What, then, do we mean with the word ‘place’? Obviously, we mean something more than abstract location. We mean a totality made up of concrete things having material substance, shape, texture, and colour. Together these things determine an ‘environmental character’ which is the essence of place. In general, a place is given as such a character or ‘atmosphere.’ A place is therefore a qualitative, ‘total’ phenomenon, which we cannot reduce to any of its properties, such as spatial relationships, without losing its concrete nature out of sight.
CHRISTIAN NORBERG-SCHULZ, The Phenomenon of Place
I have already introduced the figure of the Norwegian architect, critic and architectural historian Christian Norberg-Schulz in the article The Place of Architecture The Architecture of Place – Part II: A Historical Survey. He acted as a messenger between philosophers like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, and Bollnow, and architects, introducing existentialism and phenomenological thinking to a broad audience of architects. Even in virtue of his mediatory role, architecture became more concerned with questions of place as a direct topic of inquiry – I mean theoretical inquiry especially, in this context.
In this article, I will delve into Norberg-Schulz’s theoretical work for two main reasons: firstly, his ideas are closely tied to the core argument of this website, which revolves around reinterpreting spatiality and challenging the traditional modern understanding of space and place. Secondly, I have a special sympathy for pioneers, crediting Norberg-Schulz as the first architect or architectural theorist to have explicitly and systematically developed a theory of place during a time when the concept of space was the primary framework for understanding architectural phenomena. I will examine in detail his theoretical work on the elucidation of the phenomenon of spatiality, from Intentions in Architecture (1965) to Architecture: Presence, Language and Place (1996).[1]
Although Norberg-Schulz advocated for a shift from space to place in architecture and urban planning, I argue that his approach was not as effective as his intentions in achieving this goal. Space remained the primary theoretical reference for architects, and it wasn’t until the recent emergence of climatic and environmental concerns that design professions began to focus on place, embracing the pragmatism and realism of local dynamics.[2] Notably, Norberg-Schulz was one of the first to explicitly and systematically call for this shift. He certainly contributed to changing the architect’s understanding of contemporary architectural space, particularly through his application of Heidegger’s, Merleau-Ponty’s, and Bollnow’s existential and phenomenological theories to architecture and urbanism, which gave space concrete and existential values that belonged to place in the pre-modern era.
I contend that attributing existential and concrete values to space hindered architects from grasping the ontological and epistemological distinctions necessary for understanding the interplay between space and place. Architects should be aware of that distinction, as it shapes our fundamental understanding of the environment and is crucial for addressing the current environmental crisis in the Anthropocene era, which is characterized by the interplay between concrete (natural) and abstract or symbolic (that is, human, cultural) aspects of reality. This new era requires a clear reformulation of the theoretical bases of the design disciplines that intervene in the natural and the built environment as a whole–Nature & City. Such theoretical bases are intimately connected with our interpretations of concepts of place, space, matter – i.e., things – and time – i.e., duration.[3] Fundamentally, I argue that failing to distinguish between place and space ontologically leads to confusion between the two, which in turn affects their understanding at more practical levels, diminishing the relevance and particularity of both concepts and their ability to impact reality.
Although I consider Norberg-Shultz’s theoretical work a significant achievement in elucidating the meaning and roles of spatial concepts in architecture (as far as I know, the greatest single achievement in the last few decades),[4] his work presented difficulties that hindered a clear understanding of the two spatial notions – space and place. I argue that these difficulties mainly stem from the influence of Bollnow on his phenomenological comprehension of space, which led to an interpretation of spatiality inconsistent with Heidegger’s spatial hypothesis. According to Heidegger’s hypothesis, there is a clear ontological distinction between the concreteness of place and the abstractness of space, structured on 1] the primacy of place, 2] the opposition between place and space, one concrete the other abstract, which is preliminary to 3] their complementarity, meaning that the two notions, however distinct, are interdependent and inseparable. There is no space without place and vice versa.[5] In my view, Heidegger’s model of spatiality consists of that.
Our current understanding of space and place needs further clarification to move beyond what I consider a status of ‘depowered’ notions, where place is often limited to geographical and/or socio-cultural aspects, often tied to narrow identitarian values, while space encompasses a broad range of perspectives, from objective, physical, and geometrical to subjective, phenomenological, material, existential, experiential, and emotional, which are aspects rooted in bodily experiences originating in place rather than space.
Intentions in Architecture (1965)
Norberg-Schulz’s debut as a successful historian and critic of architecture dates back to his first book, Intentions in Architecture (1965), where he primarily explored the psychological and figurative factors that shape the form, structure, and meaning of buildings, suggesting that architecture is a language that concretizes physical, sociocultural, or symbolic values into form. This approach combines practical and symbolic aspects, integrating the physical environment with the sociocultural environment to create a meaningful whole, which can be achieved through three key dimensions: Building Task, Form, and Technics.[6] Indeed, it’s a promising start and a timeless argument for architects. Interestingly, for those concerned with interpreting architecture as a spatial question, the author of the book expressed scepticism about the spatial interpretation of architecture, which was popular at the time. He viewed space as a vague concept, an ‘imprecise use of language’ leading to ‘meaningless formulations’, a word – space – ‘which is employed without making clear if one refers to a physical or a psychological space, or perhaps to some undefinable metaphysical entity.’[7] Ultimately, he believed that space was of limited significance in architectural theory: ‘As it is absurd to reduce the architectural totality to its spatial aspects, we have to reject the current use of the term… In architectural theory, there is no reason to let the word “space” designate anything but the tri-dimensionality of any building.’[8]
Readers familiar with the themes I presented at RSaP will notice that Norberg-Schulz’s starting point is very close to the reasons that led me to reexamine the meaning of spatial notions, particularly how space is often used and perceived as a vague concept that requires careful scrutiny. In his early work, Norberg-Schulz pragmatically, if somewhat reductively, viewed space as an ‘element’ of architectural ‘form’ (together with ‘mass’ and ‘surface’) which ‘denotes a volume defined by the bounding surfaces of the surrounding masses.’[9] Fundamentally, he relied on a traditional definition of space, namely a ‘physical’ or ‘quasi-physical’ interpretation that falls between Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics. This conception conflicted with the psychological interpretation of space in terms of perception, which was also crucial in Norberg-Schulz’s early theories, as seen in the topological origin of the concept of space proposed by Piaget, whose studies influenced Norberg-Schulz and complemented his interest in Gestalt theory. That divergence of senses and forms of space, its fundamental ambiguity and lack of a precise meaning, stimulated Norberg-Schulz to reconsider the spatial foundation of architecture and the spatial terms of his work. That presupposed an inquiry into the historical and philosophical dimensions of space. The result of that research was published years later in his second major book: Existence, Space, and Architecture (1971). Yet, before that publication, he anticipated the basic result of his research in a famous article in which, for the first time, he expressed his reconsideration of spatial concepts. Somewhat improperly, the title chosen for that article was ‘The Concept of Place’ (1969), which I would like to discuss briefly.
The Concept of Place (1969)
Image01: Controspazio, Cover image of the first number of the Italian magazine, which included Norberg Schulz’s article Il Concetto di Luogo (The Concept of Place), June 1969.
The article ‘The Concept of Place’ (Il Concetto di Luogo) by Norberg-Schulz was published in the inaugural issue of the Italian magazine Controspazio, which can be translated to Counterspace or Contraspace, a term coined by the magazine’s editor, architect Paolo Portoghesi, to describe the opposition to space as the dominant approach to interpreting architecture at that time.[10] In this article, Norberg-Schulz introduced the concept of ‘existential space’ for the first time, conceptualizing space as ‘a system of places’.[11] At the time, I suspect that neither the author, the editor, nor the magazine’s collaborators realized that by proposing the existence of a new typology of space, ‘existential space’, and defining space as ‘a system of places’, they were actually discussing the concept of space, not place, as the article’s title suggests. In fact, the article’s primary focus is space, not place: in a system, the system itself – in this case, space – is the actual entity, whereas the parts that comprise it – places –, are secondary or subordinate and exist to serve the system (I have explored this philosophical and scientific question about the nature of systems in articles like Place, Space, and the Philosophy of Nature, or Place, Space, Matter, and a New Conception of Nature). Fundamentally, from an ontological perspective, the article builds upon the modern conceptions of space and place, which originate from Newtonian ideas and view both as physical entities, with place being a part of space. Therefore, this article does not provide any new insights into the ontology of space (and/or place); instead, it highlights a trend from that period where spatial terms with ambiguous meanings, such as ‘existential space’, were becoming increasingly popular.
It could be interesting to analyse the spatial terminology used in that article, but here I will only make a couple of observations. The first aspect concerns how Norberg-Schulz organized the concept of existential space, which is equivalent to the human circumambient environment, structured around the sum of: perceptual values (based on Jean Piaget and Gestalt theory); perceptual values combined with concrete environmental experiences (based on Kevin Lynch); and a blend of both, incorporating phenomenological and existential considerations (based on Otto F. Bollnow). Those were the main ingredients of Norberg-Schulz’s new spatial recipe for architecture; they combined into the concept of ‘existential space’. In that article, the only missing references were to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty; otherwise, all the basic ingredients that would shape Norberg-Shulz’s mature theory of architecture, space, and place were already present.
The second aspect concerns the interchangeable use of spatial terms, such as environment, space, and place, in the text, as if they were synonymous–a long-standing issue. In fact, these notions were common sense notions taken from ordinary language, with no technical distinction made between them, except for ‘existential space’, which differs from the general concept of space. In this context, regarding the distinction between space and place, we can literally speak of confusion in the Latin sense, where the two entities are fused into a single whole, the environment, as denoted by the term ‘cum+fundere’. As evidenced by his article ‘The Concept of Place’ and the subsequent book titled Existence, Space, Architecture, Norberg-Schulz was still confused about the meaning of spatial concepts at that time, swapping ‘place’ for ‘space’ between the two publications despite studying the same entity. The title of the article was epistemologically mistaken, as the real subject was space, not place. Norberg-Schulz corrected his logical error from the article to the book, which shows that he struggled with the meaning of spatial concepts; I find that admirable. I, too, have experienced this struggle, which is an inevitable part of developing specific theories about spatial concepts – moving from the common sense of concepts taken from ordinary language to more technical analysis. Kant, Leibniz, and Einstein also went through this process, changing their minds on the subject multiple times throughout their lives; similarly, Norberg-Schulz was still refining his mature version of space and place at the turn of the decade.
Image 02-03 (move the cursor left or right to see the images): Casa Papanice, architect Paolo Portoghesi, Roma, Italy, 1966-69.
Existence, Space & Architecture (1971)
In this book, Norberg-Schulz offered ‘a new approach to the problem of architectural space.’[12] The missing part in what, in Intentions in Architecture, Norberg-Schulz self-critically considered a naïve realism (concerning the interpretation of space in perceptual and geometrical terms) was the human component of existence. According to the author, by including this aspect, that is, by introducing the concept of ‘existential space’, the limitations of precedent spatial interpretations in architecture could be overcome, and previously fragmented spatial conceptions (i.e., mathematical space, geometrical space, physical space, perceptual space, social space) unified within the embracing compass of ‘existential space’. In this way, according to Norberg-Schulz, space regained ‘the central position it ought to have in architectural theory.’[13]
Norberg-Schulz’s novel spatial program for architecture, which aimed to create an existential dominion infused with human presence, daily objects, spaces, and places (which are the fundamental determinants of his architectural recipe he inherited from a careful reading of Heidegger) was immediately exposed in the first pages of the book; here, we read: ‘Merleau-Ponty as well as Bachelard and Bollnow obviously owe much to Heidegger who was the first to maintain that “existence is spatial”.[14] “You cannot divorce man and space. Space is neither an external object nor an internal experience. We don’t have man and space besides…” – Norberg-Schulz continues, quoting Heidegger – In “Being and Time” [1927] he is already stressing the existential character of human space and says: “The ‘above’ is what is ‘on the ceiling’; the ‘below’ is what is ‘on the floor’; the ‘behind’ is what is ‘at the door’; all ‘wheres’ are discovered and circumspectly interpreted as we go our ways in everyday dealings; they are not ascertained and catalogued by the observational measurement of space”. He therefore concludes: “Spaces receive their being from place and not from ‘the space’.” [‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, 1951]. On this basis he develops his theory of ‘dwelling’ and says: “Man’s relation to place and through places to spaces consists in dwelling […]. Only when we are capable of dwelling can we build […]. Dwelling is the ‘essential property’ of existence”.’ [15] Norberg-Schulz’s theoretical plan was now well grounded and clear, and he simply had to demonstrate how architects could apply it in concrete architectural practice. He needed to reveal what lay behind the concept of ‘existential space’. Ultimately, behind space, we find place, as Heidegger suggested and Norberg-Schulz correctly interpreted. ‘Centres’, ‘directions’, ‘paths’, ‘nodes’, ‘areas’, ‘domains’, ‘borders’, ‘interactions’, ‘orientation’, ‘relations’ (open/closed, inside/outside/…), etc., are all place-based notions that are considered by Norberg-Schulz the constitutive elements of ‘existential space’ and necessary to create meaningful architectures (he built upon the legacies of Kevin Lynch, Piaget and Gestalt theory for individuating these specific elements). Architects manipulate these ‘primordial’ elements to create a primary spatial structure, upon which other constraints converge to give form to meaningful architectures.[16]
Norberg-Schulz’s new focus on the concept of space, particularly his awareness of the existential interpretation of spatiality after Heidegger, had a fundamental consequence: he shifted his interest from space to place in interpreting the phenomenon of architecture. This shift is evident from the titles of other major works that followed Existence, Space, and Architecture: Genius Loci (1980) and Architecture: Presence, Language, Place (1996, the Italian edition). For this reason, Norberg-Schulz can be credited as the first critic and historian of architecture to have conducted a specific analysis of the phenomenon of place, and thus, the first to have systematically developed a theory of place, building on Heidegger’s ideas on spatiality.[17] Norberg-Schulz’s 1976 essay, ‘The Phenomenon of Place’, later became the introduction to Genius Loci, marking his significant shift in focus from space to place. Also, in that article, for the first time, the author explicitly expressed the need for a phenomenology of architecture,[18] an issue that remains highly relevant for architects even after many decades.
