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. We have seen his activity as a messenger between Heidegger’s existentialism and phenomenology, the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard and Bollnow on the one side, and architects on the other side: he was the one who introduced existentialism and phenomenological thinking to a large audience of architects. Even in virtue of this mediatory role, architecture became more concerned with questions of place as a direct topic of inquiry – I mean theoretical enquiry especially, in this context.
Now, in this article, I have decided to focus in detail on Norberg-Schulz’s theoretical activity for two reasons, mainly: first, his work is directly connected with the core argument of this website – the interpretation of spatiality, or, better, its re-interpretation if we argue against the traditionally modern understanding of spatial concepts, i.e., space and place. Second, I have a special sympathy for pioneers: I credit Norberg-Schulz for being the first architect or architectural theorist to have overtly and systematically pursued a theory of place in a period in which the concept of space was the basic interpretative key for architectural phenomena, especially. I will consider in detail his theoretical production focused on the elucidation of the phenomenon of spatiality, starting from Intentions in Architecture (1965) until the later Architecture: Presence, Language and Place (1996).[1]
Although Norberg-Schulz sponsored a turn from space to place in architecture and urban planning, in this article, I will argue that the way he structured his thinking and, most of all, the spatial notions he made use of were not as effective in provoking a real turn from space to place: space remained the principal theoretical reference for architects, and, as I already said in different occasions, we had to wait for the recent emergence of climatic and environmental questions before design professions could have a significant turn to place – a turn towards the pragmatism and realism of the dynamics intrinsic to places.[2] Indeed, Norberg-Schulz’s voice was probably the first to consciously and systematically claim that turn. Certainly, he contributed to changing the architect’s understanding of contemporary architectural space: even by Norberg-Schulz’s transposition of Merleau-Ponty and Bollnow’s phenomenological theorization into the domain of architecture and planning, that concept – architectural space – inherited many concrete and existential values that, in the pre-modern era, belonged to place.
It is my contention that this fact, this attribution of existential and concrete values to space, did not help architects have a clear understanding of the ontological and epistemological differences between space and place, quite the contrary. I believe architects should have clear in mind that difference since that difference structures our deepest understanding of the environment and its dynamics; this is mandatory if we want to face the current environmental crisis, at the beginning of a new era – the Anthropocene. This new era requires a clear reformulation of the theoretical bases of the design disciplines that intervene in the built environment. 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 putting a veil on the differences between place and space at an ontological level results in con-fusing the two entities; a con-fusion which affects their comprehension at more pragmatic levels (or ‘ontic levels’ to use a philosophical terminology), thereby diminishing the relevance and particularity of both concepts and their efficacy to intervene on reality.
Even if I consider Norberg-Shultz’s theoretical activity a great achievement in the effort to elucidate the meaning and the roles of spatial concepts in architecture (as far as I know, the greatest single achievement in the last few decades),[4] nonetheless, his work presented difficulties that were ultimately an obstacle to a clear-cut determination of the meaning of the two spatial notions – space and place: these difficulties, I will argue, mainly arise from the influence that Bollnow exerted on his phenomenological comprehension of space; that caused an interpretation of spatiality not wholly consistent with the spatial hypothesis of Heidegger, which I consider the standard of reference for understanding the meaning of spatial concepts: in Heidegger’s hypothesis of spatiality, there is a clear ontological distinction between the concreteness of place and the abstractness of space – a distinction structured on: 1] the primacy of place; 2] the opposition between place and space (one concrete the other abstract) which is the premise for their peculiar type of alliance, and consequently for 3] their complementarity, which means that the two notions goes together: there is no space without place and vice versa.[5] That is what Heidegger’s model of spatiality consists of, according to me.
The way we currently understand concepts of space and place still needs elucidation to leave definitely behind what I consider a status of ‘depowered’ notions, where place is still too often restricted to socio-cultural and geographical considerations, often associated with narrow identitarian values, while space spans in the large range from objective, physical considerations of geometrical origin to subjective, phenomenological/material considerations of existential/experiential/emotional origin by way of the body.
