This article offers a critical response to the conventional interpretation of architecture, rooted in the second half of the nineteenth century, which takes space as the discipline’s primary interpretive key.[1] This long-standing view often overlooks a fundamental fact: for any space to exist—whether architectural, sociocultural, or even pseudo-physical—place must already be on the stage. As I argue at RSaP, that stage—the stage for matter, life, and their diverse phenomena, from the physical to the symbolic, including architecture—is place, as affirmed in the now-forgotten classical Greek tradition through the enduring truth of the Archytian Axiom: ‘to be at all is to be in place.’ Place, not space, is thus the primordial and natural stage for architecture.
If we recall that the concept of architectural space is itself a nineteenth-century invention, and that three-dimensional space, as a recognized geometric and physical entity, only gained widespread currency after Descartes and Newton, we should be wary of traditional histories of architecture that retrospectively interpret pre-modern architecture in spatial terms. This is why I prefer place—and the processes that give it structure—as the interpretive key for architecture.
The title of this series of articles on place and architecture is a deliberate play on the well-documented critical anthology by Danish architectural historian Lars Marcussen, The Architecture of Space The Space of Architecture: A Historical Survey (2002, Danish edition).[2] In Marcussen’s title, the priority is given to The Architecture of Space, where space, in the first part, is presented as a cultural construct. By contrast, in the first part of my own title—The Place of Architecture—I place place at the forefront, treating it as the fundamental physical substrate that grounds all else, including the sociocultural and symbolic narratives or constructs that architecture engages with; hence my corresponding second part, The Architecture of Place.
Like Professor Marcussen, my vision is evolutionary and non-dualistic—each half of the title complements the other, forming an all-encompassing whole, with the initial separation serving only analytical purposes. Yet my perspective diverges: I foreground place rather than space, as part of an effort to avoid the trap of anachronistic spatial interpretations. Analogously to Marcussen, but from the complementary perspective of place,[3] the absence of the conjunction and between the two propositions—(1) The Place of Architecture and (2) The Architecture of Place—signals the seamless continuity and complementarity between two facets of the same phenomenon:[4] the physical and the cultural aspects of reality. The concrete and the abstract. These two facets together form what I call ‘a self-perpetuating circuit’—a whole, which is reality itself.[5]
Marcussen, however, treats this circuit as a human creation—an anthropocentric stance that leads him to speak of ‘an external world of our own making,’ and to give priority to The Architecture of Space over The Space of Architecture.[6] My own position is different: the world exists in and of itself, and also through other selves—things, plants, animals—independent of human agency. I therefore reject anthropocentric metaphysics, aligning instead with the processual and organic vision of reality—a cosmological vision—proposed by Alfred N. Whitehead in the early twentieth century.
For me, this difference in attitude toward anthropocentrism is embedded in the very distinction between place and space: while space is a human-devised concept, serving our representational and descriptive needs, place is an all-embracing principle. I go so far as to call place the principle of existence (archè, ἀρχή). In the reformed place-based perspective I advocate, ‘everything is a place—a place of processes,’ and ‘we are all places’ (Places Everywhere—Everything Is Place). Recognizing this difference between place and space requires relinquishing conventional spatial knowledge, which too often takes its own assumptions as self-evident. Such unexamined knowledge (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 their logical/philosophical, linguistic, and historical foundations), is a shirt-sighted approach to knowledge which ‘occasioned infinite mistakes’, to say it with Berkeley, 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).
This is why I believe transdisciplinary research, especially when it interrogates the origins and meanings of our concepts, can shed new light on traditional (and spatial) knowledge, opening fresh perspectives for the study of complex phenomena such as architecture and place.
Concerning my understanding of place, there is no room for mere physical reductivism—neither in general nor in the architectural sense. Place is not reducible to a purely physical or geographical determinant. Likewise, there is no room for social or cultural reductivism: place is not merely an exclusive socio-cultural construct. Rather, I see place as an all-embracing structure—a dynamic system that holds together its constitutive parts: physicochemical, biological, ecological, sociocultural, and symbolic aspects. These are complementary components of what I call the self-perpetuating circuit of reality—the parts of the whole. Reality is a place.
The central question, then, is to understand the ongoing tension between these different parts in order to gain deeper insight into the nature of phenomena—parts which often stand in contrast to one another (On the Structure of Reality). This kind of holistic understanding—one that acknowledges the influence of human activity on the environment at geological scales—is essential in the dawning era of the Anthropocene. Today, the search for a new balance between the forces regulating the relationship between humanity and the environment is one of modernity’s most urgent tasks. Achieving it requires reevaluating our spatial concepts. To reconsider place necessarily means to reconsider space, for the two concepts are inseparably linked (they are correlated).
We might now ask: How, in the past, did architects engage with the relationship between architecture and place as a conscious field of inquiry? And how do they address it today?
1. Architecture, Urban Planning, and the Place of Social Processes
Since the 1960s, architects’ and planners’ interest in place as a direct focus of research has often been shaped by social processes. To engage with place typically meant engaging with the social interactions—customs, rites, and practices—embedded within it, rather than first considering its physical characteristics. From this perspective, many architectural and urban interventions attentive to place have sought to preserve or enhance existing human customs, practices, and rites, or to create new opportunities for social interaction whenever possible.
It is here that the widely accepted distinction between place and space—a distinction largely drawn from the social sciences—comes into play: place is conceived as the stage for personal and social practices, interactions, and the meanings and memories attached to them; without such social content, we would be better off calling that stage space. Within this framework, an anonymous street, square, or urban district—or even a neutral and unremarkable building—could be transformed from space into place simply by enabling human interaction and the personal projection of experiences and memories. In short, architects and urban planners have long understood place as the nurturer of meaningful human experience—a view that is valid, though, as I will argue, unduly narrow.
Alongside architects and urban planners, this way of thinking about place and space has also been foundational for social scientists. Since the 1960s, there has been a natural alliance between these fields, converging on a shared understanding of the meanings of place and space. At the beginning of his book Place – A Short Introduction, geographer Tim Cresswell, writing from the perspective of a social scientist, makes this common view explicit—one that we have already anticipated in the passage above. Places, Cresswell writes, are ‘spaces which people have made meaningful… This is the most straightforward definition of place–a meaningful location.’[7] Later, he continues: ‘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 have aligned themselves with this socially constructed version of place and space (and many still do), such a perspective is more naturally suited to the concerns of social scientists than to those of architects and urban planners. It cannot be regarded as exhaustive—and certainly not as an all-embracing account—especially given the ontological and epistemological shortcomings implicit in the notion that ‘places are spaces.’[9] Cresswell himself acknowledges the partial and sector-specific nature of this view, not only within the social sciences (‘place is a contested concept’ he notes, before presenting competing definitions within the domain of the social sciences)[10] but also beyond it. In the closing section of his book, he points toward alternative perspectives on place: the ecological perspective; the intellectual or symbolic perspective (encompassing interpretations from the social sciences, philosophy, the arts, sports, politics, and more); and, as noted earlier, the perspective of architects and urban planners. Through their projects, Cresswell concludes, architects and planners have given ‘a practical sense’ to the research and theorization developed by social scientists.[11] On this point—and more broadly, on the fact that multiple, often conflicting visions of space and place coexist even within a single discipline—we can all agree with Cresswell.
Turning to the specific perspective of architecture and urban planning, this socially oriented understanding of place—one that sought to reconnect people, architecture, and the urban environment—can be seen as a reaction against the rigid doctrines of rationalism and functionalism: these doctrines were not only the defining principles of an entire epoch but also the prevailing framework for architectural design and urban planning from the early decades of the twentieth century onward. ‘A house is a machine for living in’, declared Le Corbusier in the 1920s, encapsulating the ethos of Modern Architecture.[12] This vision, closely tied to the avant-garde and artistic movements of the time—Futurism above all, with its celebration of the machine age, speed, movement, and industrialization—had profound social and aesthetic consequences for 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 sought to restore human interactions and relationships to the core of design and planning—most visibly during the 1960s and ’70s. This shift was embodied in the work of architects and planners such as Alison and Peter Smithson, Aldo van Eyck, Jacob Bakema, and Giancarlo De Carlo—the most active members of the group known as Team X (Team Ten), named after the tenth Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM). Their projects and writings challenged the mechanistic logic of early modernism, advocating instead for architecture and urbanism rooted in lived experience, social networks, and the everyday life of communities.
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 central to the so-called structuralists, a term frequently invoked in architectural discourse and often associated—sometimes in contrast, sometimes in parallel—with the members of Team X and their allies. Although structuralism first emerged in linguistics, its migration into architectural thought was largely mediated through anthropology, particularly via the work of French anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. His structural analysis of myths, kinship systems, and cultural practices offered architects a framework for understanding the built environment as an interconnected system of relationships, rather than a mere collection of isolated forms.
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 embraced by architects and planners since the 1960s was not the only way in which place became a central theme in architectural and urban discourse. Other approaches, likewise making place a direct subject of inquiry, were developed and formalized by different groups of architects and planners. These placial strands—which we will examine in the following paragraphs—were often conceived as a counterpoint to the rationalist and functionalist principles embodied in the architecture of early modernism, particularly the so-called International Style. Coming from an almost opposite stance—more concrete and pragmatic than idealized and symbolic—the turn toward place displaced the almost obsessive preoccupation with space that had dominated architectural thought up to that point. Space was the emblem of the functionalist and technicist vision of figures such as the early Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. Since the late nineteenth century, space had been the defining concept of a new architecture eager to sever ties with historical styles, becoming both a working tool and a symbolic and aesthetic hallmark of the modern movement (see the Appendix in 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 us now turn to other place-based strategies that architects and planners have developed—approaches that sought to diverge from, challenge, or openly critique the dominant current of modern architecture known as the International Style.
