, cannot be described by means of analytic or scientific concepts (which are only referred to quantitative determinants), and phenomenology of architecture is ‘urgently needed’:[82] the phenomenology of architecture has place as its ultimate concern, its ‘subject’; in the article The Phenomenon of Place, Norberg-Schulz unveils its structure.
Figure 01: The Phenomenological Structure of Place, according to Christian Norberg-Schulz, as described in the article The Phenomenon of Place (this structure he derived from a faithful ontological interpretation of Heidegger’s notion of spatiality in Building Dwelling Thinking). ‘Place’ is the environmental totality; ‘character’ or ‘atmosphere’ (resulting from actual ‘things’ – among which we should include man – ‘a thing among things’ Norberg-Schulz says in the book Genius Loci) and ‘space’ (as extension or dimensional relationships among things) are its structural parts.
The basic act of architecture is therefore to understand the “vocation” of the place. In this way, we protect the earth and become ourselves part of a comprehensive totality.
Christian Norberg-Schulz, The Phenomenon of Place
Architecture means to visualize the ‘genius loci’, and the task of the architect is to create meaningful places, whereby he helps man to dwell.
Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci
Image 27: Delphi Theater, Delphi, GR, V Century B.C.
The essay The Phenomenon of Place was later included in the book Genius Loci, 1980, of which it constitutes its theoretical axis. In that book, Norberg-Schulz examined the phenomenon of natural place and of man-made place, before drawing any conclusion on the necessity to recover place (after its loss in the modern epoch) for a genuine form of dwelling to be possible. We can say that the original essay/article on place and the new chapters converged into the first systematic study of the relationship between architecture and place: the first Theory of Place to have reached a wide diffusion among architects. In that book, he maintained the close relationship between architecture and place, not to say their identification by saying that architecture is ‘the making of places’.[83]
The making of places we call architecture. Through building man gives meanings concrete presence, and he gathers buildings to visualize and symbolize his form of life as a totality
Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci
While in the first part of the book Norberg Schulz analyzed the structure of place, in the final section of Genius Loci, he considered the problematic state of place today (for many aspects, that analysis still holds a few decades later), that’s why the author speaks of The Loss of Place – a phenomenon of modernity where space and the character of places are ‘distinguished’ for their monotony, loss of character and qualities of the environment, which caused us to entered a time of ‘environmental crisis’ (the reference is exclusive to human phenomena: the environment is mostly understood as an exclusive human value, which is, in the present days, an important limit of Norberg-Schulz’s theorization – this is one of the reasons why we cannot consider Norberg-Schulz’s theory of place a complete theory). By considering ‘the work of the first of modern pioneers’, Frank Lloyd Wrigt, and by referring to the architectural works of Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier (in the second part of his career), Louis Kahn, and a selected number of the so-called ‘third generation’ of modern architects – Jorn Utzon, Atelier 5, Reima Pietila, James Stirling, MLTW, or Ricardo Bofill are mentioned – Norberg-Schulz sees ‘the means for a solution of the environmental crisis [and] how we may create places which serve the complexities and contradictions of contemporary life.’[84]
Image 28: Hanna House, by Frank Lloyd Wright, Stanford, CA, USA, 1937.
Slideshow 03: Place and the ‘pioneers’ of Modern Architecture: Image 29 – MIT Baker House Dormitory, byAlvar Aalto, Cambridge, MA, USA, 1949; Image 30 – Villa Shodhan, by Le Corbusier, Ahmedabad, IN, 1954; Image 31 – Richards Medical Research Laboratories by Louis Khan, Philadelphia, PA, USA, 1961 (see Image Credits, below, for details).
Slideshow 04: Place and the ‘third generation’ of modern architects: Image 32 – Opera House, by Jorn Utzon, Sydney, AU, 1957; Image 33 – Siedlung Halen, by Atelier 5, Herrenschwanden, CH, 1961; Image 34 – Dipoli, by Reima Pietila, Otaniemi, FI, 1967; Image 35 – Sea Ranch, by MLTW (Moore, Lyndon, Thurnbull, Whitaker), Sonoma, CA, USA,1967; Image 36 – University of Cambridge by James Stirling, Cambridge, UK, 1968; Image 37 – La Fabrica, by Ricardo Bofill, Barcelona, ES, 1975 (see Image Credits, below, for details).
However, Norberg-Schulz points out, those architectural references are just ‘scattered and quantitatively scarce’ examples, whose scarcity is due to ‘a general social inertia… vested interests’ and – this is what interests us – ‘the lack of a clear understanding of the environmental problem’;[85] therefore, a theory of place is necessary since it is through such theory that we can develop an understanding of environmental questions. So, Norberg-Schulz concludes:[86]
A theory of place does not only integrate the different contributions, offering a comprehensive conception of the relationship between man and his environment but also shows that the history of modern architecture has a direction and goal: architecture as the recovery of place… the concept of place unites modern architecture with the past… Only when understanding our place, we may be able to participate creatively and contribute to its history.
Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci
This call for a theory of place, which, indeed, he began to put on the table in Genius Loci, transformed into the art of place in the book Architecture: Presence, Language and Place (1996),[87] where Norberg-Schulz summed up his theoretical vision of a lifetime. I suspect the passage from ‘a theory of place’, as a means to interpret architecture and access the phenomenon of place as reciprocally structured phenomena, to architecture itself considered as ‘the art of place’ was due Norberg-Schulz’s everlasting imprinting with the figurative, art-based understanding of architecture (an original legacy of his period as a disciple of Giedion, when ‘modern architecture was thought of as ART’).[88] The art of the place has the task of bridging the gulf between thought and feeling, between quantity and quality, ultimately. But this move should not take architects by surprise: ‘Hasn’t architecture, however, always been the art of place?’, Norberg-Schulz asks.
Hasn’t architecture, however, always been the art of place?