Before continuing with the presentation of Norberg-Schulz’s main works, let me address a couple of key considerations regarding Heidegger’s critiques of spatiality, as outlined in ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ and other writings.[19] This is important because Norberg-Schulz built a significant part of his thinking on Heidegger’s ideas.
In my opinion, Heidegger’s work remains unparalleled in his attempt to elucidate the concepts of place, space, and their relationship, which are closely tied to questions about the meaning of things and time. My reservations about Heidegger’s interpretation of spatiality do not stem from the structure of his analysis, which is impressively articulated, but from its limited or even misguided influence on thinkers and scholars, particularly those concerned with questions of space and place. I am referring to the limited success it had in conveying a sense of space that is both subordinate to and correlated with place, as evident in his spatial descriptions since ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’. Despite the passage of decades, Heidegger’s insights seem to be contradicted: in many spatial narratives or interpretations of reality, space is still often prioritized over the concreteness of place. Space is often mistakenly seen as having an independent existence, separate from place, which can lead to it being confused with or even substituted for place. As a result, the fundamental (concrete/abstract) difference between the two concepts is overlooked or neglected, causing semantic confusion and ambiguities that ultimately undermine Heidegger’s original efforts to clarify these concepts.
I also suggested at the wrong impact that Heidegger’s criticism of spatiality sometimes had, and still has, among scholars: this happens when we have a too narrow interpretation of the primary role of place, that is, when we inappropriately reduce the all-encompassing existential value of place, as intended by Heidegger, to mere geographical and/or sociocultural considerations, which become the catalysers of all the existing processes of place. Naïve or superficial interpretations of place may result, particularly in a regionalist or nationalist sense, – see paragraph 2.1 in The Place of Architecture The Architecture of Place – Part II: A Historical Survey – which can overshadow all other dimensions of place or even threaten its existence as a viable concept for theorization. Superficial, instrumental, and political readings of Heidegger’s work may be responsible for the latter point.[20] If Heidegger’s mature interpretation of spatiality is correct, and it has led to highly debatable second-hand and third-hand interpretations in both placial and spatial senses, then the Heideggerian analysis needs to be re-examined and potentially revised to clarify the aspects that were missed or difficult to grasp and put into practice (this aspect is particularly relevant for architecs). My attempt to rethink spatiality, introducing 1] the concept of place understood as a system of processes, and considering 2] space, at the same time, subordinate and complementary to place, is an attempt to clarify and expand on Heidegger’s analysis of spatiality.[21]
I hold the work of Norberg-Schulz, the pioneer in the existential and phenomenological interpretations of architecture, in the highest esteem; however, I must note that his interpretation of Heidegger’s analysis of spatiality has some critical aspects that ultimately obscure Heidegger’s work.[22] These critical aspects, already present in the background of Existence, Space, and Architecture became manifest in his subsequent works. The article ‘The Phenomenon of Place’ is critical to grasp this fundamental question. Therefore, I will now introduce that article, repeating a couple of important passages already included in The Place of Architecture The Architecture of Place – Part II: A Historical Survey, to maintain the integrity and logical flow of this exposition.
The Phenomenon of Place (1976)
In his previous work – Existence, Space, and Architecture (1971) – Norberg-Schulz exposed the existential meaning of spatiality with a specific focus on the concept of space. Now, in The Phenomenon of Place’, he covers another relevant aspect contained in Heidegger’s lesson: the phenomenological side of the spatial question, with a specific interest in the everyday life-world in which man and things participate. According to Norberg-Schulz, phenomenology implies ‘a return to things as opposed to abstractions and mental constructions’.[23] Now, In this world of concretely experienced things, the concept of place forms the central focus of his investigation. At the outset, Norberg-Schulz highlights the strong connection between things and places, and when he asks, ‘What, then, do we mean with the word “place”?’, he responds that, beyond the classical and reductive meaning of place as ‘abstract location’, by ‘place’ we mean ‘a totality made up of concrete things having material substance, shape, texture, and colour. Together these things determine an “environmental character” which is the essence of place. In general, a place is given as such a character or “atmosphere.” A place is therefore a qualitative, “total” phenomenon, which we cannot reduce to any of its properties, such as spatial relationships, without losing its concrete nature out of sight.’ [24]
Figure 01a: The Phenomenological Structure of Place, according to Christian Norberg-Schulz, as described in the article The Phenomenon of Place. ‘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 – rocks, mountains, buildings, etc.) and ‘space’ (as extension or dimensional relationships among things) are its structural parts.
Some important considerations can be drawn from such a promising beginning. The structure of place that Norberg-Schulz delineates concretizes as a ‘totalizing environmental phenomenon’, analysable by means of ‘character’ and ‘space’: ‘character’ (or ‘atmosphere’) encompasses the qualitative elements or things that determine the general atmosphere of a place – its ‘most comprehensive property’; ‘space’ ‘denotes the three-dimensional organization of the elements which make up a place’.[25] Space, in this sense, is a quantitative aspect of place, the measure of its extension or the measure of the extension between the things in place. This perspective aligns with Heidegger’s idea of spatiality, where space emerges from place, making it a derived entity; as he famously stated in ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, ‘spaces receive their being from places and not from “space”.’ Moreover, it is clear that when we refer to ‘atmosphere’, we are actually talking about the global quality of a place, rather than its measurable, extensive component (space). That’s why, according to Norberg-Schulz, places are too complex to be described using analytic or scientific concepts, which only account for quantitative determinants, and a ‘phenomenology of architecture is therefore urgently needed.’[26] Therefore, the ultimate concern of the phenomenology of architecture, its central subject, is place rather than space. Here, Norberg-Schulz aims to reveal the structure of place (see Figure 01a, above). In the initial part of the essay, Norberg-Schulz aligns with Heidegger’s critiques of spatiality outlined in ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, except that he initially proposes the comprehensive concept of ‘lived space’ to transcend the distinction between space and character. Fortunately, he resists this hypothesis in the first part of the essay, as ‘lived space’ would have overlapped with ‘place’, creating confusion between the two concepts (place is ‘lived’… not space).[27]
However, as the analysis progresses, a problematic question arises in Norberg-Schulz’s pioneering study, deviating from Heidegger’s interpretation: the introduction of a new genealogy of ‘concrete’ spaces derived from Bollnow’s phenomenology and his too markedly physicalist reading of Heidegger’s analysis of spatiality, an interpretation that almost totally overlooks the overtly abstract characterization of space as mere dimension or extensio–“space”, the “one” space, as Heidegger defines it, derived in a mathematical manner; this is precisely the entity that was reified as ‘physical space’ after Newton–the translucent glass block without glass, as Julian Barbour puts it–and which passed into ordinary thinking and language. Space. The proliferation and widespread use of spatial concepts (such as ‘experienced space’, ‘lived space’, ‘sacred space’, ‘hodological space’…), which we are now used to, can create confusion between different domains – concrete and abstract, qualitative and quantitative, physical and ideal, etc. Heidegger, however, avoided this confusion to preserve the distinct contours of two complementary spatial notions: place on the one side, the primary entity which carries existential (i.e., qualitative) meanings and values; space, on the other side, which emerges from place and conveys dimensional, quantitative meanings and values (this is a derivation from the original sense of the Greek stadion/spadion and the Latin spatium – see the article Back to the Origins of Space and Place). This complementary and oppositional approach between terms is characteristic of Heidegger’s methodological inquiry, as seen in Being as Place: Introduction to Metaphysics – Part Two. When dealing with concepts of space and place, we should not underestimate the importance of this distinction, but rather use it as a litmus test to ensure we remain faithful to Heidegger’s path. Concepts such as ‘lived space’ ‘existential space’, ‘green, brown, or white spaces’, or the oxymoronic ‘concrete space’, which are additions to the isotropic space of geometrical and physical origin, are introduced by Norberg-Schulz with the intent to complement the quantitative, numerical aspects of space with qualitative aspects (such is the encompassing function of existential space). Among such qualitative aspects, we should also include perceptual space, which Norberg-Schulz understood as a synthesis of elements between Piaget and Gestalt theory, i.e., topological space and figurative space.
In my view, the approach to expand the concept of space beyond its original abstract and quantitative aspects is highly problematic for two key related reasons: first, it deviates significantly from Heidegger’s interpretation of spatiality, where the ‘existential’ or qualitative and concrete aspect is a fundamental condition of place, while the ‘dimensional’ or ‘numerical’, quantitative and abstract aspect is a condition of space as a derivation from place. Hence, Heidegger preserves a logical necessity: the abstract, space, emerges from the concrete, place, according to the known spatial sequence place>room>stadion/spatium>extensio>”space” elaborated in ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’. In this way, Heidegger created and preserved a dynamic opposition, a ‘positive’ tension between place and space – the concrete and the abstract – as the prerequisite for their complementarity and (re-)unification, closing the circle of reality: reality is one, comprised of both concrete and abstract aspects. Now, with the attribution of concrete qualities to space and its reification in the form of different concrete/sensible/physical spatial entities (physical space, concrete space, existential space, experiential space, etc.) the dynamic tension between the two concepts is almost lost. Second, the primary criticism of Norberg-Schulz’s strategy, anticipated by phenomenological thinkers like Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, and Bollnow, and followed by many others, is that it has failed to provide a comprehensive understanding of environmental phenomena, which rely on clarifying the concepts of place and space. I didn’t observe any significant positive outcomes in terms of understanding, managing, and transforming environmental reality as a whole, which is essential for evaluating the reliability of interpretative hypotheses about the nature of place and space, in between concrete (place-based) and abstract (space-based) considerations. To be more explicit, in my opinion, the current environmental crisis is fundamentally a crisis of knowledge and understanding of environmental dynamics, stemming from a failure to distinguish between space and place, or abstraction and potentiality versus concreteness and actuality (together with time and matter, space and place are fundamental concepts to take account of the environmental reality). By preferably focusing on space and giving it concrete qualities, we have restricted its original, unlimited potential of abstract notion, and, at the same time, we reduced place’s explanatory power, stripping it of its all-encompassing qualities. Fundamentally, an anthology of newly created spaces, rooted in phenomenological accounts of reality especially focused on human dynamics – e.g., existential space, lived space, bodily space, perceptual space, experienced space, human space, etc. – has led us away from understanding the complex interplay of place-based (concrete and natural) and space-based (abstract and human) dynamics of reality, overlooking and downplaying their differences, reducing the explanatory power of the concepts of place and space and their ability to effectively address environmental issues as a whole (of natural and human dynamics).
If we expand our historical perspective beyond Heidegger and return to Aristotle’s origins of the debates on spatiality, we find that place (topos) was the sole conveyor of reality’s environmental, qualitative, and concrete characteristics: in Aristotle’s analysis of spatiality, there is no concept of space, which did not exist in ancient Greek thought, or alternative pseudo-concrete vacuum-entities, such as the void (to kenon).[28] We deduce that qualities such as ‘concrete’, ‘lived’, ‘perceptual’, ‘experiential’, and ‘human’ originally belonged to places or things that make up places, as Norberg-Schulz initially noted, rather than to space; therefore, places or things-as-places are ‘concrete’, ‘lived’, ‘perceptual’, ‘experiential’, or ‘human’, unlike what Bollnow and, later, Norberg-Schulz claimed about spaces. On that important question, now almost totally out of sight and not even questioned anymore, consider the interpretation argued for by psychologist James J. Gibson, in his seminal works on environmental perception: he clearly understood that space was not the appropriate term for analyzing the concrete world of things and events so dear to phenomenologists; this is ironic given that phenomenologists created a genealogy of ‘concrete’, ‘physical’ spaces, despite the fact that space never appears – the term ‘phenomenon’ comes from the Greek verb ‘phaino’, meaning ‘to appear’, and only matter ‘appears’ concretely, unless we’re referring to dreams, fantasies, illusions, imagination, thoughts, and so on, which appear in our minds but cannot be defined as ‘concrete’ or ‘physical’, indeed.
Image 04:‘A child “concretizes” its existential space.’ This image is explicative of Norberg-Schulz’s understanding of space in concrete and qualitative terms – a mode of understanding space he especially derived from O.F. Bollnow.