2. ‘Regionalisms’, ‘Vernacular Architecture’, ‘Existential and Phenomenological Approaches’: The Place of Physical, Biological, Socio-cultural and Symbolic Processes
The return to place and humanism in architecture and planning, as discussed in the previous paragraph, was in large part a reaction against the deep-rooted sociocultural and economic forces of the modern era: the spread of rationalism, functionalism, and the technologies born of industrialization; the rise of the market economy; and the unchecked modes of capitalist production, distribution, and consumption. These forces encouraged widespread standardization and the erosion of local particularities—undermining the very principle of locality as a driving force for social development. I would argue that the concept of space, with its intrinsic neutrality and indifference to specificity, played an instrumental role in reinforcing and disseminating these universalizing, and ultimately flattening, tendencies of modernity. Once the bond with place and the local is severed, we are free to act anywhere—as if on a tabula rasa—unconstrained by the nature, climate, history, society, or culture of a given location. (The parallel spread of the concepts of space and site, with their inherently abstract and neutral connotations, was particularly functional to this mindset—on the term site, see my article On Place and Site).
The modern zeitgeist, driven by unregulated industrial capitalism, displayed the same disregard for limits as the concept of space itself. In my view, the two perspectives—economic and spatial—were, and remain, seamlessly intertwined and mutually reinforcing (a relationship I have elsewhere described under the notion of Spatiophilia). The expansionist logic of modern economics meant no limits to industrial, agricultural, or economic growth; no limits to the exploitation, and therefore depletion, of natural resources. This combination of boundless economic ambition and a spatial worldview that regards the Earth as a neutral, limitless stage for human activity has culminated in the universal civilization we now inhabit—globalization.
2.1 Architecture, Place, and the Spirit of Time: Different Forms of Regionalism
The phenomenon of universalization—and the ways in which certain modes of architectural production could resist it by appealing to placial concepts (place, environment, region, bioregion, etc.) rather than to the abstract concept of space—was sharply articulated in the early 1980s by the British critic and historian Kenneth Frampton. In his influential 1983 essay ‘Towards Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance’, Frampton opened with a long quotation from Paul Ricoeur’s History and Truth (1965). Ricoeur offered a lucid framework for the global condition of that historical moment: he described 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] In Ricoeur’s view, this presented a profound paradox: ‘how to become modern and to return to sources; how to revive an old dormant civilization and take part in universal civilization.’ [15]
For Frampton, the architectural response to this paradox had a name: Critical Regionalism—a term he adopted from architects Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre,[16] who were also exploring approaches to architecture rooted in place—sensitive to local geography, climate, and culture—while at the same time warning against the regressive tendencies of chauvinism and populism often tied to traditional place narratives. As Professor of Architectural History L. Eggener observed, this positioned Critical Regionalism within a ‘vaguely politicized’ framework, aiming to avoid ‘both the placeless homogeneity of much mainstream modernism and the superficial historicism of so much postmodern work.’[17] In Frampton’s own formulation, Critical Regionalism sought to promote a place-conscious poetic in architecture—critically mediating between specific world cultures and universal civilization—‘without falling into sentimentality’ or overly idealized, narrow visions 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 key essay on Critical Regionalism—‘Prospects for a Critical Regionalism’ (1983)—Frampton stated: ‘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] To my knowledge, nowhere else has the clash between place and space as operative instruments of architecture been expressed with such clarity, directness, and brevity.
Tzonis and Lefaivre, in the article that introduced the term 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] approached the concepts of space and place in a way I would describe as correlative or complementary, rather than mutually exclusive, as Frampton’s position might initially appear. In their first characterization of Critical Regionalism, they paired an attentiveness to local dynamics with an abstract, spatial reading of architecture—the ‘grid’ serving as a reference to this abstract dimension (i.e., space).[21] This aspect is largely overshadowed in Frampton’s formulation of Critical Regionalism, in which space, following a Heideggerian reading, is associated with the abstract and leveling tendencies of universalization that regionalism aims to resist—hence his call for ‘a commitment to “place” rather than “space”.’
This divergence between the principal advocates of the same concept—Critical Regionalism—is not trivial. Space and place, beyond their apparent architectural roles as physical and/or geographical notions, function as carriers of distinct social, ideological, and political values, which demand careful scrutiny. Indeed, it was precisely on one of these dimensions—the geo-political—that Tzonis and Lefaivre marked their distance from other interpretative models seeking to define 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 turning to other strands of regionalism in architecture, it is worth pausing to note two key questions that Frampton distilled in his ‘points’ and ‘prospects’ for Critical Regionalism. First, we see the clear resonance between sociocultural processes, place, and architecture—an interconnection already examined in the previous paragraph. Frampton’s call for a new architecture grounded in humanism, expressed through place-oriented terms such as ‘place creation’, ‘placelessness’, or ‘the enclave’ aligned closely with the prevailing spirit of the time. That period fostered a strong alliance between architects, planners, and social scientists, united by a socially constructed understanding of place.
Second, there is a deeper question—one that runs throughout many historical and critical essays on this website: the idea that concepts of space and place have always served to promote the worldview of a given epoch, from the moment Aristotle first posed the spatial question through his systematic formulation of place (topos). More accurately, we might call this a placial question—a place-based question—rather than a spatial one. This shift in terminology is important: it marks the distinction between space and place and asserts the primacy of place—both in its physical (territorial or geographical) and existential sense. As the Archytian Axiom, Aristotle, and later Heidegger affirm, place is primary and cannot be subsumed under space; rather, the reverse is true: space is derived from place.
The paradigm shift I proposed over a decade ago in From Space to Place: A Necessary Paradigm Shift in Architecture reflects an ongoing reaction, present for decades among different actors, against the universalizing tendencies of modernity and their ecological, economic, and social consequences. My argument is that the global phenomenon of ‘universal civilization’ (to use Ricoeur’s term) has been structurally grounded in the concept of space—a neutral, unlimited, and passive container—while eclipsing placial (place-based) dynamics. This view presumes that the world can host human processes without influencing them or without being heavily influenced, an assumption that underpins what I have elsewhere called Spatiophilia. Yet, recent history has shown that Planet Earth is anything but a passive backdrop. Without invoking the full scope of the Gaia hypothesis, it is clear that anthropogenic forces have altered the trajectory of global physicochemical, biological, and ecological processes on a planetary scale. The where of processes—the world itself—acts as an active, responsive environment, delivering positive and negative feedback at multiple levels of reality. In this sense, the Aristotelian notion of place as an active determinant of matter’s behavior remains strikingly relevant (see Aristotle on the Concept of Place and Space and Place: A Scientific History – Part One). We should therefore understand the environment first and foremost in terms of place—an inherently active environment and milieu—rather than space, which is passive and neutral by definition (despite modern attempts in various disciplines to redefine ‘space’ as active, thus blurring the distinction between the two).
Frampton, in introducing Critical Regionalism through Ricoeur’s reflection on universalization, intuited this fundamental dichotomy: the call for a commitment to place rather than space was, at its core, a call to resist the abstract, flattening tendencies of globalization—the modern habit of treating processes (economic, urban, architectural) as though they occur in an unresponsive void or space. In practice, the concept of space became the Trojan horse of expansionist logic driven by economic, technological and political forces through which actual territories were absorbed into a homogenizing system, erasing locality and particularity—erasing place itself. For Frampton, the commitment to place was a way to reverse this abstraction and return to concreteness, a path that would eventually lead him to embrace the tectonic as an architectural response.[23] It is a commitment I share, grounded in a reconsideration of place’s traditional meaning and its enduring relationship to space.
However, this is not, tout court, a plea for place against space—neither for me, nor for Frampton, nor for Lefaivre and Tzonis. Space and place are, after all, two sides of the same coin. Any return to place must therefore be examined with care and subjected to critical scrutiny. As Frampton, Tzonis and Lefaivre, and many other scholars exploring the relationship between architecture and regionalism have cautioned, we must remain vigilant against the dangers of backwardness, chauvinism, provincialism, or populism—tendencies that too often accompany traditional narratives of place and locale. For this reason, I argue that the very concept of place requires critical revision. This is the hypothesis guiding my work at RSaP, where I propose an alternative, all-embracing vision of place: place as a system of processes. Such a conceptualization broadens the scope of traditional understandings, moving beyond narrow and static or exclusive definitions of place—whether geographical, psychological, socially constructed, or cultural—toward wider, more inclusive, processual 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 conceptual framework grounded in the notions of place and locality. Interest in regionalism within architecture and planning—as an alternative or counterpoint to the ‘phenomenon of universal civilization’—long precedes the 1980s, when the concept of Critical Regionalism first took shape in architectural discourse. In fact, the earliest explicit and theoretically significant appeal to regionalism and place as an interpretive model for modern urban phenomena dates back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the Scottish biologist, sociologist, and urban planner Patrick Geddes presented his pioneering ideas on the intertwined evolution of societies and their environments.