Christian Norberg-Schulz, Architecture: Presence, Language and Place
The author explicates his thinking of modernity as a struggle between quantity and quality (a struggle between space and place I would say, similar to what was already argued for by Frampton years before) and assigns place the possibility to be the vehicle of qualitative values: ‘… the qualitative is what we all share, regardless where we live, and the art of the place is what brings us closer to the qualitative. I therefore wish to open all places, through a qualitative understanding, so that we may learn to respect the places of others and take better care of our own.’ [89]
… the qualitative is what we all share, regardless where we live, and the art of the place is what brings us closer to the qualitative. I therefore wish to open all places, through a qualitative understanding, so that we may learn to respect the places of others and take better care of our own.
Christian Norberg-Schulz, Architecture: Presence, Language and Place
Image 38: Norwegian Glacier Museum, Fjærland, NO, 2002. Architect: Sverre Fehn.
To summarize Norberg-Schulz’s legacy, we should say that through his works he greatly contributed to diffusing among architects a new sensibility towards the existential and phenomenological values of architecture, unveiling their connections with spatiality: architecture was not merely understood and interpreted in terms of space, as in the decades before, but now architecture could also be understood and interpreted in terms of place. That’s why architecture became the art of place in the hypothesis followed by Norberg-Schulz.
Norberg-Schulz’s 1976 call for a phenomenology of architecture had a vast and positive echo among architects (I also answered that call in my years of formation as an apprentice architect, in the mid-1990s, as I explained in the article Archi-textures). A specific strand in between architecture and phenomenology was born mostly as a reaction against the formalisms of postmodernism and degenerative forms of deconstructivism. That new strand began to be explored by a growing number of architects, architectural historians and critics, with the important contribution of philosophers and social scientists (after the examples of Heidegger, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, especially). A new strand which is still alive and fruitful. In this regard, following a timeline useful for architects, we must especially mention the work of Kent C. Bloomer and Charles W. Moore – Body, Memory, and Architecture, 1977 –,[90] which, in continuity with the pioneering examples of Kevin Lynch (in The Image of the City) and Norberg-Schulz, contained information to understand how buildings are experienced (by way of the body and all of its senses and kinesthesis), which is a condition as important as knowing how buildings are built. Another important specific cross-disciplinary contribution in that sense was offered by architect Steven Holl and architectural historians Juhani Pallasmaa and Alberto Pérez-Gómez who published a seminal work on the subject – Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture, 1994 – in a special issue of the magazine A+U, Architecture and Urbanism.[91] Here, the historico-philosophical perspective promoted by Pérez-Gómez,[92] the phenomenological, sensuous and bodily perspective of Pallasmaa, and the architectural perspective of Holl merged into a remarkable theoretical and practical synthesis that any young architect or student of architecture should carefully consider and confront with.
Image 39: Y House, Catskill, NY, USA, 1999. Architect: Steven Holl.
The phenomenological call launched by Norberg-Schulz for the recovery of the quality in architecture and the importance of the character of places (i.e., ‘atmosphere’ – see Figure 1, above) was also answered a few decades later by the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor who delivered a lecture in 2003, later published with the title ‘Atmospheres. Architectural Environments. Surrounding Objects’.[93] Here, the author posed the following question: ‘What do we mean when we speak of architectural quality? … Quality architecture to me is when a building manages to move me’, the Swiss architect answered [94] (which is the position I also expressed in a phenomenological account of architecture informed by my experiences with human-built places, i.e., architectures, when I was a child – see the article On Architecture). With a unifying term, Zumthor managed to answer the question of quality in architecture in terms of ‘atmosphere’.
Image 40: Bruder Klaus Kapelle, Mechernich, DE, 2007. Architect: Peter Zumthor. Image source: Tim Van de Velde Photography (see Image Credits, below, for details).
In the wake of phenomenological considerations, the concept of ‘atmosphere’ has quite recently become an important field of exploration for scholars, philosophers and architects. The concept of ‘atmosphere’ acquired both theoretical and practical relevance for the activity of architects, as beautifully illustrated by Zumthor’s exemplary works. However, as illustrated by Norberg-Schulz’s article The Phenomenon of Place, the issue concerning the relevance of atmosphere for Being, places, things and their presence, was already asserted by Heidegger in the ‘30s when he described atmosphere ‘the fundamental way of being of man in the world as well as the foundation of presence’.[95] Different studies in the last years proposed an ‘atmospheric’ interpretation of Heidegger’s thinking. The phenomenon of atmosphere has been specifically investigated by a new generation of phenomenological thinkers after Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard and Bollnow: I especially refer to the work of Hermann Schmitz, who advanced the thesis for a ‘New Phenomenology’ in the ‘60s, and authored a specific essay on ‘Atmosphere’, and, more recently, Gernot Böhme, who also explored the atmospheric quality of the environment and adopted the concept of atmosphere as ‘the fundamental concept of a new aesthetic’, proposing an interesting inversion with respect to traditional theories of perception: ‘The primary object of perception is atmospheres. What is first and immediately perceived is neither sensations nor shapes or objects or their constellations, as Gestalt psychology thought, but atmospheres, against whose background the analytic regard distinguishes such things as objects, forms, colours etc.’[96] The conflation of philosophy and atmospheres on architecture and the city was elaborated by Böhme on different occasions in exclusive space-based terms (that is, atmosphere as a quality of space, which is contrary to what Norberg-Schulz proposed in The Phenomenon of Place, in the wake of a faithful Heideggerian analysis of spatiality – see Figure 1)[97] raising problematic ontological questions on the intertwined nature of place, space and architecture. That is an interesting issue which needs more careful exploration. Also, Juhani Pallasmaa and Alberto Pérez-Gómez, in recent years, offered interesting contributions to the relationship between architecture and atmosphere.
Fundamentally, as noted by the American Geographer David Seamon (an active and proactive scholar working at the intersection between Architecture and Phenomenology)[98] out of phenomenological discourses originated by the pioneering work of Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, two topics especially are drawn upon in architectural thinking today, both of which we have briefly considered above: one concerns ‘environmental embodiment’, which regards the relevant role of the human body and its senses as the primary organizing factor for architecture; the other considers the role of ‘atmosphere’ as a unifying factor of the architectural phenomenon.[99]
Image 41: Church on the Water, Shimukappu-mura, Japan. 1988 Architect: Tadao Ando. Image source: Yoshio Shiratori (see Image Credits, below, for details).