Intentions in Architecture (1965)
Norberg-Schulz’s debut as a successful historian and critic of architecture is traceable to his first book Intentions in Architecture (1965), where the author mainly expressed his interest in the psychological and figurative factors that determine the form, the structure, and the meaning of buildings, this latter factor implying that architecture should be considered a specific language which deals with the concretization of certain values – either physical, sociocultural or symbolic – into form. An approach aimed at complementing practical with symbolic aspects, the physical environment with the sociocultural environment, transforming them into a meaningful totality ‘to be carried out by means of three basic dimensions: Building Task, Form, and Technics’.[6] A promising start, indeed; an evergreen argumentation for architects. However, interestingly enough for those who care about the interpretation of architecture as a spatial question, in that book, the author expressed his scepticism on the spatial interpretation of architecture, so much in vogue in that period: he considered space a fuzzy 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] That’s why, in the end, he maintained that space was a concept of limited importance 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]
The reader who knows the themes that I am presenting at RSaP can see how close is Norberg-Schulz’s starting point to the reasons which led me to reconsider the meaning of spatial notions: space, in many cases, is still used and ‘perceived’ as a fuzzy concept, thereby a concept which still needs careful inspection. Very pragmatically, and a bit reductively, in this first work, Norberg-Schulz considered space 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, i.e., a ‘physical’ or ‘quasi-physical’ interpretation in between Euclidean geometry and Newtonian physics. That conception somehow conflicted with the psychological interpretation of space in terms of perception, which also played an important part in Norberg-Schulz’s first theorizations (that is especially evident if we consider the topological origin of the concept of space proposed by Piaget, whose studies were a point of reference for Norberg-Schulz, complementing his interest for 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), on which I want to spend a few words.
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 by Norberg-Schulz appeared in the first number of the Italian magazine Controspazio, which we could translate as Counterspace, or Contraspace since, by that new-coined expression, the Italian editor of the magazine, architect Paolo Portoghesi, meant the opposition to space as the univocal mode of interpreting architecture, so in vogue at that time.[10] Here, Norberg-Schulz presented the concept of ‘existential space’ for the first time and regarded space as ‘a system of places’.[11] I suspect nobody at that time, neither the author, nor the editor or the people collaborating at the magazine realized that if you propose the existence of a new typology of space – ‘existential space’, which is the main subject of the article – and you say that ‘space is a system of places’, you are not speaking about the concept of place, as the title of the article suggests, but you are speaking about the concept of space. In fact, space is the real argument of the article, not place: in a system (space is the system, according to the definition given by Norberg-Schulz) the system itself (i.e., space) is the real and actual entity, not the parts it is composed of (places); parts are ‘instrumental’ to the system, in the sense that they are subsidiary entities with respect to the existence of the system (I have spoken of this specific philosophical and scientific question concerning the nature of systems in a few articles, e.g., Place, Space, and the Philosophy of Nature, or Place, Space, and a New Conception of Nature). Fundamentally, from an ontological perspective, in the article, we are within the tradition of the modern conceptions of space and place; conceptions of Newtonian derivation or interpretation, where both space and place are interpreted as physical entities, and one, place, part of the other, space. Therefore, concerning space, no relevant ontological news in this article; the only news regards the tendency of that period for the proliferation of spatial terms of ambiguous nature: among others, such is ‘existential space’.
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 regards the way Norberg-Schulz structured the concept of existential space which is nothing other than another term for the (human) circumambient environment, structured on the sum of: perceptual values (derived from Jean Piaget and Gestalt theory); perceptual values and concrete environmental experiences (derived from Kevin Lynch); a mixture of them, in-between phenomenological and existential considerations (derived from Otto F. Bollnow). Those were the main ingredients of Norberg-Schulz’s new spatial recipe for architecture – conflating in the notion of ‘existential space’. For the moment, in that article, only references to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty were missing; otherwise, all other basic ingredients on which Norberg-Shulz will structure his mature theorization about architecture, space, and place are already there.