I have examined Geddes’ work in detail elsewhere (On the Modernity of Patrick Geddes (1854-1932)), so here I will simply recall that his innovation lay in adopting a systemic or organic perspective—one that was simultaneously local and global. In many ways, a century before Critical Regionalism addressed similar tensions, Geddes offered a possible resolution to the paradoxical clash between local and global imperatives in modernity. His groundbreaking proposals—such as the regional survey (a vital instrument for planning), the valley section (linking human occupations and technologies to the physiographic profile of a region), and, more broadly, his conception of territory as the outcome of interrelated geographical, biological, ecological, and sociocultural processes operating at multiple scales (an idea that he presented to the public in a permanent exhibition at the Outlook Tower, in Edinburgh, since the end of the XIX century)—were key contributions to understanding the relationship between human activity and the environment. These ideas had nothing in common with traditional, nostalgic place-based narratives. Geddes’ regionalism was a modern regionalism, standing in deliberate contrast to two popular strands that reappeared throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: ‘romantic regionalism’ and ‘nationalist romanticism’—the latter often a geographical extension of the former and, in many cases, its ideological degeneration.[24] According to Lefaivre and Tzonis, exemplary cases of romantic regionalism emerged in England and Germany from the late eighteenth century onwards. Yet by the early twentieth century, regionalism had often deteriorated into ‘commercial’ forms—as Alexander Tzonis observed—[25] or worse, into cultural and political models co-opted by totalitarian regimes.[26]
Another strand of modern regionalism—and thus another appeal to a place-based narrative consciously seeking to avoid the pitfalls of romantic nostalgia or superficial associations with nationalist movements—was articulated by Lewis Mumford, a disciple of Patrick Geddes. Drawing on his mentor’s pioneering vision, Mumford adopted a regional interpretation of the world and of historical phenomena as early as his first book, The Story of Utopias (1922).[27] Over the course of his prolific career as a writer and critic of sociocultural trends, he refined the contours of his regionalist approach, becoming a central figure in the discourse. A mature synthesis of his thinking appears in The South in Architecture (1941), which Professor Eggener has described as the ‘Ur-text of critical regionalism,’ characterizing Mumford’s stance as a form of self-reflexive regionalism.[28] In many respects, Mumford’s regionalism was an elaboration and refinement of the principles first advanced by Geddes decades earlier. Yet, more directly and effectively than his mentor, Mumford anchored this vision—this focus on inclusive rather than exclusive local dynamics—within the specific field of architecture.[29] His skill as an architectural critic enabled him to formulate a regionally informed history of modern American architecture in works such as Sticks and Stones (1924) and the aforementioned The South in Architecture (1941). In these studies, Mumford identified Henry Hobson Richardson (1838–1886) as the first American regionalist architect, whose influence spread along the East Coast and, as Lefaivre and Tzonis have noted, was subsequently ‘appropriated and refashioned by the three main modern architects of the time: Frank Lloyd Wright, Greene and Greene, and Bernard Maybeck.’[30]
According to American architect and historian Anthony Alofsin—a former collaborator of Tzonis—Mumford’s concept of regionalism could be applied to architects such as Wright, Sullivan, Greene and Greene, and Maybeck 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] Here again, we see one of the defining principles of modern regionalism at work: an approach rooted in the local (place-based dynamics) yet aiming to transcend locality through universal and symbolic modes 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
Mumford also used his Sky Line column in The New Yorker—which he began writing in 1931—to champion a modern architectural regionalism as an alternative to the International Style. In this context, he outlined the features of what he described as a Bay Regional Style or School emerging along the American East Coast, where architecture represented ‘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, the modern perspectives on regionalism first articulated by Geddes and later given a coherent architectural form by Mumford combined respect for tradition with an optimistic, forward-looking vision. They did not reject technological or industrial developments outright; instead, they integrated local and global—or even universal—concerns, helping to clarify a key aspect of what is often, and sometimes misleadingly, framed as a conflict between tradition and modernity. In the Geddesian model, or in the ‘self-reflexive’ form advanced by Mumford, regionalism was not a case of tradition opposing modernity, nor was it an alternative to modernism itself. Rather, it offered an alternative form of modernism—a different lens through which to view modernity. This approach selectively drew on elements of tradition (inevitably tied to place, region, and locality) and wove together past, present, and future expectations into a new, open-ended vision—one inherently connected to the imaginative and projective potential of space. In many respects, the Critical Regionalism of the 1980s can be seen as a contemporary response to, or an evolution of, the models of regionalism expressed decades earlier by Geddes and Mumford. It is precisely these striking continuities that led Lefaivre and Tzonis, in their book Critical Regionalism (2003), to regard Mumford’s regionalism as an ante litteram form of Critical Regionalism.[33]
These alternative visions of regionalism—distinct from romantic forms and their nationalist or chauvinistic distortions, and in which traditional and modern elements could coexist—were not immediately embraced in the early decades of the twentieth century. Avant-garde movements and mainstream architectural circles tended to dismiss traditional or local characteristics in favour of the new canons of the International Style. This meant an abrupt break with the past, with locality (place), and with those specific aesthetic elements—form, mass, colour, ornament—that could be seen as continuous with tradition. In their place came an entirely new aesthetic: space conceived as volume, stark white surfaces, minimalism, pure geometric forms. Yet the triumph of modern architecture, narrowly interpreted through the lens of the International Style and promoted by the early CIAM congresses, did not go unchallenged for long. Over time, even prominent cultural figures—architects, planners, and historians—who had once rejected regional architecture began to acknowledge its value. Gradually, regionalism re-emerged in multiple forms within the current of modernity.
One telling example is architectural historian and critic Sigfried Giedion, a leading champion of the International Style, who in a 1954 article for Architectural Record came close to repudiating the very term he had helped popularise in his earlier works. Reflecting on a new phenomenon—the work of architects attuned to both traditional and modern concerns, balancing the allure of open space with the grounding presence of place—Giedion wrote: ‘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] This shift in Giedion’s outlook is telling: having once been among the most ardent promoters of the International Style, he eventually acknowledged the value of architecture that balanced modernity with regional specificity. His later appreciation for figures such as Alvar Aalto—whose work, blending local traditions with modernist principles, had been excluded from the first edition of Space, Time, and Architecture (1941) but was included in subsequent editions—signals a broader reassessment taking place within the architectural avant-garde. Giedion’s case thus exemplifies a change in sensibility, one that would shape how the contrast between the International Style and regionalism was interpreted in the decades that followed. Indeed, the gradual paradigm shift from space to place in architectural thought can be traced, in part, to this very confrontation: space served as the conceptual cornerstone of the International Style, while place lay at the heart of modern regionalist discourse.
Image 15: Säynätsalo Town Hall, Jyväskylä, FI, 1949-1952. Architect: Alvar Aalto.
In the post–Second World War period, the sharp opposition between modernism and regionalism began to soften. Certain regionalist tendencies—and the corresponding interest in place and place-based issues within architecture and planning—were taken up by Team X, whose work we have already discussed under the heading ‘The Place of Social Processes’. Yet, the question of regionalism, particularly in relation to architectural engagement with place, never entirely disappeared from the architectural discourse. It was with the rise of postmodernism in the 1970s and 1980s that regionalism re-emerged forcefully in the form of critical regionalism. This resurgence was driven by a convergence of factors: the pressures of universalization, the waning aesthetic and conceptual energy of the first modern movement—the International Style—amid a rapidly changing society, and the arrival of a postmodern culture which, much like earlier regressive forms of regionalism, often appropriated history and notions of place in an instrumental or superficial way. Against this backdrop, Critical Regionalism positioned itself as a renewed and compelling force at the centre of architectural debate—one which, in many respects, remains relevant today, even if the term itself has receded, as suggested by the title of Lefaivre and Tzonis’ recent book Architecture of Regionalism in the Age of Globalization (2021).
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
Building on Frampton’s seminal essays and his ‘Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance’, we can trace two further strands that illuminate the enduring dialogue between architecture and place. One is as old as human settlement itself: the vernacular tradition, rooted in the patient adaptation of buildings to topography, context, climate, light, and tectonic form—elements Frampton groups in Point 5. The other is more recent yet no less profound: the existential and phenomenological approach, which reframes place (and space) not simply as a site or physical setting, but as a lived and experienced reality. This latter current, inspired by Heidegger’s philosophical reflections and carried into architectural discourse by Christian Norberg-Schulz, aligns closely with Frampton’s Point 4—The Resistance of the Place-Form—and Point 6—The Visual Versus the Tactile. Together, these two traditions—one born from the accumulated wisdom of local building cultures, the other from the philosophical inquiry into human dwelling—offer complementary ways of resisting placelessness and reasserting architecture’s bond with the world it inhabits—the world-as-place.
2.2 The Place of Vernacular Architecture
As an introductory note, it is worth pausing on the etymology of the word vernacular to better grasp its meaning. The term derives from the Latin adjective vernaculus, meaning ‘native’ or ‘domestic,’ itself rooted in the noun verna—a term in Ancient Rome used to describe a slave born within the household. Over time, the meaning shifted, coming to denote ‘belonging to one’s own country’, or ‘pertinent to the native language’.[35]
All architects are aware that the close relationship between architecture and place—in the traditional, geographical sense of the physical environment—was already recognized in the earliest known treatise on architecture: De Architectura (c. 27–23 B.C.). Its author, the Roman architect Vitruvius, discusses the importance of selecting an appropriate site for founding a city, guided by geographical and biological principles connected to human and animal health. He believed these were influenced by factors such as sun exposure, prevailing winds, availability of water, and levels of temperature and humidity. Vitruvius’ practical rule of thumb was simple: if wild animals and plants thrived in a given location, then it was likely suitable for human settlement. This immediately calls to mind Hippocrates’ treatise On Airs, Waters, and Places—a work that Vitruvius not only knew but explicitly referenced in the first book of De Architectura. For Vitruvius, architecture was a profoundly multidisciplinary endeavor: among the many fields an architect should master, he included medicine. In short, according to Vitruvius, an architect ought to be a true jack of all trades… and thus we may have here the first recorded example of a transdisciplinary architect.