Apart from those problematic questions, Norberg-Schulz’s essay offers a variety of valuable insights. Firstly, I’d like to revisit the close connection, if not identification, between the tangible aspects of a place and the things, which are assessed based on linguistic considerations. According to Norberg-Schulz, when we label places such as ‘countries’, ‘regions’, ‘landscapes’, ‘settlement’, or ‘buildings’ using specific nouns like ‘island, promontory, bay, forest… square, street, courtyard… floor, wall, roof, ceiling, window, and door’, we return to the concrete things, that is, places are ‘real things that exist’ (I’ve dedicated an article to this question Place Kicks Us Back, Space does not), as the original meaning of the word ‘substantive’ suggests.[29] I agree with this idea, but it’s striking to see how far we’ve strayed from it 40 years later: today, we often replace specific names with the abstract, neutral term ‘space’, as seen in the phenomenon I described as Spatiophilia, where ‘space’ is used instead of ‘shop’, ‘beauty-saloon’, ‘school’, etc. or even instead of ‘square’, ‘courtyard’, or ‘park’, which are all distinct places. Instead, ‘Space – Norberg-Schulz continues – as a system of relations, is denoted by propositions… over or under, before or behind, at, in within, on, upon, to, from, along, next. All these propositions denote topological relations. Character, finally, is denoted by adjectives.’ [30] Adjectives or attributes define characters or atmospheres which, in accord with language, belong to names (i.e., places), not to adverbs (i.e., space as a topological relation). This intriguing linguistic framework is incomplete without verbs. I would complement Norberg-Schulz’s fascinating thesis proposing that, within the place-based processual hypothesis of reality that I am advocating for, the mode of presencing of things as places, or their disclosure and constant presence, can be viewed as an event, which is defined by processes and, therefore, described by verbs, ultimately (see Being as Place: Introduction to Metaphysics – Part One and Part Two and What is a Thing?).[31]
When we consider places and things as events, we introduce the question of time as another key component of a place’s identity (see Figure 01b, below, which completes Figure 01a, above). Norberg-Schulz explicitly recognizes the role of time when he states that: ‘To some extent the character of place is a function of time; it changes with the seasons, the course of the day, and the weather, factors which above all determine different conditions of light.’[32] This takes Norberg-Schulz to deal with the question of the identity of places and of Genius Loci, which is the central argument in the second part of his essay ‘The Phenomenon of Place’. Given that time flows, and, with it, the processes that influence the appearance of a place under different conditions, the structure of place is not fixed: place is not an ‘eternal state’ – its identity incurs variations over time. ‘This does not mean, however, that the “genius loci” necessarily changes or gets lost… places conserve their identity during a certain stretch of time. “Stabilitas loci” is a necessary condition for human life.’[33] So, it is essential to understand, protect, and conserve the genius loci in order to provide stability to human existence. Analyzing the genius loci allows us to enter the historical and temporal dimension (time) of place, which completes its structure (character and space) and meaning, providing a comprehensive account of the phenomenon of place. With the analysis of the genius loci, we are entering the historical/temporal dimension of place which completed its structure (character and space) and meaning to give an exhaustive account of the phenomenon of place.
Figure 01b: The Phenomenological Structure of Place. The description of place given at the beginning of the article (which I summarized in Figure 01a) is completed by Norberg-Schulz introducing the component ‘time’ which unifies the ‘character’ and ‘space’ of place. Even if the character of place changes because of the processes in it (e.g., day/night, weather, seasons), its identity – the identity of place – remains unchanged whenever the main components (things/character and spatial or geometrical organization) remain unchanged: the Genius Loci – the spirit of place – does not get lost and it is the proper task of architects to comprehend and take care of it, Norberg-Schulz says.
Genius Loci, Norberg-Schulz observes, was a Roman concept: ‘According to ancient Roman belief every “independent” being has its “genius”, its guardian spirit. This spirit gives life to people and places, accompanies them from birth to death, and determines their character or essence.’[34] Therefore, it was important for the ancients to understand the genius of a place and come to terms with it ‘to become friends’: that was an existential necessity. According to Norberg-Schulz, that existential necessity, which is inherent in dwelling, is structured around two fundamental psychological functions: orientation and identification. To feel at home and avoid alienation, the environment should have a spatial structure that facilitates orientation and a character composed of concrete objects that facilitates identification, allowing for a harmonious relationship between humans and their environment, as ‘Human identity presupposes the identity of place’.[35] The existential dimension inherent in dwelling and place is also revealed in linguistic terms when Norberg-Schulz references Heidegger’s etymological analysis of the word ‘dwell’ which also means to be at ‘peace, to remain in peace’, and connects the German word for ‘peace’ (Friede), to being ‘free’, that is ‘protected from harm and danger’, a protection achieved through enclosure (Umfriedung),[36] a characteristic trait of places and the archetypal act of building and dwelling, enabling the gathering, unveiling, and sustaining of the presence of things in the world. [37] One of those things is architecture, which ‘comes into being when a total environment is made visible’, which means to concretize the genius loci’.[38] So, architecture, by gathering places, has the potential to unveil the genius loci or the spirit of a place; therefore, Norberg-Schulz concludes, ‘the basic act of architecture is to understand the “vocation” of a place. In this way, we protect the earth and become ourselves part of a comprehensive totality.’[39]
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
Genius Loci (1980)
The essay ‘The Phenomenon of Place’ was later included in the book Genius Loci (1980), which can be considered Norberg-Schulz’s comprehensive theory of place for architects. In his book, Norberg-Schulz explores the concept of natural and man-made places, examining three case studies – Prague, Khartoum, and Rome – and concludes that recovering a sense of place (which has been lost in the modern era) is essential for genuine dwelling. The new chapters, along with the original essay, presented the first systematic study of the relationship between architecture and place, which has gained wide acceptance among architects.
The book’s systematic analysis of natural and man-made places employs the same methodological framework as the article ‘The Phenomenon of Place’, which is structured around: 1) presenting the phenomenon of place in its general traits, which are composed of concrete elements and attributed human meaning; 2) analyzing the elements that give place its structure; and 3) defining the spirit of place or Genius Loci. The overall task of the author is to elucidate the meaning of building and dwelling in the existential and phenomenological senses illustrated by Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, and Bollnow.
That book laid the basis for the first complete theory of place aimed at architects and planners. For this reason, I think it is worthwhile presenting an extended account of the argumentation in that book.
Image 05: Delphi Theater, Delphi, Greece, V Century BC.
The Phenomenon of Natural Place
Meaning. The analysis of The Phenomenon of Natural Place is the obvious beginning for any phenomenological theorization about place and architecture. Fundamentally, ‘any understanding of the natural environment grows out of a primeval experience of nature as a multitude of living forces’, Norberg Schulz says; [40] so, he argues, to trace back the meaning of the phenomenon of natural place we should go back to cosmogonies, and to mythological knowledge; these were usually based on the presence of five basic modes of understanding the circumambient world according to: ‘concrete things’ or forces (sky, earth, sea, rocks, mountains, rivers, trees, vegetation, etc.), ‘cosmic order’ (that is the spatial basic orientation due to the course of the sun and the cardinal points, or to prominent elements in the landscape that orientate an entire territory, i.e., a river, a desert, etc.), ‘character’ (the peculiar quality of a territory, e.g., the brilliant colour of the sky, the intense sunlight, or the clear air which point out some specific characters of the natural territory), ‘light’ and ‘time’ (or temporal rhythms), which determine the alternation of day and night, seasons, weather, influencing our relationship with and understanding of the environment. Things, cosmic order, character, light and time are the basic categories on which our concrete understanding of the natural world is based, and while things and cosmic order ‘are spatial (in a concrete qualitative sense) character and light refer to the general atmosphere of a place… [while] “things” and “character” are dimensions of the earth… “order” and “light” are determined by the sky. Time, finally, is the dimension of constancy and change, and makes space and character parts of a living reality, which at any moment is given as a particular place, as a genius loci. In general – Norberg-Schulz concludes – the categories designate the meanings man has abstracted from the flux of phenomena (“forces”).’ [41]
Structure. The analysis of the phenomenon of natural place continues with a focus on its structure, which is basically made of continuous ‘environmental levels’ (places within place within places within places…, the continuous extension from the macro scale to the medium, human scale), ‘determined by the concrete properties of earth and sky’, since both the ground (with its character of permanence) and the sky (with its character of variability) are always present: they represent the stage of life.[42] Concerning the earth, the distinctive character of any landscape, Norberg-Schulz says, its modality of presentation is extension, which is characterized by the surface relief, or ‘topography’, the consistency of the ‘surface’ (with its textures, colours and vegetation) and the presence of ‘water’, whose combinations vary greatly from mountains to hills, valleys, ravines, basins, plains, etc., so that we can have wild or friendly environments.
Image 06: Aurlandsfjord, Norway. Example of environmental structure determined by the earth’s surface and the sky.
‘Being on the earth implies to be under the sky’, which, even if it is continuously changing, it is a constant presence that influence our understanding of the environment, depending on two factors: ‘First the constitution of the sky itself, that is, the quality of light and colour, and the presence of characteristic clouds. Secondly, its relationship to the ground, that is how it appears, from below.’ [43] The latter element gives us that sense of bodily expansion or constriction due to the presence of obstacles that might reduce our complete our vision of the horizon and the vaulted sky.
Image 07: Puttalam Lagoon, Sri Lanka. Example of environmental structure determined by dynamics of the vaulted sky.
Then, the basic stage of our life is composed of the proximity of the earth, its horizontal dimension – the horizontal plane –, and the distance, the ‘otherness’ of the sky, with its vertical dimension: ‘on the plane man chooses and creates, paths and domains which make up the concrete space [i.e., place, actually] of the everyday world’.[44]
Spirit. After describing the elements of the natural environment and their basic subdivision into earth and sky dynamics, Norberg-Schulz proceeds to describe the spirit of natural place, which emerges from one dominant element of the previous analysis: meaning, structure, or their interplay. The analysis yields archetypal types of places, which Norberg-Schulz categorizes as: ‘Romantic Landscape’ (characterized as ‘mutable and rather incomprehensible’, where the ground is ‘rarely continuous’, the sky ‘relatively low [creating] a varied play of spots of light and shadow, with clouds and vegetation acting as enriching ‘filters’, the element of water ‘ever present as a dynamic element’ and the quality of air ‘constantly changing’ – all characteristics of Scandinavian Countries, above all, and of Central Europe);[45] ‘Cosmic Landscape’ (characteristic of desertic lands, where the ground is barren and infinitely extended, the cloudless sky is immense, the sun is burning and gives no shadows, the air dry and warm, an environment which, as a whole, ‘seems to make an absolute and eternal order manifest… distinguished by permanence and structure’ – all characteristics of the Egyptians and the Arabic world, which determine what Norberg-Schulz defines as ‘Arabic space’ where ‘the play of light and shadow is extinguished, and every-thing is reduced to surface and line.’);[46] ‘Classical Landscape’ (the midzone between northern Countries and Desertic Countries, a landscape characterized by an intelligible composition of distinct elements: ‘clearly defined hills and mountains… clearly delimited, imageable natural spaces such as valleys and basins… a strong and evenly distributed light and transparent air which give the forms a maximum of sculptural presence [where the] ground is simultaneously continuous and varied, and the sky is high and embracing [and where] all dimensions are human and constitute a total harmonious equilibrium – all characteristics that shaped the ancient Greek and Roman cultures and the Genius Loci especially manifests ‘where clearly defined natural places are emphasized by the loving care of man’ – see Image 08, below);[47] and a mix of them, which constitute a ‘Complex Landscape’ – given that any of the aforementioned types hardly appear in pure form.
Image 08: Valdarno, Tuscany, Italy: an example of ‘Complex Landscape’, where natural and cultural dynamics are interwoven.
The Phenomenon of Man-made Place
Meaning. After delineating The Phenomenon of Natural Place, Norberg-Schulz proceeds to describe The Phenomenon of Man-made Place, following his established framework, which begins with an explanation of its meaning. According to Norberg-Schulz, since the man-made environment is not just a practical tool for community life, but rather embodies humanity’s understanding of nature, the study of man-made places ‘should take the relationship to the natural environment as its point of departure.’[48] As previously analyzed, the natural environment elements that can be transposed into man-made forms are: things, cosmic order, character, light and time. How did different types of architecture symbolically concretize such elements, in history?
The architecture of early civilizations (Nordic peoples, Mediterranean civilizations) made that transposition by making use of large stones building megalithic structures– dolmens, menhirs, or pyramids – which represented the connection between the earth and the sky (menhir) or represented natural things such as mountains (pyramids), or caves (dolmen). At the same time, those massive structures might give a man-made spatial order to the territory. Conversely, the ancient architectures of Egypt, Greece, and the Roman world derived their orthogonal spatial order from the disposition of their own built structures or from cosmic orientation and cave-like interiors (e.g., some Egyptian temples, or the Roman Pantheon), which constituted cultural environments (either urban or agricultural), which, according to Norberg-Schulz, satisfied ‘man’s need for understanding nature as a structured whole’.[49] However, buildings, or architectures, were not mere acts of representation of the characters of the natural environment; in many cases, through more abstract symbolization, the very act of building could be a mode to understand the natural environment. This was especially true for the Romans and the Greeks who could be credited for having developed ‘a coherent formal language’ (with the so-called classical orders) necessary for the symbolization and articulation of the specific character of each building: such orders would have been adopted to characterize later stylistic approaches, such as the Renaissance or neoclassic architecture.[50] Also, a coherent symbolic language was expressed by Medieval architecture when they had to symbolize the Christian ordered cosmos of Christianity through the manifestation of the light: the dematerialization of the heavy walls of Roman/Romanic architectures in favour of structural frames and large glass-coloured windows ‘was understood as a function of light, as a divine manifestation… Since then light has been a primary means of architectural characterization.’[51] In addition to the ‘forces’ (behind the things), order, character and light, time – i.e., ‘the order of phenomenal succession and change’ or even permanence I add –[52] has been embodied in spatial terms as well, through the alternation of paths and centres (the goal or destination of paths) which are archetypal aspects of both buildings and urban configurations (streets and squares).