Each of my projects… results from an endeavour to create a landscape by bringing the character of place fully into play. I compose the architecture by seeking an essential logic inherent in the place… Without sentimentality, I aspire to transform place through architecture to the level of the abstract and universal. Only in this way can architecture repudiate the realm of industrial technology to become ‘grand art’ in its truest sense
Tadao Ando, Toward New Horizons in Architecture
3. Architecture, Planning and the Place of Ecological Processes
Finally, we arrived at the most recent development of architecture and planning as disciplines of place: ecological design, which is sometimes declined with alternative expressions such as ecological architecture, green design, sustainable architecture, bio-architecture, regenerative design, climatic design, environmental design, eco-masterplanning, and the likes. Those domains may include or run parallel with landscape design, which has always dealt with the physical, biological and ecological sides of places, initially as gardening art, transforming the natural environment into a cultural environment to fulfil human needs and desires for the beautiful or the sublime (an art culminating in the invention of the profession of ‘landscape architect’ by Frederick Law Olmsted, the creator of the Central Park), more recently with conservative, healing and regenerative intent, aiming at the benign integration and coevolution of natural and human systems.[100]
Image 42: Central Park and Skyline, New York, USA.
What changed in the sensibility of people and the community of architects, in the last couple of decades especially, was the emergence of the environmental question at a global scale (in the sense of diffused social awareness) as a critical issue of modernity: I am referring to the climate change and issues such as desertification, biological diversity, depletion of natural resources, ozone layer, etc. caused by human activity. How can the discipline of architecture react to such global environmental changes? More, specifically: how can architecture be responsive to the natural environment and the human-made environment as a whole? Fundamentally, by returning to place – place understood as a systemic and processual notion, I say, the result of interacting dynamics not exclusively understood within an anthropocentric perspective (reality as the place of sociocultural and symbolic processes) but including the natural or biocentric perspective (reality as the place of physicochemical, biological, and ecological processes) as its complementary part.[101] As soon as architects recognize the implications of the environmental question for architecture and planning, and understand the natural and the human-made environment as a whole – a whole place – everything changes: in the past, at this regard, I’ve spoken about the awareness of global environmental questions as an ‘epistemological line of demarcation’ for architecture and urban planning appropriating the words and the concept by the Swiss Philosopher Nicola Emery.[102] Environmental issues inevitably call for a reconsideration of architecture within an enlarged ethical commitment which regards the natural environment and its processes.[103]
Consequent of this new understanding of the relationship between man and the environment I’ve talked about architecture and planning as the place of ecological processes. In Architecture as Place of Sustainability I’ve explored a threefold strategy – ‘energy-saving design’, ‘bioclimatic design’ and ‘ecological design’ – through which architecture may respond to environmental issues with different degrees of engagement with places. My intention was to consider a theoretical and operative framework considering the environmental question within the context of a reformulation of spatial concepts and of architecture as a place-based discipline (place as a systemic and processual notion). Then, this paragraph is just a reminder to point out this new aspect of architecture and planning which is contributing to a more complete understanding of the phenomenon of place, an aspect not even fathomed by Norberg-Schulz’s art of place: architecture and urban planning as the place of ecological processes, where the oikos represents the house and the city as the house of every living being coupled with the physical environment. This is the meaning of ecology after all: ‘the study of the “life at home” with emphasis on “the totality or pattern of relations between organisms and their environment,” to cite a standard dictionary definition of the word’.[104]
In the past, architects already developed environmental strategies which necessarily implied a fusion between architecture, planning and places. Here, the theme often intersects with vernacular architecture and with questions of regionalism as I anticipated at the end of Paragraph 2.2. Such an environmental approach, in the case of architecture was often a practical biologically-oriented response to difficult climatic conditions and also a response to traditional ways of building before a commitment to global environmental questions or ecological sensibility. However, exemplary cases of environmental and ante-litteram ecological awareness do not lack in the past: again, we must refer to the pioneering work of Patrick Geddes, whose transdisciplinary approach to design, decades later, was appropriated and developed by his compatriot, the Scottish landscape architect, Ian L. McHarg – author of the seminal book ‘Design with Nature’ (1969). Similarly to Geddes, McHarg expressed ‘the necessity of sustaining nature as a source of life’ showing an ethical commitment to the environment before a practical response to design questions.[105] More than others, before others, McHarg understood the environment in systemic and processual terms at ecological level – the environment as a complex ecosystem. That was also my source of inspiration when I was thinking of a more comprehensive notion of place in systemic terms – i.e., place as a system of processes – including the ecological perspective, and trying to supersede, by inclusion, traditional geographical and sociocultural understanding of places.[106]
Another pioneering architect working within a transdisciplinary, systemic approach focused on human settlements but aware of ecological issues, was the Greek architect Constantinos Doxiadis, ‘one of the foremost people of his time’, who, already in the ’70s, recognizing that ‘we are in the middle of a major ecological crisis on a global scale’, tried to investigate the connections between nature and human settlements, with the aim to achieve a new global ecological balance.[107] He’s been a transversal but also controversial figure, who invented a new discipline – Ekistics, the science of human settlements – which had common goals with ecology, which he explained in his testament-book Ecology and Ekistics (1977). However, contrarily to the concrete, place-based regionalist approach of Geddes and McHarg, Doxiadis’ theoretical work was highly speculative and universal in scope: he was devoted to exploring the potentialities of the relationship between human settlements and the natural environment projected into the future – he was a visionary man –, and, as such, his theoretical work was informed by space rather than by place, which, it is seems to me, is linguistically and epistemologically correct.