This was traditional wisdom as old as architecture itself, rooted in the intuitive principles of early town planning. Such wisdom has its deepest roots in the millennia-old tradition of vernacular architecture—what Austrian-American architect Bernard Rudofsky famously called Architecture Without Architects in his groundbreaking 1964 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The show was accompanied by a seminal book of the same title, now a classic among architects. Vernacular architecture has been variously described as ‘non-pedigreed’, ‘communal’, ‘primitive’, ‘anonymous’, ‘spontaneous’, ‘indigenous’, or ‘rural’ architecture—that is, ‘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 his exhibition and its catalogue,[37] Rudofsky challenged the prevailing, narrow conception of architectural history, which had traditionally focused almost exclusively on high-style buildings, and introduced ‘the unfamiliar world of nonpedigreed architecture’, i.e., vernacular architecture, into the cultural spotlight.[38]
While vernacular architecture had been discussed before—particularly in relation to domestic architecture (for example, by Mumford in his regional American studies; by Sybil Moholy-Nagy, whose Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture appeared in 1957; or even earlier by Giles Gilbert Scott, who in 1857 examined aspects of British vernacular in Remarks on Gothic Architecture)—Rudofsky’s work marked a turning point. From that moment, vernacular architecture emerged as a distinct and legitimate field of inquiry, entering the mainstream discourse among architects, historians, and critics, and the term ‘vernacular architecture’ began to overshadow earlier labels.
Image 16: Architecture Without Architects, exhibition at MOMA, New York, 1964. Architect: Bernard Rudofsky. Photograph by Rolf Petersen.
As Rudofsky’s varied naming of the phenomenon suggested from the outset, the label vernacular architecture was broad, fluid, and at times ambiguous. For example, when compared with ‘regionalism’ or ‘regional architecture,’ it prompts questions: Where does one begin and the other end? Is the vernacular a subset of the regional, or vice versa? And in the developed world—where construction invariably requires the involvement of specialists such as architects and engineers—does it even make sense to speak of vernacular architecture in the traditional sense? In such cases, might regional architecture be considered the contemporary, evolved form of the vernacular—its successor both linguistically and architecturally?
In one of his essays on Critical Regionalism, Kenneth Frampton addressed the blurred boundary between regionalism and the vernacular by citing 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, there is a question of style and aesthetic judgment, although, according to Frampton, these should not be the essence of Critical Regionalism. Instead, its essence ‘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 noted earlier, Critical Regionalism often carried ‘vaguely politicized’ undertones—something that set it apart from the more apolitical, organic nature of genuine vernacular architecture.
Regarding this important semantic question between adjacent categories, the architect and interdisciplinary scholar Amos Rapoport was among the first to recognize the need to define the linguistic boundaries of vernacular architecture, paying particular attention to the meaning of the term vernacular. Rapoport conceived ‘vernacular’ as the characteristic expression of a specific environment, in contrast to ‘primitive’ (preliterate), ‘popular’, and ‘high-style’ environments, each of which produced its own corresponding form of architecture: primitive, vernacular, popular, and high-style. Rather than reducing the term vernacular to a single defining trait—such as ‘place-specific’ (Swaim), ‘unselfconscious’ (Alexander), or ‘without architects’ (Rudofsky)—he proposed a multidimensional model based on a range of variables. These included cultural and geographical specificity, formal qualities, choice of materials, relationship to the landscape, response to climate, and efficiency in the use of resources. Each variable, he argued, was perceived differently depending on which of the four environmental and temporal categories it belonged to.[42] This was a dynamic and innovative way of understanding and analyzing the vernacular phenomenon—one with the explicit merit of attempting a systematic investigation into a field that was often not even recognized as a linguistic problem, but rather taken for granted and left in a state of ambiguity and uncertainty.
In the context of these semantic questions—both within architecture as a discipline and in relation to vernacular architecture in particular—one cannot help but recall Nikolaus Pevsner’s much-debated distinction between buildings (popular and functional constructions) and architecture: a conundrum that remains as unsettled as ever…
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
In many of the vernacular buildings illustrated by Rudofsky, it is easy to detect traces of the aesthetic appeal that Pevsner considered necessary for a structure to qualify as architecture—even if such appeal appears at rudimentary levels, as in the anthropomorphic decorations applied to the adobe walls of certain African granaries. In other cases, however, this aesthetic dimension is absent, or at least not easily discernible through the judging eyes of foreign, and often culturally biased, observers.
One thing is clear: when we engage with vernacular architecture, we are engaging with dwelling in its most fundamental sense and with the very origins of architecture itself—origins whose constructive principles are as old as humanity. In those beginnings, place—the place of architecture—was always a central consideration. First, it influenced the choice of location in terms of accessibility, safety or defence, climate suitability, and proximity to food resources (exogenous or environmental factors). Yet beauty was also a factor (endogenous or human), ensuring that vernacular architecture cannot be reduced to mere physical or geographical determinism. As Rudofsky observed: ‘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’.[43] Second, place remained a constant reference throughout the building process, demanding a specific architectural response to topography, climate, and available materials. These constraints shaped every aspect of the building: its form, roof structure, placement and size of doors and windows, and the very choice of materials.
Image 17: Archaeological site of Ancient Thera, GR.
Here, the crucial question resurfaces: to what extent are the physical constraints of place—climate, topography, accessibility, materials, and so on—determinative in shaping the vast variety of architectural forms? This issue was explicitly addressed by the architect and scholar Amos Rapoport in his influential book House, Form, and Culture.[44] While Rapoport tended to emphasise the primary role of sociocultural processes—such as economics, religion, symbolism, and social relationships—in determining the formal appearance of buildings, he ultimately rejected any single-factor explanation. As he argued, ‘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 stated in the opening passage of this article, my attempt to conceive of a notion of place that is simultaneously receptive to physical (physicochemical), biological, ecological, socio-cultural, and symbolic dimensions is consistent with the idea of the primacy of place—place as archè, the ultimate principle. At the same time, this notion stands as an antidote to any simplistic, determinist and reductivist theory of knowledge, for the concept of place I propose is an all-embracing structure, at once universal and particular. There is no a priori primacy of the physical over the cultural or the symbolic (or vice versa), while acknowledging the obvious fact of their sequential emergence in the course of evolution: the physical precedes the biological, the biological precedes the social, and so forth. Yet the two planes of discussion—the ontological or metaphysical, and the evolutionary—must not be conflated. My place-based vision of architecture is plainly anti-reductionist and thus opposed to all forms of simplistic determinism: architecture is the product of a dynamic tension among multiple factors—physicochemical, biological, sociocultural, and intellectual or symbolic—and cannot be reduced to any one of them in isolation. Ultimately, this vision diverges from Rapoport’s. Despite the good intentions implicit in the quotation above (see note 45), he ultimately relocated the origins of vernacular architecture from physical to sociocultural determinants—a position very much in vogue in the 1960s and 1970s, when his theories found a receptive international audience.
Returning to Rudofsky’s Architecture without Architects, we may recall that, in the opening pages of the catalogue, he briefly speculated on the origins of architecture in biblical terms, suggesting that the first human hut was ‘probably put together with some of the Ark’s lumber.’[46] The critic and historian of architecture Joseph Rykwert addressed the same question from a more erudite perspective. Like Rudofsky, he traced the origins of architecture—the source of all architectural thought, whether modern, contemporary, or ancient—to the ‘primitive hut’ in biblical terms (On Adam’s House in Paradise, 1972).[47] Yet, with respect to place as the fundamental existential realm of architecture, Rykwert situated the primitive hut in a radically different setting: not in a concrete location, but in a non-place, an Utopia—the primordial locus of all religions, ‘whose location cannot be found on any map’: Paradise.[48] Once again, the origin of architecture is inseparable from the origin of humanity and of religious or mythical thought; and, as always, place is the stage that grants things the possibility of existence—whether we understand those things as ‘physical’ (geographical sites) or ‘symbolic’ (Paradise, cosmogonies).
… the origin of architecture is inseparable from the origin of humanity and of religious or mythical thought; and, as always, place is the stage that grants things the possibility of existence—whether we understand those things as ‘physical’ (geographical sites) or ‘symbolic’ (Paradise, cosmogonies).
Setting aside symbolism and mythopoesis, Rudofsky proposed a possible scientific hypothesis for the origins of the earliest human forms of architecture, drawing on Darwinian evolutionism. He imagined the first humans adopting habits and behaviours akin to those of anthropoid apes—constructing platforms for sleeping in the trees where they lived, and covering themselves with leaves. This practice, driven by a shared instinct between closely related species, may have been translated into the first primitive huts erected on the ground by ‘the early progenitors of man.’[49] In this way, Rudofsky—through Darwin—wove together biological processes, the genetic structures of the mind (which shape habits and customs), the physical environment and its resources, and the emergence of architecture into a plausible primordial scenario.
Image 18: The Origins of Architecture, Joseph Michael Gandy, 1830. Photograph: Sir John Soane’s Museum, London.
Yet the connection between place, dwelling, and architecture precedes even this aboriginal human possibility grounded in evolutionary theory. At this deeper stage, nature itself appears as the builder—a master architect—shaping the world through the forces of physics and chemistry. In a specific place, geological, hydrological, and climatic forces act relentlessly over millennia: the earth shifts, the sun scorches, winds erode, water carves, and fire transforms. Out of this ceaseless natural (specifically, physicochemical) activity emerge remarkable structures—caves, overhangs, rock shelters—offering humans ready-made possibilities for dwelling with minimal effort. These forms, carved from soft rock by processes spanning hundreds of thousands or millions of years, reveal a profound truth: here, place and architecture are not separate realities, but fused into a single entity. The ultimate truth resurfaces: everything is place—we are all places, a place of processes.
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.
This fundamental aspect of vernacular architecture—the intrinsic connection between dwelling and place—was the subject of a seminal work by the English architectural historian Paul Oliver: Dwellings: The Vernacular House Worldwide (1987), a compendium of traditional architectures later expanded into his monumental Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World (1997).[50] That book – Dwellings – is especially significant because it adopts, in my view, the most appropriate approach to the subject, vernacular architecture, situating architecture within the broader, existential framework of dwelling, a framework with clear Heideggerian roots.