Fundamentally, Norberg-Schulz, by presenting the phenomenon of man-made place, is telling us that through architecture and the urban environment man-made places with a specific Genius Loci are created; architecture is the main instrument to build such places. The examples of primitive or vernacular architectures showed that the genius loci of man-made place nearly corresponded to the genius loci of the natural place, while in more structured forms of architecture (from classical Greek to modern architecture), or in certain urban configurations, the genius loci ‘ought to comprise the spirit of the locality to get roots but it should also gather contents of general interest, contents which have their roots elsewhere, and which have been moved by means of symbolization.’[53] So, we’ve come back to one of the recurrent points of my theorization at RSaP, which is sympathetic with Norberg-Schulz’s main point: architecture is a place, a man-made place. How far are we from the prevailing interpretations of architecture as space in vogue in the same period when Norberg-Schulz was making the first steps for a phenomenology of architecture understood as a theory of place?
Structure. After introducing the meaning of man-made places, Norberg-Schulz illustrates their structure. At the outset, Norberg-Schulz reminds us that the term man-made place ‘denotes a series of environmental levels, from villages and towns down to houses and their interiors’ and that all these places ‘begin their presencing (being) from the boundaries.’[54] Continuity and enclosure, which are determined by boundaries, are two main structural elements of man-made places (those are Heideggerian as well as Aristotelian place-based arguments). Enclosures determine a discontinuity and distinctiveness between adjacent areas which are necessary to identify the specificity of a place. According to Norberg-Schulz, the archetypal form of such delimited area is the Greek temenos, or the Japanese shima, which defines a new human order within the territory. This new order is the premise for the beginning of human settlements (i.e., the beginning of sociocultural processes). The way enclosures are determined via boundaries influences the degree of enclosure or ‘openness’ of a man-made place, as well as its spatial direction and orientation; so, any act of enclosure operates through centralization and longitudinality, that is: a boundary creates a centre and, consequently, a path, or paths, as a direction towards such centre. That holds either in the case of architectural environments or urban environments (squares and streets).
Image 09: Graphic reconstruction of temenos (Kourayos 2012). The continuity of a boundary and its closure characterizes the structure place. See Image Credits, below, for details.
A boundary not only defines a centre and a path (or paths) leading to that centre, but it also establishes a domain or ‘field.’ This domain refers to the area enclosed by the boundary, which can be a room or hall within an indoor environment, or a piazza in an urban setting (see images below).
Image 10: Piazza dell’Anfiteatro, Lucca.
Images 11-12: Sacred family church, Salerno, IT. Architect: Paolo Portoghesi. Image source: Cédric Dasesson (see Image Credits, below, for details)
Centre, path and domain – Norberg-Schulz continues – are abstract concepts which can be associated with forms and translated into architectural terms. So, we may have polygons or circles identifying centres which generate three-dimensional volumes or which may define the entire extension of an urban centre (see Images below).
Images 13-14: Villa La Rotonda, Vicenza, IT. Architect: Andrea Palladio.See Image Credits, below, for details.
Image 15: Orthophoto of the City Fortress of Palmanova, IT.
Similarly, longitudinal forms can be aggregations around a curved or straight line to define the parts of a building or the entire configuration of an urban environment (see Images below).
Image 16: Saya Park Art Pavilion, Gyeongsangbuk-do, South Korea. Architects: Carlos Castanheira + Álvaro Siza.
Image 17: Caprarola, IT. Image source: manutoni24 (see Image Credits, below, for details).
So, far we have considered the spatial organization which determines the particular form of a man-made place, either architecture or urban environment. Regarding the character of a man-made place Norberg-Schulz says it is ‘to a high extent determined by its degree of openness’,[55] that is: the different modalities with which we deal with boundaries determine an open or closed area with different degrees of ‘openness’ which is decisive for the character (or atmosphere) of place. In buildings, for determining the different degrees of ‘openness’, the element of transition between inside and outside – the wall – and the openings in it – windows and doors – are the decisive factors. But they are not the only factors: the way the building stands on the ground, that is, the way it is related to the earth through the basement or the floor, and the way it rises to the sky through the form of the roof, are also determinant. Very important, concerning the nature of buildings, ‘meaning’ and ‘character’ are intimately connected with ‘making’: not only is the kind of construction used important (walls, openings, structure, form of the roof, etc.) but also the very act of ‘making’ – making as such – is important: ‘binding, joining, erecting, etc.’ that is the processes that set the thing into work, how they become a ‘thing’ (again, it is evident Norberg-Schulz’s intention to recall Heidegger’s thinking on building and dwelling).[56] Also, material and colour contribute decisively to the characterization of man-made places. Fundamentally, ‘the man-made genius loci depends on how these places are in terms of space and character, that is, in terms of organization and articulation’ of its parts.[57]
Image 18: The Parthenon, Athen, EL.
Spirit. Finally, Norberg-Schulz analyses the spirit of man-made place returning to the same categories he already individuated in the previous analysis about natural places, that is: romantic, cosmic, classical, and complex. Concerning ‘Romantic Architecture’ Norberg-Schulz says it is ‘distinguished by multiplicity and variety [and] cannot be understood in logical terms, but seems irrational and subjective… characterized by a strong “atmosphere”… a live and dynamic character and aims at expression.’[58] Space is topological rather than geometrical, and the atmosphere is determined by complex or even contradictory forms where lines represent symbols of force and dynamism typical of Art Nouveau or expressionist and organic architecture. Nordic architecture and Medieval towns of central Europe are romantic types par excellence, whose genius loci is strong and eminently local. Some traits of the architecture of Alvar Aalto and Hugo Haring are exemplary.
Image 19: Residential Building Mettenberger Weg 17, Biberach, DE. Architect: Hugo Häring
Image 20: City of Strasbourg, FR.
‘Cosmic Architecture’ is ‘an architecture distinguished by uniformity and absolute order… and seems rational and abstract, in the sense of transcending the individual concrete situation.’[59] It is characterized by a certain ‘lack of atmosphere’ and its forms are ‘static rather than dynamic’ denoting ‘necessity rather than expression… it is distinguished by abstraction… shuns sculptural presence and tends to dematerializes volumes.’[60] Space is ‘strictly geometrical’ usually concretized by grid systems or orthogonal axes but also ‘labyrinthine space’, typical of Islamic cities, has a cosmic value. Egyptian and Roman systems can be headed under the attribute ‘cosmic’, and similarly modern American cities. Overall, Norberg-Schulz says grid-systems or universal models ‘hardly allow for the concretization of a distinct genius loci.’ [61]
Image 21: Brookfield Place, Battery Park, New York. Architect: Cesar Pelli
Image 22: The grid of Manhattan, New York, USA. Image source: Luis Dilger (see Image Credits, below, for details)
‘Classical Architecture’ is ‘an architecture distinguished by imageability and articulate order [and] is characterized by concrete presence… a distinct personality. Its forms are neither static nor dynamic, but pregnant with organics life’.[62] From the spatial perspective, the space of classical architecture ‘unifies topological and geometrical traits’.[63] The concrete presence of classical architecture is reached by means of the plastic articulation of forms, and light is an important element to characterize the imageability of such forms. Greek architecture is exemplary but also Roman architecture, the Florentine Renaissance, and even modern architecture have strong classical components, suffice to say the often-quoted remark made by Le Corbusier: ‘Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of volumes brought together in light. Our eyes are made to see forms in light; light and shade reveal these forms: cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders and pyramids are the great primary forms…; the image of these is distinct… and without ambiguity.’[64]
Image 23: Ospedale degli Innocenti, Firenze, IT. Architect: Filippo Brunelleschi.
Image 24: The Acropolis of Athens, Athens, EL. Image source: Vladimir Drodzin (see Image Credits, below, for details).
All of these categories are archetypes and ‘hardly appear in pure form, but participate in various kinds of syntheses’: this is what Norberg-Schulz calls ‘Complex Architecture’.[65] Exemplary cases are the Gothic cathedrals, which unite romantic and cosmic qualities (dematerialization of walls and use of light as a transcendental element), and the Baroque garden-palace with its geometrical network of paths close to elements of nature (cosmic and romantic values) culminating in the palace itself which is usually represented by classical elements.
Image 25: Strasbourg Cathedral, 1015-1439, Strasbourg, FR. Image source: Christophe Hamm (see Image Credits, below, for details).
After discussing the phenomenon of natural place and the phenomenon of man-made place, Norberg-Schulz examines three urban environments – Prague, Khartoum, and Rome – in terms of their ‘image’, ‘space’ (i.e., spatial/territorial organization), ‘character’, and ‘genius loci’, demonstrating how the various architectural and urban elements defined so far – character and space – determine the essence of a place, its genius loci.
The Phenomenon of Place
In the final part of the book, Norberg-Schulz revisits the analysis of place, highlighting its key characteristics, which were introduced earlier, within the context of meaning, identity, and history. I will briefly give a sketch of them.
Meaning. In the paragraph about meaning – i.e., the meaning of place – Norberg-Schulz revisits the fundamental existential question posed by Heidegger, which underlies all thinking about place. According to Norberg-Schulz, the meaning of place is ‘a psychic function [which] depends on “identification,” and implies a sense of “belonging”. It therefore constitutes the basis of dwelling.’[66] Behind this important premise, we see that dwelling is resolved in the relationship between man and place, or man and the environment. So, Norberg-Schulz analyzes that relationship. Since the time of G.W.F. Hegel (who associated the characters of people with the specific locality they were born), J.G. Herder (who introduced the concept of ‘climate’ and characterized the life of man as ‘climatic’), K. Marx (a basic tenet of Marxism – Norberg-Schulz says – is that ‘man, as a biological being, is part of nature, and that nature is an ‘objective reality’, which is given independently of man’s consciousness’), and more recently A. Toynbee (who interpreted the relationship between man and the natural environment in terms of ‘challenge and response’), the direct influence of the environment on humans has been considered, but the specific psychological and existential significance of place for human dwelling has never been adequately explored. According to Norberg-Schulz, Marxism failed to fully understand ‘dwelling’ and human alienation because of that crucial omission. He believes that alienation, a characteristic of modern human dwelling, results from the loss of orientation and identification with places, i.e., the natural and man-made things that constitute the environment. This loss is essentially a ‘loss of place’. To regain a sense of place, we must recover our sense of dwelling, as the two are closely linked. Norberg-Schulz draws on Heidegger’s existential concept of dwelling, as outlined in ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, which emphasizes the connection between place, the things in place, and the idea of ‘gathering’. According to Norberg-Schulz, in the modern era, the components of our environment, i.e., the things that shape the character of a place, have been reduced to ‘mere objects of consumption’; unless humans develop a deeper understanding of the significance of these things, they will never regain their connection with nature, their place on earth, under the sky, among things, and before the divinities.
Things have become mere objects of consumption which are thrown away after use, and nature in general is treated as a resource. Only if man regains his ability of identification and gathering [with things], we may stop this destructive development. The first step to take is to arrive at a full understanding of the objects of identification and gathering, that is an understanding of the concept of the thing.
CHRISTIAN NORBERG-SCHULZ, Genius Loci
Man made-things, just like places (or architectures), Norberg-Schulz continues, are not solely shaped by economic, social, political, or cultural factors; instead, as they exist in the world, between the earth and sky, and between mortals and divinities, they must embody that existential state, which is a gathering of the Heideggerian ‘fourfold’ within things-as-places, implying that ‘natural meanings are brought together in a new way, in relation to human purposes. Natural meanings are thus abstracted from their natural context, and as elements of a language they are composed to form a “new”, complex meaning which illuminates nature as well as man’s role within the totality.’[68] The function of things is thus revealed: things concretize and reveal the meaning of life in its various aspects, gathering the world and being themselves gathered as places. How do things concretize such profound meaning, how do things concretize the Heideggerian ‘fourfould’ (their being natural things – that is, staying between earth and sky –, human, and symbolic/sacred – that is, staying between mortals and divinities)? One modality involves symbolization (others means are ‘visualization’ and ‘complementation’), which starts by analyzing the natural environment, abstracting its characteristics, and concretizing them into new forms that inherently belong to the place from which they originated. Norberg-Schulz, in the wake of Heidegger, has unveiled the unity between genuine dwelling, place, things, and architecture: ‘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’.[69]
The making of places we call architecture.