The second observation regards the interchangeability, in the text, between spatial terms, such as environment, space, and place, as if they were synonymous (this is a long story that still persists). In fact, those notions were taken from the common language with no specific technical discernment between one another (the only exception is ‘existential space’ which is different from the ‘generic’ notion of space). Then, in this regard, concerning space and place, we could literally speak of confusion, in the Latin sense of cum+fundere, that is the fusion of entities (in this case space and place) into one whole (the environment). That Norberg-Schulz was still ‘confused’ about the meaning of spatial concepts, at that time, is proved by the fact that what he called ‘place’ in the article – The Concept of Place – became ‘space’ in the book published a few years later –Existence, Space, Architecture: the entity, the subject of his study, was the same. Obviously, the epistemological mistake was in the title of the article, since the real subject of that article was space not place. But it also means that in the passage from the article to the book, Norberg-Schulz realized his logical error and corrected it; also, it means that, at that time, he was still struggling with the meaning of spatial concepts, which is something admirable for me: that struggle, which I also experienced in first person, is an inevitable passage for those who make specific theorization about the meaning of spatial concepts, as also Kant, Leibniz, or Einstein showed, changing their minds on the meanings of spatial concepts more than one time in their life. The same happened to Norberg-Schulz who, at the turn of the decade, was still elaborating a mature version of space and place.
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 intended as an existential dominion imbued 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: he ‘just’ had to show architects how this plan could be concretely put into practice, that is, put into architectural practice. He had to show what there was behind ‘existential space’. Ultimately, behind space, we find place, Heidegger suggested and Norberg-Shulz correctly interpreted. ‘Centres’, ‘directions’, ‘paths’, ‘nodes’, ‘areas’, ‘domains’, ‘borders’, ‘interactions’, ‘orientation’, ‘relations’ (open/closed, inside/outside/…), etc., are all place-based notions which are considered by Norberg-Schulz the constitutive elements of ‘existential space’ and necessary to create meaningful architectures (here, for individuating those specific elements, his legacy to the studies on Kevin Lynch, Piaget and Gestalt theory come to the fore). Those are the ‘primordial’ elements that architects should manipulate to create a primary spatial structure upon which other constraints conflate to create meaningful architectures.[16]
Norberg-Schulz’s new focus on the concept of space and, most of all, his awareness of the existential interpretation of spatiality after Heidegger had a basic consequence: the shift of his interest from space to place for the interpretation of the phenomenon of architecture. This shift is evident from the titles of other major works that followed Existence, Space, and Architecture, that is: Genius Loci (1980) and Architecture: Presence, Language, Place (1996, the Italian edition). For this reason, Norberg-Schulz could be credited as the first critic and historian of architecture to have attempted a specific analysis of the phenomenon of place, and therefore the first to have systematically pursued a Theory of Place, after having ‘absorbed’ Heidegger’s lesson on spatiality.[17] The essay ‘The Phenomenon of Place’ (1976), which, years later, became the introductory part of the book Genius Loci, was the first meaningful text written by Norberg-Schulz where he expressed in full terms his turn 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 which still has great potential for architects after so many decades.
Before continuing with the presentation of Norberg-Schulz’s main works, allow me a couple of considerations on Heidegger’s critics of spatiality elaborated in Building Dwelling Thinking and in other writings.[19] This question is important since Norberg-Schulz structured a big part of his thinking on Heidegger.