From the perspective of dwelling, the centrality of place becomes immediately apparent, both as a geographical reality and as an existential concept. To dwell, in its etymological sense, ‘signifies to remain, to stay in place’ —a form traceable to the most basic mode of being: I am. As Heidegger observed, to dwell is to be, and to be—as the ancient truth behind the Archytian Axiom reminds us—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 notes – 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 near-absence of constructed form, yet clear presence of dwelling, is strikingly illustrated in various examples (see Images 19, 20, 21, above)—from caves, grottos, and naturally sheltered formations inhabited by troglodytes (from the Greek troglē, meaning ‘hole’) across different epochs, to the diverse architectural expressions that developed over time. All other, more structured forms of human habitation—whether the temporary shelters of nomads, the huts of early settlements, their formal codification into enduring types such as the Sardinian nuraghi, the Apulian trulli, the Sicilian dammusi, or the Balearic talaiots, built from earth (mud, adobe, stone) or from growing resources (timber, branches, leaves, grasses)—culminate in the more permanent architectures of later periods. Ultimately, these varied examples attest to the same principle: ‘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.
Although Oliver does not explicitly reference it, the conceptual framework through which he articulates dwelling and place strongly recalls Heidegger’s celebrated inquiry—well known among architects—‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in which the philosopher ‘traces building back into the domain to which everything that “Is” belongs’, that is, an existential domain.[54] In a similar vein, Oliver observes that dwelling ‘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]
What Oliver is emphasising here is the existential significance of dwelling, which requires a place in which to occur, rather than merely a space, a site, or a permanent built form—the “stage” in his analogy. From this existential perspective, the wide compass of dwelling, encompassing everything from ‘natural architectures’ (Images 19, 20, 21) to ‘primitive’, ‘vernacular’, ‘popular’ and ‘high-style’ forms, is always underpinned by the presence of place. And it is precisely the fundamental structure of place—comprising the interplay of physicochemical, biological, sociocultural, and symbolic processes—that we must examine if we wish to understand architecture, or buildings, as a basic manifestation of dwelling.
In this respect, the parallel with Heidegger’s essay is striking. One need only recall his famous example of the farmhouse in the Black Forest, which could stand as the quintessence of vernacular architecture, where pragmatic necessity and profound symbolic—indeed sacred—meanings coexist in a single, unified form.
Fundamentally, by studying vernacular architecture—whose forms arise from the immediate interplay of external and internal determinants (environmental forces on one side, and human factors—biological, sociocultural, and symbolic—on the other)—we can better grasp the full spectrum of place-based conditions that give buildings their concrete form. These include climate and location, economic patterns and settlement types, available materials and construction techniques, spatial organization and use (the social ‘spatialization’ of life), as well as cultural and intellectual dimensions expressed through decoration and symbolism. To understand this complex web of tensions—where environmental imperatives meet human aspirations—is to approach more effectively the meaning of dwelling, even in the profound sense evoked by Heidegger (to be addressed in the next section),[56] and to contribute, as Oliver hoped, to ‘meeting the housing demands of the future.’[57] In this dynamic, place emerges as the balancing medium for the diverse forces exerted by both humanity and the environment—absorbing their tensions and preserving the unity between them.
In envisioning future scenarios, it is difficult to doubt that the renewed interest in vernacular architecture and regional approaches stems largely from the rise of environmental concerns, which are redefining the relationship between humanity and nature—a theme we will explore more fully in paragraph 3. For now, it is enough to note that Oliver’s emphasis on the intertwined questions of place and dwelling, as articulated in his widely read Dwellings, offers a natural bridge to the following section. There, we will turn to the existential and phenomenological approach to architecture and place—an approach first developed by Martin Heidegger and later refined by other phenomenological thinkers, including practicing architects.
2.3 Presence and Human Body: Existential and Phenomenological Approaches to an Architecture of Place and Space
In 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 had reduced place to merely a part of space, a simple location or site, ultimately disintegrated into point-like coordinates in space.[58] Casey showed that the restoration of the ancient, philosophically and dynamically rich dimensions of place—dimensions traceable to ancient cosmogonies, the Archytian Axiom, and Aristotle’s physical theory—came ‘by way of body’, through thinkers such as Kant, Whitehead, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty, as well as by ‘a via media between body and mind’, the ‘indirect’ philosophical path chosen by Heidegger.[59] On the centrality of place in Heidegger’s thought, 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.’[60] I share Malpas’s view. In several of my own articles and commentaries on Heidegger (What Is a Thing?, The Place of Being and Becoming, Being as Place: Introduction to Metaphysics – Part One and Part Two), I have argued that a place-based interpretation of his thinking is crucial for grasping the nature of spatial concepts and of things in general—architecture included. 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 on place and the body—the body as the instrument for accessing the phenomenon of place—were taken up by architects in the last three decades of the twentieth century. In the specific case of architecture’s recovery of the concept of place, the impact of Heidegger’s thought, mediated through the interpretative work of Norwegian architect, historian, and critic Christian Norberg-Schulz, was of paramount importance. From the 1960s onward, new architectural expressions emerged from this renewed understanding of place and its relation to the immediate environment, as architecture entered existential and phenomenological domains through philosophical inquiry. In what follows, I will outline some significant moments in this passage from philosophy to architecture—moments that revealed place and the body as the primary generative forces in architectural thinking.
We have already outlined several connections between architecture, place, and Heideggerian thought in the preceding sections. First, in Paragraph 2.1, we referred to Kenneth Frampton’s discussion of Critical Regionalism, in which he observed: ‘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 later returned to Heidegger’s placial conception when he spoke of the ‘loss of nearness’ in his reflections on architectural regionalism. Second, in Paragraph 2.2, we examined Paul Oliver’s work on vernacular architecture through his text Dwellings. In both cases, a clear link emerged with Heidegger’s seminal essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ (originally delivered as a lecture in Darmstadt in 1951), which illuminates the existential dimension of architecture and building, as well as their deep connections with place and space.
Let us now take a closer look at Heidegger’s reflections on spatiality, for they offer valuable insights into why architecture should be regarded first and foremost as a place-based discipline, rather than merely a discipline grounded in space, as modern interpretations have so often suggested.
As Edward Casey notes in The Fate of Place (discussed in my article Place and Space: A Philosophical History), the existential structure of place was already implicit in Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927). There, Heidegger describes the structure of being through the concept of Dasein—literally ‘being-there’—the distinctive form of being-in-the-world peculiar to human existence. The hyphenated suffix ‘-there’ immediately points to a placial, or place-based, dimension of existence.
In his later work An Introduction to Metaphysics (1935)—which I have examined in Being as Place: Introduction to Metaphysics – Part One and Part Two—Heidegger makes this connection even more explicit. As Casey observes, ‘Heidegger – belatedly – underlines the placial significance of Dasein’ when he writes that ‘Dasein should be understood, within the question of Being, as the place (Stätte) which Being requires in order to disclose itself.’[61]
I explored this inherently place-oriented dimension of Heidegger’s thought in my article What Is a Thing?, based on his lecture course of 1935–36, titled What Is a Thing?. Through a series of images (Images 1–7), I illustrated how our understanding of a ‘thing’ is inseparable from the place of processes through which it reveals itself to the world. By ‘place of processes’, I mean the dynamic interplay between perceiving subject and perceived object. This is particularly relevant for architects: if we regard architecture as a specific kind of ‘thing,’ then understanding the universal structure and meaning of things can offer valuable insight into the meaning of architecture itself.
The reciprocal, existential relationship between things and places is developed further in Heidegger’s essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ (1951). Using the example of a bridge, Heidegger argues that place is not a pre-existing container for spatiality but comes into being with the presence of the thing itself. As Casey puts it, place ‘arises with the bridge regarded as a thing.’[62] In this way, Heidegger clarifies the structure of spatiality—unveiling the interrelation of place, space, and the things situated within place.
Equally significant for architects is Casey’s observation, following Heidegger’s late essay ‘Art and Space’ (1969), that ‘things [and, as I have argued, buildings and architectures among them] 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
This is the central existential and architectural thesis I uphold at RSaP-Rethinking Space and Place: things are places, and architecture—being a particular kind of thing—can be understood as one of these places. In other words, architecture is fundamentally a matter of place before it is a matter of space, contrary to the view advanced by many modern architectural critics and historians. That said, this primacy of place should not obscure the fact that architecture is a discipline of both place and space; every architecture of place is necessarily also an architecture of space. For architects, the essential task is to grasp the distinct ontologies and epistemologies of place and space. Place is primarily concrete; space is essentially abstract. They are correlated concepts, each necessary for a complete understanding of environmental phenomena, including architecture. Yet place holds a certain physical primacy, while space functions as an ideal framework through which we can return to that original physicality with rational thinking. Together, place and space close the circle of reality—bridging concreteness and abstraction, body and mind, things and thought.
From Heidegger’s conception of spatiality follows an important corollary, made explicit in an oft-quoted passage from his essay on dwelling: ‘spaces receive their being from places and not from space’. This means that, as I am also suggesting, space is subordinated to place, and that there is no such thing as a pre-constituted space in which things simply appear. Rather, space emerges from place, just as place is inseparable from the thing in place. This perspective reverses the traditional, modern understanding of spatiality. The implication is clear: we cannot fully grasp the phenomenon of architecture unless we place place, space, and the meaning of the thing in their proper relationship—space arising from place, and place being tantamount to the thing in place. This is the guiding message behind the name of this website: we must rethink the conventional relationship between space and place, starting from the inversion of meaning proposed—among others—by Heidegger. As we learn from Edward Casey’s The Fate of Place, this inversion is, in fact, a return to the original Greek and Latin distinctions: place as topos, and space as spatium—the original ‘interval’ or ‘distance’ abstracted into pure extension, the three-dimensional manifold of height, breadth, and depth—as interpreted by Heidegger in ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’.