As climate and environmental questions became arguments at the top of the list in the agendas of NGO and governmental organizations in the decades between the ’70s and ‘90s, a few pioneering architects but also the industry sector began to be receptive to the call for a ‘sustainable development’ launched by the World Commission on Environment and Development – WCED in 1987 (see the article The Place of Sustainability). Systemic ecological approaches to design practices such as the one promoted by landscape architect John Tillman Lyle, author of the seminal text ‘Regenerative Design for Sustainable Development’ (1994)[108] and founder of the ‘Center for Regenerative Studies’ at CalPoly Pomona, or by permaculture, but even more ‘mechanistic’ approaches, such as those adopted by newly developed environmental building assessment systems since the ‘90s (BREEAM, LEED, etc.), all of them, in a way or another, contributed and are still contributing to a return to place in architecture and planning (and therefore, they are contributing to that epochal shift of architect’s interest from space to place, which I evidenced in the past).
Image 43: Lyle Center for Regenerative Studies, California, USA, 1993.
Closer to vernacular and regional issues, the ecological approach to architecture and, therefore, the constant focus on place has always been an asset for the well-known Australian architect Glenn Murcutt, Pritzker Prize winner in 2002, and the Malaysian architect Ken Yeang, a disciple of Ian McHarg, who worked on the ecological basis for architectural desing since the 1970s, and author of numerous architectural ecologically-oriented projects and urban plans.[109] The epistemological line of demarcation concerning the necessity of a new environmental awareness I’ve spoken in a passage before was clearly understood by Yeang who spoke about it in the following terms: ‘Understanding ecology changed my perception of the world and humbled my own role within it, where humans are simply on species among thousands in the biosphere each functioning as part of the ecological nexus.’[110]
Understanding ecology changed my perception of the world and humbled my own role within it, where humans are simply one species among thousands in the biosphere each functioning as part of the ecological nexus
Ken Yeang, EcoArchitecture
Here, the meaningful paradigm shift from space to place is accompanied by the even more meaningful shift from an anthropocentric to a biocentric vision since ‘the basic premise for ecodesign is that our health, both as human beings and as one of the millions of species in nature… depend on the quality of the natural environment’, Yeang says.[111] The link of biotic and abiotic components (living organisms – humans, plants, animals – and soils, nutrients, etc.) is Ken Yeang’s scope in planning and architecture, or using Yeang’s own expression: ‘The objective of ecodesign is a benign and seamless biointegration with the environment.’ [112] According to Yeang, to address the environmental question in mere technological terms is not a sound approach: ecological design must be place-specific. That’s why we should speak of ‘the place of ecological processes’ (an expression which synthesizes the presence of living beings functionally coupled to the physical environment), before sociocultural and symbolic processes come into the scene as complementary parts.
Slideshow 05, Images 44-46: Solaris Building, Singapore, 2010. Architect: T. R. Hamzah & Yeang Sdn. Bhd.
Even more than in the past, in the last couple of decades, as the environmental question became an issue of public domain, the number of players affected by such question greatly increased, and the number of architects focused on it increased correspondently. It is not the scope of the present paragraph to trace a history of environmental or ecological design, nor to draw a line between the many different architectural and urban approaches to the question.[113] The main point here is to consider that the environmental question, at large, is contributing to bringing back together architects and place-based dynamics, from a completely different perspective with respect to those analyzed in the previous paragraphs. This is the biggest new or the biggest force that may contribute to giving place a new shape, and, most of all, a new balance to the relationship between place and space in architecture and urban planning.
Image 47: Simpson-Lee House, Mount Wilson, AU, 1993 Architect: Glenn Murcutt. Image source: Anthony Browell (see Image Credits, below, for details).
4. A Glimpse into the Future: The Place of Architecture as a Total Environment
I conclude this review of the different approaches of architects to ‘place’ as a specific subject of investigation with a last question: is not time ripe enough for architects and planners, especially those who care about the environment as place, to put all those different place-based approaches together and synthesize them at a superior level instead of working on them in bits and pieces? Many design professionals are already working on the practical aspects of the question, and many of those place-based aspects are already considered and implemented into buildings and planning, but, as Norberg-Schulz observed decades ago, we need a theory of place, as complete as possible, to complement practical efforts with theoretical efforts to get this new synthesis available to all, as a constitutive element of environmental disciplines and not as the fruit of personal researches, often unrelated one from the other. A place-based framework or tool is what we need as a first step to accomplish this epochal mission for architects: considering architecture and cities, i.e., the cultural environment, part of the natural environment, and, as such, functional to the behaviour of the environment as a whole, a total environment, and not an obstacle to it.
In the reformed, environmental place-based hypothesis I am advancing at RSaP, we cannot reduce place to one or another aspect whether we speak of it in terms of physicochemical, biological, ecological, social, cultural or symbolic processes. Place is irreducible to any single processual category or event: place is a synthesis deriving from the interplay of those processes. Correspondingly, as we have seen through the equation place=thing=architecture, the same can be said about the phenomenon of architecture, which, within inescapable existential and phenomenological hypotheses, can be seen as the place of dwelling. If place cannot be reduced to any singular aspect, and if architecture is a place (the place where processes are concretized into specific material forms finalized to dwelling), it follows that architecture as well cannot be reduced to processes or aspects taken singularly, either physical, ecological, social, cultural or symbolic. This is a sort of principle of architectural indeterminacy which defies any simple-minded form of architectural determinism. Architecture and planning must be considered within the all-embracing, dynamical compass of intertwined processes, from physical to symbolic, that is, from natural to cultural. The novelty and the difficulty for the discipline of architecture in the last few decades, has been that of putting together all those processual instances of dwelling (from natural architectures to ‘high-style’ architectures) and synthesizing them at a superior level of environmental awareness. To do that it is necessary to promote and develop a transdisciplinary approach to knowledge, where the integrative study of the disciplines that concur with the formalization of architecture as a total, multi-faceted environment is not customarily a part of architectural education, but becomes an integral part of it (I’m speaking of the inclusion of the fundamentals of the natural sciences – the sciences of the earth, especially – and the social sciences within the academic curricula of architects). This will concur with the formalization of architecture as a trans-architecture – an architecture beyond architecture – which would represent the highest level of complexity ever reached by architecture in its millenary history: architecture understood, analyzed and created as a total environment. The necessity behind this new vision is not a question of developing new styles or architectural expressions, but responds to a more cogent existential and ethical question at the beginning of a new epoch: what does ‘dwelling’ mean at the beginning of the Anthropocene?