CHRISTIAN NORBERG-SCHULZ, Genius Loci
In this way, through symbolization, humans can interpret and reveal the genius loci ‘in accordance with the values and needs of the actual society. In general, we may say that the meanings which are gathered by a place constitute its genius loci’.[70]
In relation to the themes I’m exploring at RSaP, particularly the systemic concept of place, I’d like to note that when I discuss symbolic or intellectual processes, which are unique to humans, similarly to Norberg-Schulz’s argument, I’m referring to the fact that humans assign meaning to the things they create, whether concrete or abstract, such as architecture, art, equations, poetry, music, or dance. By doing so, they alter the state of the world and, consequently, the state of place, transforming it from a social to a symbolic or intellectual realm. This implies that places can only be modified, never created, as they always exist prior to human or animal activity; hence, I define architecture as the modification of places for dwelling, rather than creation. What is created by architects is space, which falls within the symbolic domain of human creativity and imagination. So, Architecture is about creating spaces and modifying places for dwelling, as stated in What Is Architecture?.
Identity. Norberg-Schulz then proceeds to analyse the identity of place. After illustrating the meaning of things, place, and dwelling, he can specify the subject of the phenomenology of architecture: place. ‘Places where natural and man-made elements form a synthesis are the subject-matter of a phenomenology of architecture.’ [71]
Places where natural and man-made elements form a synthesis are the subject-matter of a phenomenology of architecture.
CHRISTIAN NORBERG-SCHULZ, Genius Loci
‘The identity of a place – Norberg-Schulz says – is determined by location, general spatial configuration, and characterizing articulation… When all the components seem to embody basic existential meanings, we may talk about a “strong” place [which] presupposes that there exists a meaningful correspondence between site, settlement and architectural detail [buildings].’[72]
The identity of a place is determined by location, general spatial configuration, and characterizing articulation… When all the components seem to embody basic existential meanings, we may talk about a “strong” place… In any case, a strong place presupposes that there exists a meaningful correspondence between site, settlement and architectural detail.
CHRISTIAN NORBERG-SCHULZ, Genius Loci
Very briefly, location (‘Where does man locate his settlements?’) refers to the primary relationship between human-made and natural elements, which influences our emotional connection to a place. According to Norberg-Schulz, this connection is shaped by ‘enclosure’ (establishing spatial relations that facilitate orientation) and ‘meaningful things’, like mountains, sea, rivers, trees, and rocks, which enhance our sense of identification with the environment. Also, the arc of the sun is an important determinant which influences location.
Image 26: Calcata, Italy.
Natural conditions have often influenced the spatial configuration of settlements, such as rows parallel to the land’s direction in defined valleys or more centralized patterns in urban valley-settlements, although more abstract spatial configurations, like the Roman cardo-decumanus or the east-west ‘cosmic orientation’ of Christian churches, can also be superimposed onto the natural environment. In urban contexts, ‘spatial foci’ such as the Greek agora, the Roman forum or Italian piazzas, always contributed to facilitating spatial orientation and identification through a sequence of paths and squares. These are constituted by buildings whose characterizing articulation, by means of the way they stand on the ground, rise towards the sky, and by their particular ‘motifs’ (disposition of the openings -doors and windows), combines with spatial configuration to define the identity of a place. According to Norberg-Schulz, the internal relationships between dwellings, objects, and places, which he is bringing to the attention of architects and planners, are a tangible representation of Heidegger’s idea that ‘that things themselves are places and do not merely belong to a place.’[73]
Image 27: Bangladesh’s National Parliament House, Dhaka. Architect: Louis Kahn.
we would have to learn to recognize that things themselves are places and do not merely belong to a place.
MARTIN HEIDEGGER, Art and Space.
History. Finally, after meaning and identity, the nature of place is also characterized by its history, specifically the preservation of its identity and genius loci over time, despite the pressure of new functional demands, such as practical and sociocultural changes. This is a decisive factor concerning the problem of constancy and change: What ought to be preserved and what kind of changes does history ask for? These are the immediate questions we need to answer, Norberg-Schulz says. Since the genius loci is the manifestation of location, spatial configuration and characterizing articulation (i.e., the identity of place), the primary structural properties of these elements hardly accept big changes as these alterations can disrupt human orientation and identification; ‘if the primary structural properties are respected – Norberg-Schulz says – the general atmosphere or Stimmung will not get lost.’[74] To preserve the genius loci through the conservation of urban and specific architectural elements such as squares, streets and buildings we must understand history as ‘a collection of cultural experiences, which should not get lost but remain present as possibilities for human use.’[75] This also means that places, along with their genius loci, are not fixed entities but rather evolve over time. What’s important is that economic, social, political, and cultural changes must be ‘concretized in a way which respects the genius loci. If not, the place loses its identity… cities have to be treated as individual places, rather than abstract spaces where the “blind” forces of economy and politics may have free play. To respect the genius loci does not mean to copy old models. It means to determine the identity of the place and to interpret it in ever new ways.’[76] What we need is to promote a living tradition, and to do that we need ‘to see the meanings of the things that surround us; be they natural or man-made’, Norberg-Schulz concludes.[77]
cities have to be treated as individual places, rather than abstract spaces
CHRISTIAN NORBERG-SCHULZ, Genius Loci
The final section of the book Genius Loci addresses two fundamental concerns, the first being the state of Place Today, which is highly problematic, as already anticipated when Norberg-Schulz talked about the alienation of modern man, ultimately an alienation from place, now referred to as The Loss of Place, by the author. The second, and concluding chapter of the book, offers a message of hope about the possibility of recovering the meaning of place, which was lost in the modern era, as outlined in The Recovery of Place.
The Loss of Place
According to Norberg-Schulz, The Loss of Place is a modern phenomenon that became particularly apparent in post-World War II Europe, where traditional planning and building methods were abandoned in favor of a supposedly better and healthier environment. Space and the character of places became distinguished for their monotony. The indiscriminate diffusion of anonymous curtain walls, in the USA especially, gave buildings an ‘unsubstantial and abstract character’ which implied a lack of bodily stimuli. The modern urban environment seems flat and lacks the ‘surprises and discoveries’ found in old European towns; attempts to break the monotony often seem arbitrary and, in general, ‘the symptoms indicate a loss of place. Lost is the settlement as a place in nature, lost are the urban foci as places of common living, lost is the building as a meaningful sub-place’.[78] Norberg-Schulz continues his criticism of urban and architectural modernity, arriving to what I consider the fundamental reason (space!) behind the loss of such elements: very appropriately, the author says that modern buildings exist in a ‘nowhere’, unrelated to the territory, and therefore they ‘live their abstract life in a kind of mathematical-technological space which hardly distinguishes between up and down’ and the same can be said about the interiors of dwellings, where we encounter the same feeling of ‘nowhere’ which is caused, among other things, by the ‘neutral, flat surface [which] has substituted the articulate ceilings of the past and the window is reduced to a standard device’, which is usually insensitive to the external environment.[79] This leads to the inevitable conclusion that, following this loss of character and qualities of the environment, we entered a time of ‘environmental crisis’ (Norberg-Schulz’s reference is exclusively to human phenomena – i.e., the perception of the environment from the human perspective and as a human value). This ‘environmental crisis’ ultimately implies a loss of orientation and identification with places, leading to alienation from them.
Image 28: Aerial view of Levittown, Pennsylvania, USA, c 1959.
Image 29: Skyline of Detroit, Michigan, USA.
Norberg-Schulz takes his analysis a step further by proposing an intriguing thesis: the direct application of successful architectural values and techniques, introduced by pioneers like Frank Lloyd Wright, Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe, to urban planning led to the loss of place; in other words, what succeeded in architecture failed in urban planning. Again, space is under indictment: while applying the idea of space as a flowing continuum and open plan to architecture led to the development of a new, outstanding style known as ‘The International Style’, the same concept applied to urban planning resulted in a lack of character, monotony, and loss of local specificity; as Norberg-Schulz notes: ‘Spatially, the modern city is therefore based on a confusion of scales; a pattern which might be valid on one level [architecture] is blindly transferred to another [urban planning]’, and this was possible, Norberg-Schulz concludes, ‘because the concept of milieu was at the outset of the modern movement only understood in physical terms, that is as a mere need for ‘air light and green’.[80] There is a specific point, related to the previous one, concerning the loss of place argued for by Norberg-Schulz: it regards the fact that the idea of an international style involves rejecting local or regional characteristics (rejection of place-based instances), instead favouring more abstract, universally applicable principles (acceptance of space-based instances). Norberg-Schulz argues that this abstract tendency was soon abandoned by the leaders of the modern movement. By 1944, S. Giedion was calling for ‘a new monumentality’, and by 1954, he was promoting ‘New Regionalism’, making it clear that applying universal standards to architecture and planning without considering specific environmental conditions could lead to problems.
How, then, may a theory of place help us to solve our actual problems?
CHRISTIAN NORBERG-SCHULZ, Genius Loci
Allow me a brief consideration concerning the basic arguments I am proposing at RSaP, before continuing: if we implement the above-mentioned concept of milieu, which Norberg Schulz referred to, with ecological issues and substitute that concept with the concept of place as system of processes – physicochemical, biological, ecological, sociocultural and symbolic processes – we arrive at the concept of place as a total environment which is the concept I am promoting, here. This would be a way to recover the sense of architecture and the sense of reality as a total environment through the concept of place; a revision, in contemporary terms, of the theory of place illustrated by Norberg-Schulz. In this regard, in order to understand or recall the holistic function of architecture I suggest architects and, above all, students of architecture to carefully read the chapter ‘The Building Task’ in Intentions in Architecture, which should set up the starting point for any architectural research or practice.
The purpose of architecture is to give order to certain aspects of our environment.
CHRISTIAN NORBERG-SCHULZ, Intentions in Architecture
The Recovery of Place
In the conclusive section of Genius Loci, Norberg-Schulz explains how the leaders of modern architecture’s second phase pursued The Recovery of Place: their aim was ‘to give buildings and places individuality, with regard to space and character [which] means to take the circumstantial conditions of locality and building task into consideration, rather than basing the design upon general types and principles.’[81] The work of architects like Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier in his later career, Louis Kahn, and more recent figures such as Jorn Utzon, Atelier 5, Reima Pietila, James Stirling, MLTW, and Ricardo Bofill (these are the names mentioned by Norberg-Schulz) demonstrates ‘the means for a solution of the environmental crisis [and] how we may create places which serve the complexities and contradictions of contemporary life.’[82]
Image 30: Richards Medical Research Laboratories, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Architect: Louis Kahn.
Here, we are revisiting the theses presented by Kenneth Frampton, Alexander Tzonis, and Liane Lefaivre on Critical Regionalism, as discussed in The Place of Architecture The Architecture of Place – Part II: A Historical Survey. However, Norberg-Schulz notes that such examples are ‘scattered and quantitatively scarce’, a scarcity attributed to ‘a general social inertia… vested interests’ and – this is what interests us – ‘the lack of a clear understanding of the environmental problem’.[83] A theory of place is then necessary since it is through a theory of place that we can develop such understanding; so, Norberg-Schulz concludes: [84]
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… This direction is not dictated by politics or science but is existentially rooted in our everyday lifeworld… Its aim is to free us from abstractions and alienation, and bring us back to things… Only when understanding our place, we may be able to participate creatively and contribute to its history.
CHRISTIAN NORBERG-SCHULZ, Genius Loci
These illuminating concluding remarks in Genius Loci, the first systematic presentation of a theory of place for architecture and urbanism, should always be considered during the formation of architects and remain valid, now more than ever.
I consider Norberg-Schulz’s Genius Loci his theoretical ‘summa’ for understanding his theory of place and, accordingly, the concept of place. Fundamentally, his later major works, such as The Concept of Dwelling (1985) and, particularly, Architecture: Presence, Language and Place (2000), attempt to clarify his positions, providing a more detailed examination of specific questions he had previously explored in his writings. I am going to consider them.
The Concept of Dwelling (1985)
Norberg-Schulz’s The Concept of Dwelling: On the Way to Figurative Architecture (1985),[85] was a return to the existential and phenomenological dimensions of architecture and planning with the following intent: the recovery of the figurative value of architecture to explain the phenomenon of architecture as a specific figurative language. Overall, the argumentation of the book revolves around four main themes related to dwelling: settlements, urban space, public and private buildings (e.g., churches, theatres, museums, houses). If the appeal to the existential question of dwelling, reflected in the title, is a direct reference back to Heidegger’s analysis of spatiality, the way Norberg-Schulz works out those aspects of dwelling is based on the complementary aspects of identification and orientation, two issues already presented in Genius Loci: identification is the human response to the character of the things that are physically present in a natural environment or a man-made setting; orientation is the human response to the spatial disposition or spatial relations between such things that compose an environment.