Apart from the example of the bridge—which served to clarify the relationship between place, space, and the thing in place—Heidegger also explored the existential link between building and dwelling, initially in linguistic terms. He showed that in Old High German, building meant to dwell, and dwelling meant to stay in a place, which ultimately meant to be. Later, he developed this relationship in seemingly straightforward architectural terms through 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]
This example has often been interpreted too narrowly—confined to its architectural details—or worse, co-opted for cultural or political purposes, instead of being read in its fundamental existential sense, as it should be: on the one hand, place and space, on the other (emerging from the space room afforded by or intrinsic to place) the natural environment and humanity are the fundamental existential aspects of dwelling we should focus on, one complementary to the other. The environment as the conveyor of natural processes on the one side (they represent the Heideggerian dyad earth/sky); humanity, with its material and immaterial—or symbolic—creations that complement these natural processes in sociocultural and symbolic ways, 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, urban 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 concepts of place and space—see also On Spatiality: The Fourfold Vision, and ‘Newton’s Sleep’). This framework offers architects an easier way to interpret the Heideggerian ‘fourfold’, as it preserves its symbolic meaning while enabling its practical application.
Following the trajectory outlined by Edward Casey in The Fate of Place, we can see that Heidegger’s incremental turn toward place continues into his later works. In ‘Time and Being’ (1962), Heidegger entertains the possibility of including temporality within place—what we might call an implacement of time: ‘Where is time? Is time at all and does it have a place?’ he asks.[66] In his final major text on the subject, ‘Art and Space’ (1969), Heidegger poses the decisive question: ‘Still, what is place?’, and reaches 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 develops this insight further, offering an observation of particular relevance to 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]
In the end, space belongs to place—an inversion of the prevailing assumption since the Renaissance and solidified in the modern epoch, which has shaped our current understanding by subordinating place to space. Today, place is often understood—and even described—as space. Beyond my article on Casey’s The Fate of Place (Place and Space: A Philosophical History), I have explored this inversion in my studies of Ivor Leclerc (Concepts of Place, Space, Matter, and the Nature of Physical Existence and Place, Space, Matter and the New Conception of Nature), one of the few thinkers—alongside Casey—who clearly traced this historical reversal in the meanings and roles of place and space. For numerous examples of places misidentified as spaces, see my photographic essay 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 experience—and in support of Casey’s thesis—[69] I can say that I truly realized I was an architect (in the inner sense of self-awareness, rather than in the outer sense of academic or institutional certification) the moment I absorbed the meaning of space as a plenum, and thus came to understand space ultimately as place (a learning experience I have discussed in the article Archi-textures). However, this realization brings with it a kind of contradiction—a linguistic short-circuit—that complicates our understanding of spatiality. If space is a plenum, if it is the bearer of qualitative and concrete values, as phenomenologists also affirm, and if we are aware of the historical, philosophical, and physical trajectories of the concepts of space and place, then such a ‘plenum’ cannot truly be space at all. Rather, it must be regarded as place, in accordance with the origins of Western thought, as Aristotle and Heidegger have shown us.[70]
But if space is place, why continue to call it space instead of place? And, more importantly, what then is space? My view is that Heidegger provided the most fitting philosophical resolution to this ‘Gordian knot’, in ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, where he restored space and place to their original, complementary roles. Place, in its qualitative and primary—or existential—sense, is that which allows the existence and presence of things; it offers the space ‘room’ in which they appear as concrete, qualitative realities, in keeping with the original Greek meanings of chōra and topos. Space, in its quantitative and subordinate—or dimensional—sense, is a matter of distance, measure, or interval (the Greek and Latin spadion/stadion and spatium), later abstracted into extensio—i.e., three-dimensional extension. This original, abstract notion of space was subsequently expanded into the Cartesian model of mathematical/geometrical space and, eventually—reversing its initial abstract role—into Newtonian physical space, which remains the dominant, everyday conception today.[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 overview of spatiality has outlined the existential value of place and its relationship to space and the thing, framed in philosophical terms and taking its cue from Heidegger’s writings. Yet an important question remains: how did these abstract and deeply insightful reflections on place, space, and the thing—illustrated in Heidegger’s examples of the bridge, the temple, or the jug—find their way into the realm of architecture, becoming a recurring point of reference for architects? Reading Heidegger is never a straightforward task, especially for those outside the philosophical tradition. Several intermediate steps were required. In what follows, we will examine those steps to understand how architecture came to address questions of place directly, often through the lens of existential and phenomenological criticism.
The purpose of architecture is to give order to certain aspects of our environment.
Christian Norberg-Schulz, Intentions in Architecture
At this point, it is essential to introduce the lifetime work of the Norwegian architect, historian, and critic Christian Norberg-Schulz—who served as a crucial mediator between the existentialism of Heidegger, the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, and Bollnow on one side, and the world of architecture on the other. I will dedicate a separate article to Norberg-Schulz’s theoretical contributions (see A Theory of Place), as his writings are closely aligned with the core concerns of this website: the interpretation—and, where necessary, the re-interpretation—of the fundamental concepts through which we articulate our understanding of spatiality, especially when challenging the dominant modernist view of space and place. Here, however, I will focus primarily on the key moments in his intellectual trajectory, tracing how his thinking shifted from an emphasis on space to an emphasis on place, thereby helping to restore the concept of place to prominence in architecture and urban planning.
In his first major work, Intentions in Architecture (1965), Christian Norberg-Schulz expressed his interest in the psychological and figurative factors that shape buildings. He conceived architecture as a distinct language—a synthesis of functional and symbolic dimensions—mediating the relationship between human beings and their environment. This concern with the ways in which architecture’s language is expressed and interpreted in figurative terms remained central to his entire career. In Intentions in Architecture, Norberg-Schulz challenged the prevailing view of architecture as ‘the art of space’, arguing that the very notion of space was vague and imprecise, leading to empty formulations. As he observed: ‘… 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 denotes an imprecise use of language, how can it serve as the foundation for architectural theory? My own interest in re-examining the spatial question emerged from precisely the same type of considerations and doubts first articulated by Norberg-Schulz. Same starting point, different spatial outcome (fifty years later): for an examination of the main differences and continuities between these two spatial hypotheses, I direct readers to the aforementioned article.
Image 26: Sacred family church, Salerno, IT. Architect Paolo Portoghesi. Image source: Cédric Dasesson (see Image Credits, below, for details).
Norberg-Schulz’s scepticism toward the traditional understanding of space led him to reassess spatial terminology in his next major work, Existence, Space, and Architecture (1971). Here, drawing on the thought of Heidegger and phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, and, above all, Bollnow,[73] he introduced the concept of ‘existential space’ as the basis for a new approach to architecture and spatiality. At this stage, however—aside from the traditional geographical and social considerations already discussed in the preceding paragraphs—there was still no fully articulated notion of place, nor a meaningful ontological distinction between space and place. As the title suggests, space remained his primary focus, even though two years earlier he had published an article entitled ‘The Concept of Place’ (1969). That article can be seen as an anticipation of his idea of ‘existential space’, yet his understanding of the space–place relationship was still framed within the prevailing Newtonian paradigm: space was conceived as ‘a system of places’ —in other words, space was still primary and place was understood as belonging to space rather than the other way around. [74]
According to Norberg-Schulz, the introduction of the concept of ‘existential space’, allowed space to regain a central role in architectural theory. Previous spatial references—whether to the dimensionality of buildings (i.e., ‘physical’–geometrical space) or to their perception (i.e., perceptual space, traditionally limited to visual experience)—had, in his view, captured only the superficial aspects of architecture.[75] By contrast, his notion of existential space was grounded in a synthesis of existential, phenomenological, psychological, figurative, and urban knowledge. The main intellectual influences behind this framework were, respectively, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Bollnow, Piaget, Gestalt theory, and Lynch.[76]
Norberg-Schulz’s renewed focus on the concept of space—and, above all, his engagement with the existential interpretation of spatiality inspired by Heidegger—had a decisive consequence: it led to a shift in his attention from space to place as the key to interpreting the phenomenon of architecture. This change is most clearly reflected in the titles of his later major theoretical works, Genius Loci (1980) and Architecture: Presence, Language, Place (1996, Italian edition). I contend that, with this turn, Norberg-Schulz became the first architect or architectural historian to undertake a specific and systematic analysis of the phenomenon of place, and thus the first to formulate a theory of place directly accessible to architects and planners.[77]
If in Existence, Space, and Architecture Norberg-Schulz embraced the existential meaning of spatiality with a particular focus on the concept of space, in his article ‘The Phenomenon of Place’ (1976)[78] he turned to another crucial aspect of Heidegger’s lesson: the phenomenological dimension of the spatial question, with special attention to the everyday life-world in which humans and things participate. Here, for the first time in his work, Norberg-Schulz explicitly articulated the need for a phenomenology of architecture—a line of inquiry that, even after several decades, still holds considerable promise for architectural thought and practice.[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, within this world of concretely experienced things, the concept of place becomes the central focus of Norberg-Schulz’s inquiry. The reason is evident: much like Heidegger in his essay Art and Space, Norberg-Schulz underscores the intimate correlation between things and places. Thus, when he asks ‘What, then, do we mean with the word “place”?’, he rejects the classical and reductive notion of place as mere ‘location.’ Instead, he defines it as ‘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
Several crucial considerations emerge from these 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. In this sense, space is a derivative entity—subsidiary or auxiliary to place—perfectly aligning with Heidegger’s notion of spatiality, in which space emerges from place rather than the other way around.