Notes
[1] See the Appendix in the article: On the Ambiguous Language of Space
[2] Lars Marcussen, The Architecture of Space, The Space of Architecture: A Historical Survey (Copenhagen: The Danish Architectural Press, 2008). Marcussen’s insight consists of the fact that he tried to unveil the correspondence between the conceptions of space as a cultural artefact built through the various epochs and the corresponding (pseudo-) ‘physical’ space of the different architectural styles that succeeded through centuries.
[3] It is my contention that place and space are terms that complement each other to have an encompassing understanding of reality as, contemporarily, place-based (placial) and space-based (spatial) phenomenon. Spatiality is the representative term for reality as both spatial and placial fact. Chorality, or chōra, instead of spatiality, would be a better term to express this fundamental characteristic of reality, since ‘spatiality’ is too close to space, linguistically. Reality, as a concrete fact, is a place-based phenomenon. Despite that, reality also presents an abstract facet which is complementary to its concrete facet: ‘space’ belongs to this ‘abstract’ facet. Given that, by a simple linguistic and logical deduction, the concrete is the necessary condition for the existence of the abstract, this implies that space is a derivative notion/entity with respect to place: fundamentally, space represents the dimensional and extensive character of reality allowed by the presence of place or places. Then the conceptual priority between place and space is reversed with respect to the prospect of modernity, according to which space is primary (space is a system of places, which means that space is the ultimate entity and place the part this entity is made of; as Newton put it in the famous Scholium: ‘locus est pars spatii quam corpus occupat’). In its basic aspects, I am expressing a Heideggerian position, which is not exempt from critics, as we are going to see.
[4] The Place of Architecture means that place is the physical ground of architecture – place as the natural fact where it all starts. The Architecture of Place means that architecture is considered in relationship with place, it is conditioned by its different aspects (physical, ecological, social, cultural, symbolic) and translates those aspects or some of them into concrete forms, specific for each place, e.g., ‘architectural regionalism’, ‘architectural structuralism’, ‘architectural existentialism’, etc., which are all examples of approaches to architecture that have a particular focus on place: then, in this sense, they are ‘Architectures of Place’.
[5] The expression ‘a self-perpetuating circuit’ is taken from Marcussen, Ibid., 14.
[6] Ibid., 15.
[7] Tim Cresswell, Place – A short introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 7.
[8] Ibid., 7, 10.
[9] At RSaP, I’ve always maintained that place and space are different entities from an ontological perspective: one concrete the other abstract. Their realm of existence is opposed and, as such, they are complementary notions: one begins where the other ends. That, for me, excludes without ambiguities the possibility to say that ‘places are spaces’, and vice versa, or that their difference is just a question of attached (social/human) meanings.
[10] According to Cresswell, we have different meanings of place according to the different perspectives of regional geography (place as the result of the interplay between environmental and cultural processes – a descriptive approach to place guided by the common-sense idea of the world as a set of places), of humanistic geography (place as the focus of existence and experience – a phenomenological approach to place), of radical humanistic geography (place as a social and cultural construct – a social constructionist approach to place), or several specific perspectives where place, from time to time, is understood as ‘open and hybrid – a product of interconnecting flows – of routes’ (D. Massey), or the focus of the interplay of ‘identity and power’ (moral geographies).
[11] Ibid., 134-135
[12] The expression ‘A house is a machine for living in’ is contained in: Le Corbusier, Toward a New Architecture (New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1986), 4, 95, 107, 240, 279. The original French version ‘Vers un Architecture’ was published in 1923, while the first English translation dates back to 1927.
[13] See https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/aug/30/curse-mies-van-der-rohe-puddle-strewn-gallery-david-chipperfield-berlin-national
[14] Kenneth Frampton, ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism. Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance’, in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern, ed. Hal Foster, 2019, 16.
[15] Ibid., 16.
[16] Alexander Tzonis, and Liane Lefaivre, ‘The Grid and the Pathway’, in Architecture in Greece, 15, 1981, 164-178.
[17] Keith L. Eggener, ‘Placing Resistance: A Critique of Critical Regionalism’, in Journal of Architectural Education (1984-), Vol. 55, No. 4 (May 2002), pp. 228-237.
[18] Frampton, Ibid., 26, 27.
[19] Frampton, Kenneth. ‘Prospects for a Critical Regionalism’, in Perspecta, Vol. 20. (1983), pp. 147-162.
[20] Alexander Tzonis, and Liane Lefaivre, ‘The Grid and the pathway. An Introduction to the work of Dimitris and Susana Antonakakis. With Prolegomena to a history of the culture of modern Greek architecture’, in Architecture in Greece, 15, 1981, 164-178.
[21] Speaking about the architecture of the Antonakakis, Tzonis and Lefaivre say that ‘two major distinctive architectonic patterns appear: the grid – the discipline which is imposed on every space element – and the pathway – the location of place elements in relation to a movement. The patterns often merge, most of the time in a well-tempered whole.’ In Tzonis, and Lefaivre, The Grid and the Pathway, 164. That’s why I have said that in Tzonis’ and Lefaivre’s characterization of the architecture of Critical Regionalism (i.e., the architecture of the Antonakakis) there is a compresence of space and place as correlating aspects.
[22] Among other essays and articles on the subject, Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis published two books to delineate the boundaries of the phenomenon of Architecture and Regionalism: the first is ‘Critical Regionalism’ (2003), where the authors draw a schematic history of the phenomenon of regionalism from the Classical Greek period to our days. In the second part of the book, the authors compile a list of images and explicative texts of some contemporary architectures which, according to the authors, respond to the main points of Critical Regionalism. Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, Critical Regionalism. Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World (Munich: Prestel Verlag), 2003.