The focus of Norberg-Schulz’s new exploration is more oriented to the detailed scale of urban space and buildings (i.e., architecture) in between phenomenology and existentialism: the perceptive values of things and place overlap with their existential values, where place, in this context, is understood as that entity which ‘unites a group of human beings… gives them a common identity and hence a basis for a fellowship or society.’[86] ‘To dwell – Norberg-Schulz observes – implies a meaningful relationship between man and the environment’ and this relationship is built on the identification with the environment, which is the reason why man settles; but it is also built on the possibility to leave or reach for new settlements, a function which implies orientation, so that a settlement is at the same a ‘goal’ and a condition for departure, a function of movement determining the existence of ‘paths’. ‘Goal’ and ‘path’ – Norberg-Schulz says – characterize ‘that “existential spatiality” which is set into work by architecture.’[87] The same path/goal mechanism which is at work with respect to settlement (which is a mode of natural dwelling) is also at work with urban space (a mode of collective dwelling) according to the alternation between streets and squares and is also at work with institutional buildings and private houses (which are modes of public and private dwelling), where the spatial organization is devoted to give man a sense of arrival (this is typical of churches) and shelter (this is typical of private houses, e.g., living rooms or bedrooms).
To closer inspection, the aspects of identification and orientation that characterize the four modes of dwelling are instrumental in taking us nearer to the genuine meaning of dwelling according to known phenomenological and existential interpretations: first, identification means identification with objects, which implies a return ‘to the things themselves’ as the point of departure of phenomenological investigations;[88] then, analogously to what we have already seen in Genius Loci, things should be considered as inner realities which reveal themselves externally, according to the known Heideggerian interpretation based on the ‘gathering’ and ‘unveiling’ function of the thing: the world gathered and unveiled by the thing is ‘the fourfold’ of earth, sky, mortals and divinities.[89] Again, this aspect of gathering and unveiling the world through the thing (the fourfold) with which we have a relationship of identification is inherent to all four aspects of dwelling (natural dwelling or settlements, collective dwelling or urban space, public dwelling and private dwelling, through public and private buildings); specifically, things such as the ‘works of architecture are objects of human identification because they embody existential meanings making the world stand forth as it is.’[90] But, as we know from Genius Loci, our psychological identification with things or places is a complementary aspect of our orientation with them; goals (center), paths (axis), fields of action or domains (grids or networks) are the constitutive elements of space, specifically of ‘existential space’, which is always present at any spatial level of inquiry, therefore it regards all four modalities of dwelling.
In The Concept of Dwelling, there are no real advancements with respect to Genius Loci concerning the possibility of delineating a clear threshold between place and space, in the sense envisioned by Heidegger, as I already evidenced in some passages above. Some of the ambiguities I evidenced concerning the superposition of the realms of place and space in Norberg-Schulz’s previous writings remain, and a mere change in linguistic terminology concerning identification/character (which are now rendered as ‘embodiment’) and orientation (which is now rendered in terms of ‘admittance’) as constitutive elements of place is not useful for the scope. Overall, this time, the concept of place is not as central as in Genius Loci; here, the language of architecture accessible through its figurative meaning is the real subject: it is on the distinction between 1] character or identification/embodiment/built form, on the one side, and 2] orientation/admittance/organized space, on the other side, that the language of architecture is structured by means of 3] building types (or archetypes), Norberg-Shulz says. Starting from phenomenological and existential considerations that already allowed Norberg-Schulz to isolate those two basic aspects of dwelling in Genius Loci – 1], 2] – and which are now sublimated in the notion of building types, i.e., a synthesis into a new form – 3] –, the aim of The Concept of Dwelling is to analyze the language of architecture in terms of what Norberg-Schulz now calls A] morphology (which studies built forms as the concrete structure of spatial boundaries – floor, wall, roof, or ceiling), B] topology (which considers the basic constituents of organized space – center, path, domain and axis as vertical dimension) and C] typology (which regards the structuration of A+B into broad general categories, e.g., ‘tower’, ‘dome’, ‘hall’, which manifest as image or figure). The ultimate scope of Norberg-Schulz’s new analysis is to call architects’ attention to the necessity of a return to the figurative quality of architecture in order to contrast the loss of the traditional figurative language of architecture, and – as already hypothesized in Genius Loci – the loss of place, the cause of men’s alienation; both phenomena are reducible to ‘the general trend towards abstraction which distinguishes our epoch’, Norberg-Schulz says.[91]
This call for a return to the figurative interpretation of architecture, which subtends the close position of the author to architectural postmodernism is highly debatable and, in fact, it did not pass the test of history (now, thirty years later, postmodernism is completely forgotten). In virtue of Norberg-Schulz’s awareness concerning the danger of ‘a relapse into superficial historicism’ [92] (which is what actually happened in the decades between the ‘70s and the ‘90s when the phenomenon of postmodern architecture finally came to an end) I consider The Concept of Dwelling a lost occasion to drive some of the insights contained in the books on the more appropriate terrain of existential and phenomenological architecture, as a place-based phenomenon, rather than on the terrain of figurative meanings. Overall, it seems to me that interpreting architecture as a figurative language is a way to enhance symbolic and abstract values (and enhance the ambiguity behind the language of space) rather than a way to promote a return to the things themselves and to place, ultimately, as the existential condition through which things (and architecture as one of such things) present themselves to the world.
Image 31: Post-modern architecture: a catalogue of figures and stylistic elements. Architect: Michael Graves.
The lesson given by history was immediately understood by Norberg-Schulz who made some slights adjustments to his theoretical argumentation, especially for that which concerns the figurative value of architecture expressed in mere post-modern terms (i.e., architectural postmodernism) and found alternative ways to show how a theory of architecture regarded as the theory of place could be taken as a guiding light for the future of architecture and planning.
Architecture: Presence, Language and Place (1996)
Norberg-Schulz’s final, major theoretical accomplishment – the book Architecture: Presence, Language and Place (1996, the Italian edition) [93] – was at the same time a continuation and a summary (other than a theoretical testament) of the main theses concerning architecture he presented in the previous decades. On the one hand, we still find existential and phenomenological accounts of architecture as the ground necessary to develop a theory of architecture through the notions of ‘place’ and ‘lived space’ (rather than ‘existential space’ as in the previous books, which means a slight shift from the existential approach of Heidegger, which, anyway, remains a grounding asset of the theory, to the insights of phenomenology and the world of life through the suggestions of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Bollnow). The theory of place now turns into ‘the art of the place’.
The theory of place now turns into ‘the art of the place’.
On the other hand, as usual, we find the author’s attempt to translate those philosophically grounding insights into architectural and planning notions (e.g., spatial organization, or ‘admittance’, form, or ‘embodiment’, paths, goals, domains, facades, floors, windows, roofs etc., expressed in terms of morphology, topology, and typology), in order to characterize architecture and planning as specific languages to be interpreted through the figurative power of the ‘image’ – or Gestalt, i.e., a whole which is more than its constitutive parts – and the qualitative values associated with it. An image is at the same time ‘sign’ (i.e., indicative function) and ‘symbol’ (i.e., a substitution to convey meaning), but it goes beyond them as a new meaningful whole (such is the meaning of the term Gestalt). This time, however, after accepting the failure of the post-modern image of architecture on which Norberg-Schulz initially (in The Concept of Dwelling) believed to revive the fortune of the discipline of architecture as a place-based language, Norberg-Schulz reconsidered the stylistic question – the rapid alternation of architectural -isms in the course of a few decades, e.g., brutalism, structuralism, new-rationalism, postmodernism, deconstructivism – and realized that architecture shouldn’t be considered anymore in terms of building customs (which is what determined vernacular architecture) and styles (‘…it is illusory to think that we can once again base the art of place upon custom and style’),[94]but should arrive at the re-composition of reason and feeling, science and art, in its ‘quest for the original’, through ‘a well-developed phenomenology of presence’ or ‘the art of place from a phenomenological viewpoint.’[95] So, rather than appealing to the static dimensions of customs and styles, now Norberg-Schulz appeals directly to the pluralism and dynamism of the phenomenological practice for ‘a new tradition’ in architecture.
Here, the meaningful evolution with respect to past inquiries is the interpretation of architecture as ‘the art of the place’. I suspect the passage from ‘a theory of place’, as a means to interpret architecture and access the phenomenon of place as reciprocally structured phenomena, to architecture itself considered as ‘the art of place’ was due to Norberg-Schulz’s everlasting imprinting with the figurative, art-based understanding of architecture (an original legacy of his period as a disciple of Giedion, when ‘modern architecture was thought of as ART’).[96] The art of the place has the task of bridging the gulf between thought and feeling, between quantity and quality, ultimately (and between space and place, I would add, if space and place are interpreted according to the Heideggerian perspective on spatiality expressed in Building Dwelling Thinking -space derives from place- and in Art and Space -things are places-, which is not always the case in many phenomenological accounts of architecture).[97] But this move should not take architects by surprise: ‘Hasn’t architecture, however, always been the art of place?’, Norberg-Schulz asks.
Hasn’t architecture, however, always been the art of place?
CHRISTIAN NORBERG-SCHULZ, Architecture: Presence, Language and Place
The author explicates his thinking of modernity as a struggle between quantity and quality (a struggle between space and place I would say, similar to what was already argued for by Frampton years before) and assigns place the possibility to be the vehicle of qualitative values; therefore, he concludes his foreword to the book with the following remark: ‘My goal is simply to point out the unilateral nature of present-day knowledge, based entirely on the quantification of data and facts. In order to counter the new wave of mysticism and speculative visions we need more information of qualitative nature. As I have already said, this is possible only through a phenomenological approach. This book constitutes a contribution to our understanding of modernism, and it is written in the spirit of a new tradition… since the qualitative approach is often rejected as something smacking of romanticism and nationalism. Instead, the qualitative is what we all share, regardless of 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.’ [98]
… the qualitative is what we all share, regardless of 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
Given that the structure of Architecture: Presence, Language and Place and the theoretical argumentation underlying it is a continuation of the thesis already presented in Genius Loci and The Concept of Dwelling, I will briefly sketch those parts where the new art of the place is explicated and new content, as well as new meaningful interpretations of old concepts, are presented.
As the title suggests, the first concept under investigation is the concept of ‘presence’. This time ‘presence’ is mainly investigated in phenomenological terms, rather than in the existential sense, proclaimed by Heidegger, considered in the previous books (as when Heidegger speaks of the presence of things, the presence of the bridge, of the jug, etc.). Now, ‘presence’ is basically related to the place where the world of life presents, the practical terms through which happenings and events ‘take place’ as daily routines. This place of events or happenings is directly related to the ‘use of place’, which entails ‘all that which the expression “to make use” implies, including practical act, the meanings, and the psychical conditions.’[99] Since architecture, as an instrumental art, is at the service of the everyday – i.e., the world of life – and since place is the concrete manifestation of such world of life, the two, architecture and place, in the new hypothesis formulated by Norberg-Schulz are reciprocally involved in the proposition: ‘architecture is the art of the place’.
The place, then, is the concrete manifestation of the world of life, and as an instrumental art, architecture is the art of the place.
CHRISTIAN NORBERG-SCHULZ, Architecture: Presence, Language and Place
This understanding of architecture and place in practical terms, under the compass of ‘use’, which is the title of the first chapter of the book, is the first important conceptualization introduced by Norberg-Schulz to understand what ‘presence’ means. A step forward in the direction of a pragmatic sense of place as the basis for architecture (a corporal and processual sense, rather than figurative and static, I would say, very close to the concept of place I am promoting at RSaP). Now, the question is: how to translate this meaning into architecture and planning? ‘Arrival’, ‘encounter’, ‘meeting’, ‘clarification’ (of the structure of the environment) through ‘goals’, ‘paths’, and ‘thresholds’ (that is, the sequence of squares, streets, transitions between the two via arches, buffer zones, etc., which in the case of buildings become rooms, corridors, vestibules, etc.) are some of the elements through which the world of life and its happenings become manifest in architectural and urban terms. However, the use of place cannot be limited to a functional level or a level of motor behaviour, but includes, all at once, other dimensions such as sensory impressions, emotional experience, and logical comprehension. Here, memory also plays an important part as the catalysing and synthetizing factor for the comprehension of the spatial organization of the environment – a question of orientation, based on topological and geometrical aspects – and for the comprehension of the structural elements, or forms, of the environment – a question of identification.[100] Those aspects concerning the ‘comprehension’ of place are the subject of the second chapter of the book. In the background of this discussion, the philosophical difference between quality and quantity in spatial terms (which, I would say, is the difference between place and space, ultimately). The third chapter concerns ‘implementation’, that is, the translation of the landscape into architecture ‘so that the use of place can be attained, and a natural landscape can be transformed into a cultural landscape.’[101] How such implementation happens, that is, how landscape can be implemented into architecture is a recollection of existential argumentations based on the Heideggerian fourfold, some of them already dealt with by Norberg-Schulz in the previous books. Here, in the wake of the example of the Greek temple used by Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art, I just remind to readers of this essential message: ‘the building assembles a total environment and… bears it as an inhabited landscape, in proximity to man’.[102] In terms of the thesis about place that I am advancing at RSaP, it means that an architecture (the building) which cares about place cannot avoid its confrontation with physicochemical, biological, sociocultural and symbolic processes: this is the notion of place as a total environment evoked by Heidegger, through statements such as ‘the temple contains the figure of the god’ (the place of symbolic processes), ‘the temple displays the natural support of the rocky base… the vault of the sky, the dark of night’ (the place of physicochemical processes), ‘the tree and the blade of grass, the eagle and the bull… all present themselves as they are’ (the place of biological/ecological processes), while the temple itself, as a man-made thing, is the direct embodiment of sociocultural processes. ‘It is in this way that things [i.e., architecture] render visible the world.’[103]
Memory, identification, and orientation are human-based modes of being in the world derived by the relationship with the world of figures, forms, and spaces that characterize the environment, and which, in the more general terms of Typology (which regards the relationships memory/figure), Morphology (identification/form), and Topology (orientation/space), constitute the language of architecture, which is the subject of the second part of the book – Chapters IV, V and VI. Those categorizations and correspondences between man and the environment follow findings already presented in Genius Loci and The Concept of Dwelling; new examples are illustrated to elucidate the argument, but this time the overall tone of the discussion is biased with the practical and phenomenological aspects of the discussion already oriented by the preceding chapters.