Moreover, it follows that when we speak of ‘atmosphere’, we are speaking of place, not space: atmosphere is a quality of place, whereas space concerns its measurable, extensive component (see Figure 1, below). This is why Norberg-Schulz insists that places, due to their complex nature, cannot be adequately described by analytic or purely scientific concepts, which address only quantitative determinants. For this reason, he argues, a phenomenology of architecture is ‘urgently needed’:[82]—a phenomenology whose ultimate concern, or subject, is place itself. In The Phenomenon of Place, Norberg-Schulz lays out its structure in detail.
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 incorporated into Genius Loci (1980), where it forms the book’s theoretical core. In Genius Loci, Norberg-Schulz explores both natural and man-made places before concluding that the recovery of place—after its erosion in the modern epoch (i.e. the loss of place)—is essential for the possibility of genuine dwelling. The original essay, combined with the new chapters, resulted in what can be considered the first systematic study of the relationship between architecture and place: the first theory of place to gain wide circulation among architects. In this work, Norberg-Schulz reinforced the intimate connection between architecture and place—indeed, their near-identification—declaring 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
In the first part of Genius Loci, Norberg-Schulz examines the structure of place, while in the final section, he turns to its problematic condition in the modern era—a diagnosis that, in many respects, remains relevant decades later. Here he speaks of ‘the loss of place’, a phenomenon of modernity marked by the monotony, diminished character, and erosion of environmental qualities of both space and place. This, Norberg-Schulz argues, has brought us into a time of ‘environmental crisis.’ Notably, his use of the term ‘environment’ is confined to human phenomena, reflecting a limitation of his theory from today’s perspective (at least the correlative, both natural and cultural, perspective I am arguing for at RSaP) and one reason why it cannot be considered a fully comprehensive theory of place. As a counterpoint to this loss, Norberg-Schulz turns to ‘the work of the first of modern pioneers’, Frank Lloyd Wright, and to later works by Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier (in the second phase of his career), Louis Kahn, and a select group of so-called ‘third generation’ modern architects—Jørn Utzon, Atelier 5, Reima Pietilä, James Stirling, MLTW, and Ricardo Bofill among them. In their architecture, 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]
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 cautions that these architectural examples remain ‘scattered and quantitatively scarce’, a scarcity he attributes to ‘a general social inertia… vested interests’ and – this is what interests us – ‘the lack of a clear understanding of the environmental problem’.[85] From this, he argues, arises the need for a theory of place: only through such a framework can we cultivate a genuine understanding of environmental issues. He therefore 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 Norberg-Schulz had already set in motion in Genius Loci—evolved into the idea of the art of place in his book Architecture: Presence, Language and Place (1996),[87] where he distilled the theoretical vision of his lifetime. I suspect that this shift, from a theory of place as a means of interpreting architecture and the phenomenon of place as a reciprocally structured reality, to architecture itself understood as the art of place, stemmed from Norberg-Schulz’s enduring inclination toward a figurative, art-based conception of architecture—an intellectual legacy from his time as a disciple of Giedion, when ‘modern architecture was thought of as ART’.[88]
For Norberg-Schulz, the art of place assumes the role of bridging the gulf between thought and feeling, between quantity and quality. Yet this development should not surprise architects: ‘Hasn’t architecture, however, always been the art of place?’, he asks.
Hasn’t architecture, however, always been the art of place?
Christian Norberg-Schulz, Architecture: Presence, Language and Place
The author frames modernity as a struggle between quantity and quality—a tension that could also be described, I would argue, as a struggle between space and place, echoing ideas Kenneth Frampton had already articulated years earlier. For Norberg-Schulz, place holds the potential to serve as the carrier 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 sum up Norberg-Schulz’s legacy, his work played a pivotal role in fostering among architects a deeper awareness of the existential and phenomenological dimensions of architecture, and in revealing their intrinsic ties to spatiality. No longer was architecture to be understood and interpreted solely in terms of space, as had been the dominant approach in previous decades; it could now also be conceived and interpreted in terms of place. In this sense, architecture—within Norberg-Schulz’s hypothesis—became the art of place.
Norberg-Schulz’s 1976 call for a phenomenology of architecture resonated widely and positively among architects. I myself responded to that call during my formative years as an apprentice architect in the mid-1990s, as I described in the article Archi-textures. This impetus gave rise to a specific strand of thought between architecture and phenomenology, emerging largely in reaction to the vanishing impetus and flattening values of modernism, the formalism of postmodernism, and the degenerative tendencies of deconstructivism. It soon attracted a growing number of architects, historians, and critics, along with philosophers and social scientists—following the examples of Heidegger, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty—forming a current of inquiry that remains vibrant today.
From a chronological perspective useful to architects, particular mention should be made of Kent C. Bloomer and Charles W. Moore’s Body, Memory, and Architecture (1977),[90] which, in continuity with the 1960 pioneering work of Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City, and Norberg-Schulz’s theoretical work, examined how buildings are experienced through the body, the senses, and kinesthetic awareness—a concern as essential as understanding how buildings are constructed. Equally significant was the cross-disciplinary collaboration of architect Steven Holl and architectural historians Juhani Pallasmaa and Alberto Pérez-Gómez, who in 1994 published the seminal Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture in a special issue of A+U: Architecture and Urbanism.[91] In this work, Pérez-Gómez’s historico-philosophical perspective,[92] Pallasmaa’s phenomenological and sensory approach, and Holl’s architectural vision fused into a remarkable theoretical–practical synthesis that every young architect or architecture student should engage with closely, even thirty years after its publication.
Image 39: Y House, Catskill, NY, USA, 1999. Architect: Steven Holl.
The phenomenological call issued by Norberg-Schulz for the recovery of quality in architecture and the importance of the character of places (i.e., ‘atmosphere’ – see Figure 1, above) was echoed decades later by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. In 2003, he delivered a lecture—later published under the title Atmospheres: Architectural Environments. Surrounding Objects—[93] in which he posed the 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]This is a view I share, and one I have expressed in my own phenomenological reflections on architecture, informed by my childhood and more mature experiences of human-built places (see the articles On Architecture and Paragraph 1 in Archi-textures). With the unifying term ‘atmosphere,’ Zumthor provided a compelling way to address the question of quality in architecture.
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 inquiry, the concept of atmosphere has in recent years become a fertile field of exploration for scholars, philosophers, and architects. It has gained both theoretical and practical relevance for architectural practice, as exemplified in Peter Zumthor’s work. Yet, as Norberg-Schulz’s The Phenomenon of Place reminds us, the significance of atmosphere for Being, places, things, and their presence was already asserted by Heidegger in the 1930s, when he described atmosphere as ‘the fundamental way of being of man in the world as well as the foundation of presence.’[95] In recent decades, various studies have proposed an ‘atmospheric’ interpretation of Heidegger’s thought. Notably, Hermann Schmitz—who, in the 1960s, advanced the thesis of a ‘New Phenomenology’—authored a dedicated essay on atmosphere, while Gernot Böhme explored its environmental quality and adopted it as ‘the fundamental concept of a new aesthetic.’ Böhme’s unusual approach inverts 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] His conflation of philosophy and atmospheres in relation to architecture and the city has been elaborated primarily in space-based terms—understanding atmosphere as a quality of space—[97] which stands in stark contrast to Norberg-Schulz’s Heidegger-inspired view in The Phenomenon of Place (see Figure 1), where atmosphere, as a constitutive element of place, is set in near-opposition to space, understood merely as the bearer of the dimensional (quantitative) aspects of place. This divergence raises important ontological questions about the intertwined nature of place, space, and architecture, and calls for further inquiry. More recently, Juhani Pallasmaa and Alberto Pérez-Gómez have also offered valuable reflections on the relationship between architecture and atmosphere.
Fundamentally, as the American geographer David Seamon observed — an active and influential scholar working at the intersection of architecture and phenomenology—[98] two themes drawn from the phenomenological discourses of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty have become particularly central to contemporary architectural thought, both of which we have touched upon above: first, ‘environmental embodiment’, which addresses the crucial role of the human body and its senses as the primary organizing principle of architecture; and second, the notion 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 arrive at the most recent development in architecture and urban planning as disciplines of place: ecological design—a term often expressed through related labels such as ecological architecture, green design, sustainable architecture, bio-architecture, regenerative design, climatic design, environmental design, eco-masterplanning, and the likes. These domains may encompass, or run in parallel with, landscape design, which has long addressed the physical, biological, and ecological dimensions of place. Initially emerging as the art of gardening—transforming the natural environment into a cultural one to meet human needs and aesthetic aspirations for the beautiful or the sublime—this tradition culminated in the professionalization of the ‘landscape architect’ by Frederick Law Olmsted, creator of Central Park. In recent decades, however, landscape design has taken on more conservative, restorative, and regenerative aims, seeking the harmonious integration and co-evolution of natural and human systems.[100]
Image 42: Central Park and Skyline, New York, USA.
In the last couple of decades, what has changed most in the sensibility of both society at large and the community of architects is the emergence—at a truly global scale—of the environmental question as a defining challenge of modernity. I am referring here to climate change and to related issues such as desertification, biodiversity loss, depletion of natural resources, and ozone depletion—phenomena caused by human activity and now embedded in public awareness. This raises pressing questions: How should architecture respond to such global environmental changes? More specifically, how can it be responsive to both the natural environment and the human-made environment as an inseparable whole?