The other book is a more recent publication ‘Architecture of Regionalism in the Age of Globalization: Peaks and Valleys in the Flat World’ (2021, second edition), which is a more detailed, historical account of the phenomenon, and which is promoted as ‘the definitive introductory text on the theory and history of regionalist architecture in the context of globalization’ addressing ‘issues of identity, diversity, community, inequality, geopolitics, and sustainability’. Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, Architecture of Regionalism in the Age of Globalization: Peaks and Valleys in the Flat World, second edition. New York: Routledge, 2021.
[23] Kenneth Frampton, Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture, edited by John Cava. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.
[24] See Vincent Canizaro’s paragraph ‘The Question of National Romanticism’ in Architectural Regionalism: Collected Writings on Place, Identity, Modernity, and Tradition (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007), 24-25.See also Keith Eggener in Placing Resistance: A Critique of Critical Regionalism.
[25] Lefaivre, Liane and Tzonis, Alexander. Critical Regionalism. Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World (Munich: Prestel Verlag), 2003, 18.
[26] The different forms and meanings of regionalism were investigated by Lefaivre and Tzonis in Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World (2003) and Regionalism in the Age of Globalization: Peaks and Valleys in the Flat World (2021, 2nd ed.). See note 22 above.
[27] In the first pages of The Story of Utopias Mumford acknowledged the role of Geddes in the development of his thinking: ‘The general background of ideas has been heavily colored by my contacts with Professor Patrick Geddes, through his books and by correspondence; and I owe a debt to him I have not always been able to acknowledge in direct reference or in quotation marks.’ More specifically, with reference to Geddes’ books City Development (1904) and Town-Planning towards City Development (1918), Mumford says: ‘Both of these books are mines from which all sorts of precious thoughts can be quarried; and it is unfortunate that the first is out of print and the second almost inaccessible. Professor Geddes’ work exemplifies concretely a good part of what I have sought to explain and define in not altogether adequate prose.’ Lewis Mumford, The Story of Utopias (New York: Boni and Liveright, inc.), 190.
[28] Keith L. Eggener, ‘Placing Resistance: A Critique of Critical Regionalism’, in Journal of Architectural Education (1984-), Vol. 55, No. 4 (May 2002), 235. The term ‘self-reflexive regionalism’ referred to Mumford’s regionalism, is also present on page 228.
[29] This ‘inclusivity’ of local dynamics is apparent in the following passage, where locality is not considered in contraposition to global dynamics but in correlation with them (an important lesson he assimilated from Geddes): ‘Now there are two elements in every architecture, indeed in every esthetic or cultural expression. One of them is the local, the time-bound, that which adapts itself to special human capacities and circumstances, that belongs to a particular people and a particular soil and a particular set of economic and political institutions. Let us call this the regional element, though one must of course include in this term far more than the purely geographic characteristics. The other element is the universal: this element passes over boundaries and frontiers; it unites in a common bond people of the most diverse races and temperaments; it transcends the local, the limited, the partial […] Without the existence of that universal element […] mankind would still live only at the brute level of immediate impulses, sensations, habits; and there would be a deep unbridgeable gulf between the peoples of the earth.’ In: Lewis Mumford, The South in Architecture (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1941), 51-52.
[30] Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, Architecture of Regionalism in the Age of Globalization: Peaks and Valleys in the Flat World, second edition (New York: Routledge, 2021), 145
[31] Anthony Alofsin, ‘Constructive Regionalism’, in Architectural Regionalism: Collected Writings on Place, Identity, Modernity, and Tradition, ed. Vincent B. Canizaro(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007), 370.
[32] Lewis Mumford, ‘The Sky Line: Status Quo’, in Architectural Regionalism: Collected Writings on Place, Identity, Modernity, and Tradition, 289-291.
[33] Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, Critical Regionalism. Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2003), 33-38.
[34] Siegfried Giedion, ‘The New Regionalism’ in Architectural Regionalism: Collected Writings on Place, Identity, Modernity, and Tradition, ed. Vincent B. Canizaro(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007), 317. The article by Giedion was originally published in Architectural Record as ‘The State of Contemporary Architecture I: The Regional Approach,’ January 1954, 132–37.
[35] Collins’ Etymological Dictionary, school edition (London: Collins Clear-Type Press), 377. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, edited by C.T. Onions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) 976.
[36] Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture Without Architects: An Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture (Hartford: Connecticut Printers, 1964), frontispiece.
[37] https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3459
[38] Ibid., 9.
[39] For the reference to Sybil Moholy-Nagy and Giles Gilbert Scott, see Paul Oliver, Dwellings (New York: Phaidon Press Inc, 2003), 11-12.
[40] Kenneth Frampton, ‘Ten Points on an Architecture of Regionalism: A Provisional Polemic’, in Architectural Regionalism: Collected Writings on Place, Identity, Modernity, and Tradition ed. Vincent Canizaro (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007), 378.
[41] Ibid., 378.
[42] Amos Rapoport, ‘Defining Vernacular Desing’, in Vernacular Architecture, ed. Mete Turan (Aldershot: Avebury,1990), 67-101.
[43] Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture Without Architects, 37.
[44] Rapoport, Amos. House Form and Culture. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1969.
[45] Ibid., 45.
[46] Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture Without Architects, 10
[47] Joseph Rykwert, On Adam’s House in Paradise, 2nd edition. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1981.
[48] Ibid., 183.
[49] Bernard Rudofsky, Architecture Without Architects, 11.
[50] Paul Oliver, Dwellings. New York: Phaidon Press Inc, 2003.
[51] Martin Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in Basic Writings, ed. D. F. Krell (New York: HarperCollins Publishers,1993), 348-349.
[52] Paul Oliver, Dwellings (New York: Phaidon Press Inc, 2003), 15.
[53] Ibid., 15.
[54] Martin Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, 347.
[55] Paul Oliver, Dwellings, 17-18.
[56] see Martin Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, 357.
[57] Paul Oliver, Dwellings, 16, 18.
[58] Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 199.
[59] Ibid., 243-244.
[60] Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006), 3.
[61] Edward Casey, The Fate of Place, 261.
[62] Ibid., 274.
[63] Ibid., 283.