In the third and final part of the book, ‘Place’, Norberg-Schulz illustrates how the application of typology, morphology and topology is implemented through the epochs to define ‘building customs’ (vernacular architecture) and ‘styles’ (stylistic architecture), and how the ‘interaction’ between different ways of being and building (i.e., the interaction between earth/sky, mortals/divinities, implemented into architecture and planning through the interaction between man and the forms and spatial organization of natural and man-made environments)[104] gave birth to modern architecture as a new art of place [105]– a new way of building in search for new beginnings, i.e., a new mode of dwelling, far from crystallized building customs and styles. Here, the examples of pioneers such as Wright and Le Corbusier (they must be credited for having started the new tradition), Mies van der Rohe and Aalto (the first modern regionalist, who must be credited for having taken the new tradition closer to the traditional instances of place),[106] Kahn (a perfect example of the many existential and figurative instances advanced by Norberg-Schulz: ‘with Kahn architecture began over again from scratch’),[107] Jorn Utzon, MLTV, Sverre Fehn, but also, very briefly indeed, and a bit superficially, the more recent cases of Gehry, Ando, Hadid and Holl (who, by following the illuminating example of Le Corbusier and Khan, according to Norberg-Schulz is representative of those ‘signs of good omen, which seem to indicate the twilight of the era of nihilism and the possibility that architecture may begin again from scratch’) [108] are under closer inspection to show how the figurative language of architecture illustrated by the author in the previous chapters has been applicated more or less convincingly in the modern epoch. Fundamentally, what is at stake with modern architecture as the new art of place is the possibility to let universal or global and particular instances of being-in-the-world coexist, i.e., the unification of general and particular.[109] ‘This is what modernism was seeking out when it abolished the images of the past, but it was not successful simply because at the time architects still lacked an adequate comprehension of place.’[110] With his work of decades, with his theory of place, Norberg-Schulz tried to overcome that important limit in the theoretical preparation of architects and planners. A limit which is still actual since, apart from Norberg-Schulz’s proposal, I saw no other conspicuous efforts which go in the same direction of a new theory of place (and space…), in more recent times.
Image 32: Nordic Countries Pavilion, Biennale di Architettura di Venezia, Italia. Architect: Sverre Fehn.
Conclusions
Norberg-Schulz deserves credit for introducing architects to Heidegger’s ideas on spatiality and for emphasizing the importance of place in architecture and urban planning, going beyond the typical sociocultural perspective of the 1960s and 1970s. Most importantly, he made a significant contribution by conducting the first systematic analysis of the concept of place in architecture and urban planning, thereby developing the first valuable Theory of Place for architects and planners, grounded in existential and phenomenological principles. As for the content of that theory, which was inevitably intertwined with the interpretative analysis of space, it offers valuable insights and, at the same time, raises problematic questions for a spatial epistemology of architecture, particularly regarding the fundamental ambiguity between the existential roles of place and space, which only partially clarifies their distinct roles and meanings. The modern adumbration of place into space was not overturned as Heidegger’s existential and extensive interpretation of spatiality would have required and as Norberg-Schulz himself might have wished for. Quite contrary, it seems to me he contributed to understanding space as place, augmenting the sense of con-fusion of the two concepts, even if as an indirect, positive outcome of that con-fusion, his theories contributed to reduce the distance between architecture and reality. To put it differently, Norberg-Schulz contributed to create an image of space that contrasts with the neutral, ‘mathematical-technological’ space of modernity, one that is characterized by existential or lived and concrete qualities. However, he also contradicted the existential premises of his own theoretical discourse, which, based on a rigorous interpretation of Heidegger’s conception of spatiality, prioritizes place over space (Image 1a, and 1b, above). This prioritization implies a clear ontological separation (abstract versus concrete) and an epistemological continuity (one requires the other to understand reality) between concepts of place and space. The reason for this spatial confusion between place and space, which is common in contemporary spatial narratives, lies in Norberg-Schulz’s shift from Heidegger’s existentialism to Bollnow’s phenomenology, which overshadowed the difference between place and space, leading to physical descriptions of space (‘existential space’, ‘lived space’, ‘experienced space’, ‘concrete space’, etc.) that reify space and erase the profound opposition and continuity Heidegger traced: the abstract (space) emerging from the concrete (place), and both necessary to understand reality between concrete and abstract determinations. How can place and space be opposite and complementary, if they both have existential values and concrete presence? The conflation of spatial concepts became particularly apparent after second- and third-hand phenomenological interpretations of architecture, and persists to this day, with place and space often being used interchangeably in most phenomenological accounts of architecture, where place and space often overlap with almost no distinction, if not in the ontologically irrelevant and outdated contraposition between neutrally-physical realms (space) and geographical or sociocultural realms (place).
To put this crucial question in different terms, Norberg-Schulz, like Kenneth Frampton, believed that the ‘loss of place’ or the flattening of urban and architectural environments resulted from inappropriate abstraction (see The Place of Architecture The Architecture of Place – Part II: A Historical Survey). Inappropriate abstraction, in design disciplines, has one specific name: space. His strategy for the recovery of place, influenced by phenomenological accounts of reality, particularly O.F. Bollnow’s, involves attributing concrete and qualitative values to space, such as existential, experiential, lived, physical, and psychological, which often overlap with the intrinsic character of place, potentially obscuring the differences and unique explanatory capabilities of the two concepts. That is a common epistemological error, which keeps on producing bitter fruits: rather than erasing differences by understanding space as place, I believe a better strategy should be their starkest ontological division (concrete versus abstract) as the premise for their epistemological continuity/complementarity (the abstract emerging from the concrete and necessary to close the circle of reality between concreteness and abstraction), and make it clear that any place is the place of processes (Whitehead), where existential (Heidegger) and experiential or pragmatic dynamics (Merleau-Ponty, Bollnow, phenomenology) are interwoven, as I argue when I say that place is the system of physicochemical, biological, social, and symbolic processes. These existential, experiential, and practical values that are inherent to place are the natural antidote against abstraction and the human alienation from reality, rather than space masquerading as place. Place is the antidote and space – as an abstract, quantitative, and dimensional aspect of place – is its complement (complementarity is played on stark differences or oppositions, rather than similarities that a too-physicalist interpretation of space might suggest). To understand reality as a unified whole of concrete and abstract values and meanings, we must preserve the stark ontological difference and epistemological complementarity between place and space (see The Place of Space).
Another problematic question in Norberg-Schulz’s approach is his consistent reference to the linguistic function of architecture, which he interprets figuratively. That ‘formal’ approach was due to Norberg-Shulz’s original ‘imprinting’: his understanding of architecture as a form of art through his adhesion to Gestalt theory as an instrumental key to interpreting that art. Overall, this figurative bias overshadowed the phenomenological and existential aspects of Heidegger’s spatial analysis. Unless the ‘symbolic approach’ to architecture is balanced with other aspects of reality, such as physicochemical, biological, ecological, and sociocultural approaches, it risks leading to too formal (superficial) interpretations of architecture, treating history – the history of architecture – as a catalogue of forms (an approach typical of many post-modern architectures) rather than a complex interplay of processes that should be synthesized and concretized into meaningful architectures and human-built environments. The risk of formal approaches that generate -isms (stylistic approaches ‘which – to say it with Norberg-Schulz – do not take their origins from the specific beings of things’)[111] is that design professions, especially architecture, may lose their fundamental purpose. Norberg-Schulz was aware of this risk when he reevaluated his stance on postmodernism and the role of style in his final major work, Architecture: Presence, Language and Place, where he aligned himself with the principles of (critical) regionalism.[112] Therefore, I prefer to direct architects’ initial attention to holistic processes rather than their figurative expression through forms (forms being the formalization of processes). By focusing on processes we can best understand how they evolve into forms and trace the meaning of those forms back to their original processes. The opposite is not true, and there is always a risk of viewing forms independently of the intersecting processes that generate them (e.g., postmodernism and later examples of deconstructivism). During my formative years as an undergraduate architecture student, when competencies and knowledge were limited, I struggled to access the complex world of architecture and its forms through the study of history or even Gestalt theory (see the article Archi-textures), as suggested by Norberg-Schulz in his writings. The production of architecture is a creative endeavour that involves a comprehensive understanding of the environment (through the concepts of space and place), encompassing physicochemical, biological, ecological, sociocultural, and symbolic processes. It cannot be reduced to the analysis of forms, which is merely the final step in a complex chain of processes that unfold before us and the natural world.
In conclusion, many instances of Norberg-Schulz’s Art of Place are still fruitful and can be taken as a reference for the analysis of the phenomenon of architecture and urban planning. The issues I have raised suggest that Norberg-Schulz’s Theory of Place requires critical revision, putting existential and phenomenological approaches to place and space in the right perspective, and focusing on processual rather than figurative aspects, with careful consideration of both. Furthermore, Norberg-Schulz’s theory of place has another significant limitation: it fails to account for contemporary phenomena that modern theories of place should address, such as the digital revolution and environmental or climatic concerns, which impact ecological and symbolic levels of reality (in the conclusive part of Architecture: Presence, Language and Place Norberg-Schulz hinted at those two aspects, and likely would have been explored further in his later works had he lived enough). Those critical revisions I am advancing at RSaP to promote Norberg-Schulz’s theory of place and space; this is necessary, decades after his works were published.
As I have stated in recent articles, architecture and urban planning should adopt a transdisciplinary approach to keep pace with and manage the complex nature of reality. This would be a further development beyond Norberg-Schulz’s theorization, which was largely conceived in interdisciplinary terms (on the difference between transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches, see Note [16] in On the Modernity of Patrick Geddes). Transdisciplinarity implies that architecture and urban planning will evolve into disciplines that transcend their traditional boundaries, embracing the total environment as their new territory – the ultimate place of processes where nature and culture are co-determined. All design professions that intervene on the physical environment should be considered place-based professions, as they should comprehend place as the interplay of evolutionary dynamics involving physicochemical, biological, ecological, sociocultural, and symbolic processes, all simultaneously. This is a new realism for the disciplines of design: its doesn’t imply a loss of specificity, but rather encourages practitioners to develop non-hierarchical collaborative approaches, fostering a more unified and synthetic understanding of reality, which is shaped by both natural and human processes. After all, this conviction was also evident in Norberg-Schulz’s later works.
Notes
[1] I will consider the following theoretical production: Intentions in Architecture (1965), The Concept of Place (1969), Existence, Space & Architecture (1971), The Phenomenon of Place (1976), Genius Loci (1980), The Concept of Dwelling (1985), Architecture: Presence, Language, and Place (1996).
[2] A turn which is more practical than theoretical, as I am maintaining at RSaP: new practices which are going to change the old meanings of concepts. For instance, this is what is happening with the concept of place as system of processes which I have been trying to unravel in all its intricate ramifications for more than a decade.
[3] ‘Time as duration’ regards the duration of processes that allow things to appear to our eyes for what they are, to persist and eventually decay; among such things, we find architecture and the city as two meaningful human creations.
[4] Apart from Norberg-Schulz, Pevsner, Giedion, Zevi, and, more recently, Alexander, Frampton, and Perez-Gomez are the authors that, more significantly than others, variously and differently contributed to elucidate the meaning and the relevance of spatial concepts in architecture, in the second part of the XX century, especially.
[5] See Place and Space: A Philosophical History, The Place of Architecture The Architecture of Place – Part II: A Historical Survey, with a particular reference to the essays ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ and ‘Art and Space’ , where we find all the basic ingredients to establish the fundamental relationships between ‘place’, ‘space’, and ‘things’ – which are fundamental for our spatial understanding of reality as well as for our spatial understanding of architecture.
[6] Christian Norberg-Schulz, Intentions in Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965), 104. Specifically, see Chapter 2. The Building Task in Christian Norberg-Schulz, Intentions in Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965), 109-130.
[7] Christian Norberg-Schulz, Intentions in Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965), 19.
[8] Ibid., 96-97.
[9] Ibid., 133-134.
[10] Regarding that choice, Portoghesi writes (my translation): ‘Choosing “Counterspace” as the title for a magazine – a word which does not appear in vocabulary – means setting as the object of analysis and information what in architecture is not “space” but its objective and historical position in reality.’ In Controspazio, Anno I, n.1, Giugno 1969, 7.
[11] The article is in the Italian language. Christian Norberg-Schulz, ‘Il Concetto di Luogo’, in Controspazio, Anno I, n.1, Giugno 1969, 21
[12] Christian Norberg-Schulz, Existence, Space & Architecture (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971), 7.
[13] Ibid., 16.