My answer is: by returning to place—place understood as a systemic and processual reality, the result of interacting dynamics seen not only from an anthropocentric perspective (reality as the place of sociocultural and symbolic processes—i.e., human processes) but also from a biocentric, or even more extendedly, a cosmological perspective (reality as the place of physicochemical, biological, and ecological processes, in addition to human processes).[101] When architects recognize these implications of the environmental question for architecture and planning—and begin to see the natural and the human-made environments as one integrated, whole place—everything changes. In the past, I have described this awareness as an ‘epistemological line of demarcation’ for architecture and urban planning, borrowing the words and concept from the Swiss philosopher Nicola Emery.[102] Environmental issues, once acknowledged in their full scope, inevitably demand a rethinking of architecture within an expanded ethical framework—one that takes the natural environment and its processes as a central responsibility.[103]
As a consequence of this renewed understanding of the relationship between human beings and the environment, I have also described architecture and urban planning as the place of ecological processes. In Architecture as Place of Sustainability, I explored a threefold strategy—‘energy-saving design,’ ‘bioclimatic design,’ and ‘ecological design’—through which architecture can address environmental issues with varying degrees of engagement with place. My aim was to propose a theoretical and operational framework that situates the environmental question within a reformulation of spatial concepts, reaffirming architecture as a place-based discipline, where place is understood as a systemic and processual notion.
This paragraph is meant as a reminder to highlight an aspect of architecture and urbanism that contributes to a more complete understanding of the phenomenon of place—an aspect not even envisioned in Norberg-Schulz’s art of place: namely, architecture and urban planning as the place of ecological processes, where oikos denotes both the house and the city as the home of all living beings in concert with the physical environment. This is, after all, the core meaning of ecology: ‘the study of “life at home,” with emphasis on ‘the totality or pattern of relations between organisms and their environment,”’ to cite a standard dictionary definition.’[104]
In the past, architects had already developed environmental strategies that necessarily implied a fusion between architecture, urban planning, and place. This theme often intersected with vernacular architecture and questions of regionalism, as anticipated at the end of Paragraph 2.2. Such approaches were, in many cases, practical, biologically oriented responses to challenging climatic conditions or traditional ways of building, rather than a conscious commitment to global environmental issues or ecological sensibility.
Nevertheless, the past offers exemplary cases of environmental—and even ante litteram ecological—awareness. A prominent figure in this regard is Patrick Geddes, whose transdisciplinary approach to design was later appropriated and developed by his fellow Scot, the landscape architect Ian L. McHarg, author of the seminal Design with Nature (1969). Like Geddes, McHarg stressed ‘the necessity of sustaining nature as a source of life,’ demonstrating an ethical commitment to the environment that preceded purely practical design considerations.[105] More than most, and earlier than most, McHarg understood the environment as a systemic and processual entity at the ecological level—a complex, interdependent ecosystem. His work was also a source of inspiration for my own effort to articulate a more comprehensive notion of place as a system of processes, one that integrates the ecological perspective while encompassing traditional geographical and sociocultural understandings of place.[106]
Another pioneering architect who worked within a transdisciplinary, systemic framework—focused on human settlements yet attentive to ecological concerns—was the Greek architect Constantinos Doxiadis, described as ‘one of the foremost people of his time.’ Already in the 1970s, recognizing that ‘we are in the middle of a major ecological crisis on a global scale,’ he sought to investigate the interconnections between nature and human settlements with the aim of fostering a new global ecological balance.[107] A transversal yet also controversial figure, Doxiadis founded a new discipline, Ekistics, the science of human settlements, which shared common goals with ecology, as outlined in his testament-book Ecology and Ekistics (1977). Unlike the concrete, place-based regionalist approaches of Geddes and McHarg, Doxiadis’s theoretical work was more speculative and universal in scope. A visionary by temperament, he devoted himself to exploring the long-term potential of the relationship between human settlements and the natural environment projected into the future. In this sense, his thinking was shaped more by the concept of space than by that of place—a distinction that, in my view, for the case, is both linguistically and epistemologically correct.
As climate and environmental concerns rose to the top of NGO and governmental agendas between the 1970s and 1990s, both pioneering architects and segments of the building industry began to respond to the call for ‘sustainable development’ launched by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) in 1987 (see the article The Place of Sustainability). Systemic ecological approaches—such as those advanced by landscape architect John Tillman Lyle, author of the seminal Regenerative Design for Sustainable Development (1994)[108] and founder of the Center for Regenerative Studies at Cal Poly Pomona—or by the permaculture movement, gained increasing traction. Even more ‘mechanistic’ strategies, including the environmental building assessment systems developed since the 1990s (BREEAM, LEED, etc.), have, in their own way, played a part. Whether holistic or technical, these approaches have all contributed—and continue to contribute—to a renewed focus on place in architecture and planning, thereby reinforcing the epochal shift in architectural thinking from the primacy of space to the centrality of place that I have underlined elsewhere (From Space to Place: A Necessary Paradigm Shift in Architecture).
Image 43: Lyle Center for Regenerative Studies, California, USA, 1993.
Closer to vernacular and regional concerns, the ecological approach to architecture—and its constant focus on place—has been a defining feature of the work of Australian architect Glenn Murcutt, Pritzker Prize laureate in 2002, and Malaysian architect Ken Yeang. Yeang, a disciple of Ian McHarg, has worked since the 1970s on establishing the ecological foundations of architectural design, producing numerous ecologically oriented buildings and urban plans.[109] The ‘epistemological line of demarcation’ I referred to earlier—a recognition of the necessity for a new environmental awareness—was clearly understood by Yeang, who expressed it in these terms: ‘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.’[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 significant paradigm shift from space to place is accompanied by an equally profound shift from an anthropocentric to a biocentric ethical vision. As Yeang observes, ‘the basic premise for ecodesign is that our health, both as human beings and as one of the millions of species in nature… depends on the quality of the natural environment.’[111] In his planning and architectural work, Yeang seeks to integrate biotic and abiotic components—living organisms such as humans, plants, and animals, together with soils, nutrients, and other non-living elements—into a unified whole. In his own words, ‘The objective of ecodesign is a benign and seamless biointegration with the environment.’[112] For Yeang, addressing environmental issues purely in technological terms is insufficient: ecological design must be place-specific. This is why I propose we should speak of ‘the place of ecological processes’—an expression that captures the presence of all living beings functionally coupled with the physical environment—before sociocultural and symbolic processes emerge as complementary layers of reality as an all-encompassing place.
Slideshow 05, Images 44-46: Solaris Building, Singapore, 2010. Architect: T. R. Hamzah & Yeang Sdn. Bhd.
Even more than in the past, over the last couple of decades—when the environmental question entered the public domain—the number of actors affected by it has grown dramatically, and the number of architects engaging with it has risen correspondingly. It is not the purpose of this paragraph to trace the history of environmental or ecological design, nor to distinguish among the many architectural and urban approaches to the issue.[113] What matters here is to recognize that the environmental question, in its broadest sense, is helping to reconnect architects with place-based dynamics, but from a wholly different perspective than those examined in the preceding paragraphs. This represents perhaps the most significant new force capable of reshaping the notion of place and, above all, of restoring a new balance 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 architectural approaches to ‘place’ with a final question: is the time not yet ripe for architects, urban and landscape planners to integrate their diverse (place-based) approaches into a higher-level synthesis, rather than addressing them as disconnected parts? Many design professionals are already engaging with the practical dimensions of the issue, and many of these place-based considerations are, to some degree, embedded in current buildings and plans. Yet, as Norberg-Schulz observed decades ago, what we still lack is a comprehensive theory of place—one that complements practical work with a unifying theoretical foundation, making this synthesis accessible to all and embedding it as a core element of environmental disciplines, rather than the isolated outcome of individual research. We need a shared, place-based framework or tool as the first step toward this epochal task: to conceive of architecture and cities—the cultural environment—as inseparable parts of the natural environment, functioning in harmony with the processes of the environment as a whole, a total environment, rather than as obstacles to them.
In the reformed, environmental place-based hypothesis I advance at RSaP, place cannot be reduced to any single aspect—whether physicochemical, biological, ecological, social, cultural, or symbolic. Place is an irreducible synthesis, emerging from the interplay of all these processes. Correspondingly, if the equation place = thing = architecture is true, the same holds true for the phenomenon of architecture, which—within inescapable existential and phenomenological premises—can be understood as a place—the place of dwelling. If place cannot be reduced to a single processual category, and if architecture is itself a place (where processes are concretized into material forms dedicated to dwelling), then architecture likewise cannot be reduced to isolated dimensions—be they physical, ecological, social, cultural, or symbolic. This is, in a sense, a principle of architectural indeterminacy, one that resists any simplistic architectural determinism, and reductionism to parts.
Architecture, urban and landscape planning must therefore be approached within the comprehensive, dynamic interplay of intertwined processes, from the natural to the cultural, from the physical to the symbolic. The challenge—and novelty—for architecture in recent decades has been to gather all these dimensions of dwelling (from natural architectures to ‘high-style’ works) and synthesize them at a higher level of environmental awareness. Achieving this requires a transdisciplinary approach, integrating the natural sciences—particularly the earth sciences—and the social sciences into architectural education, so that these fields become foundational rather than peripheral to the discipline.
Such an approach would support the emergence of a trans-architecture—an architecture beyond architecture—representing the highest level of complexity the discipline has reached in its millennia-long history: architecture conceived, analyzed, and created as a total environment, where any (old) distinctions between architecture, city, landscape, and the natural environment become instrumental, without a real ontological ground. The concept of place as system that I am discussing at RSaP is functional to this conceptual change of perspective, by recognizing the profound solidarity—everything is place, a place of processes—of all existents. This vision is not driven by the pursuit of new styles or formal expressions in architecture and related disciplines, but by an urgent existential (cosmological) and ethical imperative at the dawn of a new epoch: to ask, and answer, what it means to dwell in 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. Translations of ‘Orten’ as ‘locations’ or ‘locales’ are questionable since ‘locations’ or ‘locales’ have far more restricted senses than ‘place’, and this, it seems to me, 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
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