[64] ‘Accordingly, spaces [die Räume] receive their being [ihr Wesen] from places [aus Orten] and not from “space” [dem Raum].’ I have used Jeff Malpas’ translation in ‘Heidegger’s Topology’: Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology, 254. The usual translations (‘locations’ or ‘locales’) are not correct since ‘locations’ or ‘locales’ have far more restricted senses than ‘place’, and this is contrary to the sense of the phrase (and thinking) elaborated by Heidegger in the essay.
[65] Martin Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, 362.
[66] Edward Casey, The Fate of Place, 277.
[67] Ibid., 283.
[68] Ibid., 283.
[69] ‘To rethink space as place-and not the reverse, as in the early modem era is the urgent task…’, Edward Casey says with respect to a number of scholars who advanced interesting interpretations of spatial concepts. In Edward Casey, The Fate of Place, 309.
[70] Even better, there is the possibility to understand that entity as ‘chōra’, the Platonic notion which I have also taken as a reference to model my understanding of spatiality in-between physical/actual/concrete/ aspects, i.e., a question of place, and ideal/potential/ abstract, linguistic aspects, i.e., a question of space.
[71] See Martin Heidegger, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, 357. If space is understood as place why keep on calling ‘space’ what we know is ‘place’? Apart from a few exceptions, this habit of calling space what we know as place, fundamentally, was a revisionist trend of the modern and post-modern epoch, as my reviews of the works of Ivor Leclerc and Edward Casey showed. In this regard, see also what political geographer John Agnew says on space and place (John A. Agnew on Space and Place).
[72] Ibid., 19. This critical position assumed by Norberg-Schulz regarding space is very similar to the one that gave input to my theoretical research more than a decade ago. Similarly to Norberg-Schulz, my attention also turned from space to place for the same reasons – the interest in existential and phenomenological thinking – even if it led to different results.
[73] Christian Norberg-Schulz, Existence, Space & Architecture (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971), 7, 15-16. The concept of ‘existential space’ had a clear philosophical provenance: it was already present in a passage from Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (‘Primitive peoples, in so far as they live in a world of myth, do not overstep this “existential space”, and this is why for them dreams count just as much as perceptions’); but most of all, Bollnow structured the existential meaning of space which he derived from Heidegger’s notion of spatiality elaborated in Being and Time, in terms of ‘experienced space’ (in Human Space, original Mensch und Raum, pages 19-25); it was especially through Bollnow’s ‘anthology’ of spatial concepts applied to concrete reality and his studies on perception (Piaget, Gestalt Theory, and Lynch), that Norberg-Schulz arrived at the concept of ‘existential space’ and, as a consequence, to Heidegger. Concerning his philosophical references, in the article where Norberg-Schulz presented the concept of ‘existential space’, The Concept of Place (1969), Bollnow is mentioned but no reference is made to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.
[74] Christian Norberg-Schulz, ‘Il Concetto di Luogo’ in Controspazio,1, 1969, 20-23.
[75] Norberg-Schulz, Existence, Space & Architecture, 16.
[76] See Note 73 above.
[77] Of course, many architects, critics or architectural historians, before and after Norberg-Schulz, dealt with places in many different articles and books, and with different perspectives, however, for me, no one reached a wider, even if not complete, understanding of the phenomenon of place (and space), to be called A Theory of Place, which was systematically pursued through many writings along so many years.
[78] Christian Norberg-Schulz, The Phenomenon of Place, in Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965-1995, edited by Kate Nesbitt (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 415. First published in Architectural Association Quarterly 8, no. 4 (1976).
[79] Ibid., 415.
[80] Ibid., 414.
[81] Ibid., 418.
[82] Ibid., 415.
[83] Ibid., 170.
[84] Ibid., 200-201.
[85] Ibid., 201.
[86] Ibid., 201-202.
[87] Christian Norberg-Schulz, Architecture: Presence, Language and Place. Milano: Skira Editore, 2000. The English version is a translation of the Italian edition of 1996, which is, in turn, a translation from the original Norwegian version.
[88] Norberg-Schulz, Architecture: Presence, Language and Place, 7.
[89] Ibid., 17.
[90] Kent C. Bloomer, and Charles W. Moore, Body, Memory, and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), ix.
[91] Holl, Steven; Pallasmaa, Juhani, and Pérez-Gómez, Alberto. ‘Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture’. In a+u Architecture and Urbanism, July 1994.
[92] Pérez-Gómez, more than other architectural historians, understood the importance of the historical-philosophical analysis for questioning the meaning of the concepts of space and place beyond modern tradition. His appeal to the Greek chōra-concept to unveil the meaning of the phenomenon of architecture is something I am very close to: on different occasions, I’ve said that the concept of place I am arguing for at RSaP has many analogies with the Platonic concept sponsored by Pérez-Gómez, in-between concrete and abstract domains (my definition of architecture – ‘architecture creates spaces and modifies places for dwelling’ is nothing other than the explication in architectural terms of that notion, in between abstract/spatial and concrete/placial domains. Pérez-Gómez’s contribution in A+U ‘The Space of Architecture: Meaning as Present and Representation’ has many intersecting threads with the work of Norberg-Schulz: they both work in the background of existential and phenomenological tradition with a specific focus on spatial concepts.
[93] Peter Zumthor, Atmospheres: Architectural Environments – Surrounding Objects. Basel: Birkhauser, 2006
[94] Ibid., 11.
[95] Norberg-Schulz, Architecture: Presence, Language and Place, 159.
[96] Gernot Böhme, ‘Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics’ in Thesis Eleven, Number 36, 1993, 125.
[97] E.g., Gernot Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres, ed., J.P. Thibaud (New York: Routledge, 2017), 123-158. Gernot Böhme, Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetic of Felt Spaces, ed. and transl. by A.-Chr. Engels-Schwarzpaul (London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. 2017), 69-79.
[98] Professor Seamon is the editor of the magazine Environmental & Architectural Phenomenology, a magazine which has recently celebrated 35 years of publication.
[99] David Seamon, ‘Architectural phenomenology’, in The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Architectural History, ed. by Duanfang Lu (New York: Routledge, 2024), 286-297.