[14] Here the reference is to Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception (1962), Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1964), and Bollnow’s Mensch un Raum (1963). To say that ‘existence is spatial’ (Heidegger) does not mean that existence is a question of space, but it means is a question of spatiality. Space and spatiality are two different notions. Spatiality is the process through which space is disclosed by means of place (see note 19, below): this is what Heidegger meant by that expression in ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’. Around that expression – existence is spatial – a lot of misleading interpretations of space were given which were opposite to the interpretation of spatiality offered by Heidegger: interpreting existence as a question of space means overturning Heidegger’s intention to give place ontological priority over space.
[15] Ibid., 16. Anticipating conclusions on Norberg-Schulz’s lifetime research, it is my contention that, concerning space, Norberg-Schulz remained trapped between two highly questionable conceptualizations: the physical and the perceptual, which are both untenable and which he derived more from Bollnow than from Heidegger.
[16] I redirect those architects and students of architecture interested in such specific aspects of ‘existential space’, to the videoclip ‘Chōra’ and the article Archi-textures, where I showed how I implemented those notions into architectural design.
[17] Many architects and planners before and after Norberg-Schulz dealt with places in many different articles and books but, for me, no one reached a complete understanding of the phenomenon of place to be called A Theory of Place, which he systematically pursued through so many writings along his entire career.
[18] 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), 415.
[19] E.g., in the essay ‘Art and Space’, 1969. By the term ‘spatiality’ we should not mean ‘space’. Spatiality (and ‘spatial’) is not synonymous with space, but it describes the process through which space is disclosed by means of place. Then ‘spatiality’ should be preferably understood as a concrete term that puts into complementary relation place and space: place has an existential dimension, while space, emerging from the ‘aperture’ left open by place, should be regarded as a dimensional extent, i.e., extensional dimension (extensio), that is, space is the measure or extension inherent in place or between the things in place (‘measure’ – i.e., ‘measurable distance’ – and ‘extension’ are rendered by the Latin ‘spatium’ and ‘extensio’, Heidegger observed in ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’). From the mere linguistic perspective, it seems to me the term ‘spatiality’ is too much biased, in the sense that it is almost understood as pertaining to space only. This fact reinforces the idea that space is primary and place is derivative, which is contrary to the theorization offered by Heidegger. In technical and scholarly discussions, an alternative term for ‘spatiality’ could be the Platonic ‘chōra’, a notion which – as Casey noted in the Chapter on Plato’s Timaeus, in The Fate of Place – is neither place nor space and, simultaneously, both place and space.
[20] I’m referring to Heidegger’s tragic, association with the Nazi Party, in the period when he was elected rector at the University of Freiburg, in 1933, before he resigned a year later, 1934. I wonder if Heidegger would have avoided ‘the greatest stupidity of his life’* if he had developed his mature critics of spatiality before the ‘30s. I cannot see how that mature concept of spatiality he delineated since the ‘50s, with such a wide existential horizon – ‘existential’ here means a hymn to life, creation, and, therefore, inclusion – could coexist with such narrow interpretations in a geopolitical sense, which, more often than not, are the cause of death, destruction and exclusion. The two positions cannot co-exist.
* That is the way Heidegger once called his commitment to the Nazi Party in a dialogue with art historian and intimate friend Heinrich Wiegand Petzet: the episode is narrated by Petzet in the book ‘Encounters and Dialogues With Martin Heidegger 1929-1976’.
[21] Concerning the second point, I derive space from place similarly to the way Heidegger derived it: space, for me, is the openness afforded by place, in the sense of extension, a notion I directly associate with what Heidegger called ‘extensio’ in ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ (here, I stay anchored to the original sense of ‘spatium’ from ‘stadion’ as a distance or measure of extension, hence a dimensional sense, and, as such, an abstract sense – see also the article Back to the Origins of Space and Place). I consider space – the abstract – complementary to place – the concrete – the two combining into the self-perpetuating circuit of reality comprised between the CONCRETE( )ABSTRACT. That circle, that relation, which I have rendered by the pictorial expression of two opposing brackets ( ) defines a real unity – the region comprised between the two brackets – which cannot be anything else than a place-based entity (i.e., a place), if language and history have a sense. In fact, the concept of place is built on the presence of limits and boundaries since Aristotle posed the question ‘What is Place/Topos?’ Aristotle on the Concept of Place; therefore, by that circuit or ‘circle’, as a limit or boundary, we always return to the primacy of place. That’s why I ultimately say that reality is a place – On the Structure of Reality – and everything is a place, a place of processes – Places Everywhere—Everything is Place. This also means that things are places (in turn, this also means that architecture, which is a specific kind of thing, is a place), or to put it with Heidegger (in ‘Art and Space’), ‘we would have to learn to recognize that things themselves are places and do not merely belong to a place’, Martin Heidegger ‘Art and Space’ in Man and World, 6(1), 1973, 6.
[22] Fundamentally, introducing a concept such as ‘existential space’ means depriving place of its specificity, which is its existential value. We should be speaking of ‘existential place’ rather than ‘existential space’. If space receives its being from place – this is what Heidegger explicitly says – how can it be ‘existential’? We should interpret ‘existential’ as the capacity to afford ‘existence’ – this is what place does before any space can be conceived. But if this interpretation of mine can be debatable or ambiguous, the implications of Norberg-Schulz’s move, by the introduction of the concept of existential space, are not – we are going to see it in the analysis of the essay The Phenomenon of Place.
[23] 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. Originally published in Architectural Association Quarterly, no. 4 (1976): 3-10.
[24] Ibid., 414.
[25] Ibid., 418.
[26] Ibid., 415.
[27] Ibid., 418.
[28] Both Heidegger and Einstein were aware of that. On the contrary, Bollnow commenced his analysis of spatiality by talking about ‘the conception of space in Aristotle’. In O.F. Bollnow, Human Space (London: Hyphen Press, 2011), 28-32. As a rule of thumb, I suggest to readers to look with scepticism all those theorizations talking about ‘the concept of space in Aristotle’, since those are misleading interpretations, or, at least, their use of spatial terminology is inappropriate.
[29] Christian Norberg-Schulz, The Phenomenon of Place, 420.
[30] Ibid., 420-421
[31] Years later, in the book Architecture: Presence, Language and Place (2000) Norberg-Schulz returns to that analogy between verbal language and architectural language offering a more complete view. Christian Norberg-Schulz, Architecture: Presence, Language and Place (Milano: Skira Editore, 2000), 127.
[32] Ibid., 420.
[33] Ibid., 422.
[34] Ibid., 422.
[35] Ibid., 425.
[36] Ibid., 425.
[37] Ibid., 425.
[38] Ibid., 426.
[39] Ibid., 426.
[40] Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci, 24.
[41] Ibid., 32.
[42] Ibid., 32.
[43] Ibid., 38.
[44] Ibid., 40.
[45] Ibid., 42.
[46] Ibid., 45.
[47] Ibid., 45-46.
[48] Ibid., 50.
[49] Ibid., 52.
[50] Ibid., 53.
[51] Ibid., 54.
[52] Ibid., 56.
[53] Ibid., 58.
[54] Ibid., 58.
[55] Ibid., 63.
[56] Ibid., 65.
[57] Ibid., 69.
[58] Ibid., 69.
[59] Ibid., 71.
[60] Ibid., 72.
[61] Ibid., 73.
[62] Ibid., 73.
[63] Ibid., 73.
[64] Ibid., 76.
[65] Ibid., 76.
[66] Ibid., 166.
[67] Ibid., 168.
[68] Ibid., 169.
[69] Ibid., 170.
[70] Ibid., 170.
[71] Ibid., 170.
[72] Ibid., 179-180. The underscored terms are mine.
[73] Martin Heidegger, ‘Art and Space’ in Man and World, 6(1), 1973, 6. See also Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci, 176.
[74] Ibid., 180.
[75] Ibid., 180.
[76] Ibid., 182.
[77] Ibid., 185.
[78] Ibid., 190.
[79] Ibid., 190.
[80] Ibid., 194.
[81] Ibid., 195.
[82] Ibid., 200-201.
[83] Ibid., 201.
[84] Ibid., 201-202.
[85] Christian Norberg-Schulz, The Concept of Dwelling: On the Way to Figurative Architecture. New York: Rizzoli International Publishing, 1985. The Italian edition, by Electa Editrice, was published in 1984.
[86] Ibid., 9.
[87] Ibid., 13.
[88] Ibid., 16.
[89] Ibid., 17.
[90] Ibid., 19.
[91] Ibid., 133.
[92] Ibid., 132.
[93] 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.
[94] Ibid., 310.
[95] Ibid., 311.
[96] Norberg-Schulz, Architecture: Presence, Language and Place, 7.
[97] In almost any phenomenological account of architecture, the concepts of place and space often overlap, erasing the original distance between the concrete (place) and the abstract (space), at the cost of their dissolution into ill-defined conceptualizations that overshadow their original meanings and meaningful ontological difference. For me, that is one of the consequences of the diffusion of the speculative and quantitative mindset in the modern and contemporary epochs. Place is tentatively substituted with space, which, even if it is charged with ‘qualitative’ and ‘concrete’ or ‘lived’ values, always conserves its original, abstract, quantitative, and mathematical value, as a sheer unprescindable residuum (a continuum…), well fixed in the inaccessible recesses of the human mind forged by language, which is rather stable in its basic notions. This fact has a double limiting consequence for our understanding of spatial notions: the impossibility for space to acquire the entire qualitative gamut of characters that originally belonged to place; the weakening of the original qualitative characters of place, given that that substitution also means a substitution of the subject of study.
[98] Norberg-Schulz, Architecture: Presence, Language and Place, 12, 17.
[99] Ibid., 28.
[100] Ibid., 42.
[101] Ibid., 91.
[102] Ibid., 110.
[103] Ibid., 111.
[104] Ibid., 311-312.
[105] Ibid., 319.
[106] Ibid., 324.
[107] Ibid., 336.
[108] Ibid., 351. According to Norberg-Schulz ‘the era of nihilism’ culminated in the void formalism behind postmodernism and, most of all, deconstructivism, which is a position I partially agree with. Yet, I would make a distinction between the two: I see deconstructivism as a continuation (actually, the end of a process) of what Wright initiated by breaking ‘the box’ and letting space emerge. With deconstructivism, the ordinary box was completely dissolved and space remained as the only entity of architecture, which is anyway the biggest fault of deconstructivism, since it was not able to complement its destructive part, or pars destruens (in this case, space is the agent that allowed destruction) with a constructive part, pars construens (place, synthesized by the forms and spatial organization behind them, should have been the constructive agent). For me, the only architect who was able to complement the two modalities, the spatial and the placial, was Zaha Hadid in her very first works culminating in the LF One, Weil am Rhein, 1995-96. Later works became a fascinating yet solipsistic (nihilistic?) spatial research, like many other deconstructionist architectures. I agree with Norberg-Schulz on this matter.
[109] Ibid., 351.
[110] Ibid., 354.
[111] Ibid., 92.
[112] Ibid., 93.
Cited Works
Bollnow, O.F., Human Space (London: Hyphen Press, 2011), 28-32.
Heidegger, Martin. ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in Basic Writings, edited by David Farrel Krell. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1993.
—. ‘Art and Space’ in Man and World, 6(1), 3–8, 1973.
Norberg-Schulz, Christian. Intentions in Architecture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965.
—. ‘Il Concetto di Luogo’. In Controspazio,1, (1969): 20-23.
—. Existence, Space & Architecture. New York: Rizzoli Publisher, 1971.
—. Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1980.
—. The Concept of Dwelling: On the Way to Figurative Architecture. New York: Rizzoli International Publishing, 1985.
—. 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.
—. Architecture: Presence, Language and Place. Milano: Skira Editore, 2000.
Portoghesi, Paolo. ‘Editoriale’. In Controspazio, Anno I, n.1, 1969.
Image Credits
Featured Image: Nordic countries Pavilion, Biennale di Architettura di Venezia, Italia. Architecture: Sverre Fehn. Installation ‘Another Generosity’, Curators: Eero Lunden, Juulia Kauste. Photography: Felix Michaud, on felixmichaud.com
Images 01, 32: Alessandro Calvi Rollino, CC, BY-NC-SA
Image 02-03: Casa Papanice, on docomomoitalia.it
Image 04: Christian Norberg-Schulz, Intentions in Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965), 6.
Image 07: Puttalam Lagoon, on sonofthemorninglight.com
Image 08: Valdarno, on nelvaldarno.it
Image 09: Temenos, on circe-antique.huma-num.fr
Image 11: Sacred family church, Photography: Cédric Dasesson, on cedricdasesson.it
Image 12: Sacred family church, black and white source on journals.openedition.org
Image 14: Villa La Rotonda, on villalarotonda.it
Image 16: Saya Park Art Pavilion, on carloscastanheira.pt
Image 17: Caprarola, on IG/manutoni24.com
Image 19: Residential Building, on hugo-haering.de
Image 20: Strasbourg, by Getty Images, on nationalgeographic.com
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Image 23: Ospedale degli Innocenti, on istitutodegliinnocenti.it
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Image 25: Stasbourg Cathedral, Photography: Christophe Hamm, on visitstrasbourg.fr
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