[100] Norman T. Newton, Design on the Land: The Development of Landscape Architecture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971. The book is one of the first comprehensive histories of Landscape Design, from ancient to modern times. For a more recent review of different ecological issues related to design disciplines, see Chrisna du Plessis’ Towards a Regenerative Paradigm for the Built Environment (2012).
[101] I’ve talked about that in the paper From Space to Place: A Necessary Paradigm Shift in Architecture.
[102] Nicola Emery, L’Architettura Difficile: Filosofia del Costruire (Milano: Christian Marinotti Edizioni, 2007), 167.
[103] I addressed this question in the article Architecture, Environment, and the Imperative of Responsibility.
[104] Eugene P. Odum, Gary W. Barrett, Fundamentals of Ecology, fifth edition (Belmont: Thomson Brooks/Cole Publishing Company, 2005), 2.
[105] Ian L. McHarg, Design with Nature (New York: Doubleday/Natural History Press, 1971), 19.
[106] The work of McHarg, as well as that of Ken Yeang, a disciple of McHarg (see note 108, below), was an inspiration which guided my first project of architecture and urban planning approached in ecological terms: the Badel Block Redevelopment project, in Zagreb.
[107] Constantinos A. Doxiadis, Ecology and Ekistics (Boulder: Westview Press, 1977), vii, 11.
[108] John Tillman Lyle, Regenerative Design for Sustainable Development (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1994).
[109] Ken Yeang, Designing with Nature: The Ecological Basis for Architectural Design (New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1995), vii. Sara Hart, EcoArchitecture: The Work of Ken Yeang, ed. D. Littlefield (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, Ltd, Publication, 2011), 12.
[110] Ibid., 12.
[111] Ibid., 14.
[112] Ibid., 15.
[113] For that, I redirect you to the overview offered by Chrisna du Plessis’ essay Towards a Regenerative Paradigm for the Built Environment (2012), which contains useful information and references for tracing the history of ecologism and its relation with sustainable design.
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Image Credits
Featured Image: Detail of the ‘Chiesa di Santa Maria Immacolata’ (Architect: Giovanni Michelucci) and the surrounding Landscape, scene of the tragic events of the Vajont dam (1963), Longarone, IT. Photo by Alessandro Calvi Rollino.
Image 01: Brasila, by Fabio Colombini on loeildelaphotographie.com
Image 02-03: Project for Berlin-Haupstadt, on team10online.org
Image 04: Centraal Beheer Offices, Apeldoorn, on hertzberger.nl
Images 05, 06: New National Gallery, by Reinhard Friedrich, on theguardian.com
Image 07: Boa Nova Tea House, black and white reproduction from the original image source by Nelson Garrido, on ngphoto.com
Images 08-10: Residential complex in Distomo, on a66architects.com
Image 11: Xenia Motel, by Aris Kostantinidis, on doma.archi
Image 12: Jean-Marie-Tjibaou-Cultural-Center, black and white reproduction from the original image source by Gollings Photography, on fondazionerenzopiano.org
Image 13: John J. Glessner House, black and white reproduction from the original image source by Eric Allix Rogers, on architecture.org
Image 14: Sturges House, on architecturaldigest.com
Image 15: Säynätsalo Town Hall, by Zache on wikipedia.org
Image 16: Moma Exhibition, photograph by Rolf Petersen, on moma.org
Image 17: Archaeological site of Ancient Thera, on wikipedia.org
Image 18: Joseph Gandy, The Origins of Architecture on wikipedia.org
Image 19: Geological site ‘La Ciudad Encantada’, on eldiscretoencantodeviajar.com
Image 20: I Sassi di Matera, on isassidimatera.com
Image 21: Goreme, by Hans on pixabay.com
Image 22: Rendille shelter, on dennisrhollowayarchitect.com
Image 23: Bushmen tribe, on innovativeresearchmethods.org
Image 24: Abandoned Trullo, on alberobello.com
Image 25: Village of Oia (formerly Apanomeria), on pixabay.com
Image 26: Sacred family church, black and white reproduction from the original image source by Cédric Dasesson, on cedricdasesson.it
Image 27: Delphi Theater, on onparnassos.gr
Image 28: Hanna House, on franklloydwright.org
Image 29: Baker Dormitory, black and white reproduction from the original image source by Gunnar Klack, on flickr.com
Image 30: Villa Shodhan, black and white reproduction from the original image source by FLC / ADAGP / Olivier Martin-Gambier, on fondationlecorbusier.fr
Image 31: Richards Medical Research Laboratories, photograph by Arne Maasik, on louiskahn.org
Image 32: Sydney Opera House, black and white reproduction from the original image source by Marek Ślusarczyk, on wikipedia.org
Image 33: Siedlung Halen, by Atelier5, on atelier5.ch
Image 34: Dipoli, black and white reproduction from the original image source by Tuomas Uusheimo / ALA Architects, on finnisharchitecture.fi
Image 35: Sea ranch, black and white reproduction from the original image source by André Corboz on iconoteca.arc.usi.ch
Image 36: Cambridge University, black and white reproduction from the original image source by BDP on bdp.com
Image 37: La Fabrica, on architectureandwonder.com
Image 38: Glaciers Museum, on images.ue
Image 39: Y House, black and white reproduction from the original image source, on stevenholl.com
Image 40: Bruder Klaus Kapelle, black and white reproduction from the original image source by Tim Van de Velde Photography on tvdv.be
Image 41: Church on the Water, black and white reproduction from the original image source by Yoshio Shiratori, on metalocus.es
Image 42: Central Park, black and white reproduction from the original image source by Bernd Dittrich on unsplash.com
Image 43: Lyle Center for Regenerative Studies, California, USA on calpolypomona.com
Images 44-46: Solaris Buiding, source T. R. Hamzah & Yeang Sdn. Bhd., Albert Lim on gulfpacificpress.com and greenroofs.com
Image 47: Simpson-Lee House, black and white reproduction from the original image source by Anthony Browell on ozetecture.org