I believe nobody has surpassed Heidegger in elucidating the concepts of place, space and their relationship, considering that, related to questions of place and space, there are questions concerning the meanings of the thing and of time. The hesitancy I have regarding Heidegger’s interpretation of spatiality is not related to the structure of his analysis, which I cannot imagine clearer and sharper, but is due to what I consider a weak impact or, even worse, a wrong impact that it had on thinkers and scholars (especially those who are interested in questions of space and place). I am referring to the limited efficacy it had in conveying a sense of space that is simultaneously subordinated and correlated with place, as his spatial descriptions since Building, Dwelling Thinking showed. Decades have gone by, yet everything seems to go in the opposite direction to what Heidegger interpreted so acutely: space, instead of being considered a subordinate character with respect to the founding concreteness of place is still too often retained as the primary concept in many spatial narratives or interpretations of reality. Space is often considered as having an independent existence with respect to place, it overlaps with it or even substitutes place; in this way, fundamental differences between space and place are overlooked if not completely neglected creating semantic confusion or ambiguities, that, in the end, vanish Heidegger’s original efforts at elucidation.
I also hinted 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 intended by Heidegger to mere geographical and/or sociocultural considerations, which become the catalysers of all the existing processes intrinsic to place. That may result in naïve or superficial interpretations of place, 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 overshadow all other dimensions of place, or, even worse, threaten the very existence of place as a viable concept for theorization. Concerning this latter point, superficial, instrumental, and political readings of Heidegger’s work may be the cause.[20] If Heidegger’s mature interpretation of spatiality is correct and if it generated such highly debatable second-hand and third-hand interpretations, in both placial and spatial sense (very often, both space and place are loosely understood, understood and used as unclarified notions, or not understood the way Heidegger prospected), it means that the Heideggerian analysis needs to be reconsidered and eventually amended to elucidate those aspects that were not caught or were difficult to grasp and put into practice. 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 elucidate and extend the sense of Heidegger’s analysis of spatiality.[21]
I admire and hold in the highest esteem the work of Norberg-Schulz, who I consider the pioneer in the field of existential and phenomenological (interpretations of) architecture; however, I cannot help but note that Norberg-Schulz’s interpretation of Heidegger’s analysis of spatiality has some critical aspects which ultimately put a veil on Heidegger’s analysis.[22] Such ‘critical aspects’ which already appeared in the background of Existence, Space, and Architecture became manifest in his subsequent works. The article The Phenomenon of Place is critical to understand this fundamental question. Therefore, now I will introduce that article (a couple of important passages of it are already contained in The Place of Architecture The Architecture of Place – Part II: A Historical Survey, but I will repeat them to preserve the integrity and discoursive logic of the present 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. Phenomenology suggests ‘a return to things as opposed to abstractions and mental constructions’ Norberg-Schulz says.[23] Now, amidst this world of concretely experienced things, the concept of place becomes the core of his investigation. At the outset, Norberg-Schulz points out the close correlation between things and places, so, when he asks, ‘What, then, do we mean with the word “place”?’, he answers that, beyond the classical and reductive meaning of place as ‘abstract location’, by ‘place’ we mean ‘a totality made up of concrete things having material substance, shape, texture, and colour. Together these things determine an “environmental character” which is the essence of place. In general, a place is given as such a character or “atmosphere.” A place is therefore a qualitative, “total” phenomenon, which we cannot reduce to any of its properties, such as spatial relationships, without losing its concrete nature out of sight.’ [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’) denotes the entire gamut of qualitative elements or things that determine the general atmosphere of a place – its ‘most comprehensive property’; while ‘space’ ‘denotes the three-dimensional organization of the elements which make up a place’.[25] Therefore, space is the quantitative determinant of a place, it is the measure of extension of a place or the measure of extension between the things in place. Here, we are in perfect agreement with Heidegger’s notion of spatiality which wants space emerging from place – therefore a derived entity (subsidiary/auxiliary) with respect to place. Moreover, it is evident that when we speak of ‘atmosphere’ we should be speaking of place not space: ‘atmosphere’ is the global quality of a place, while space is the extensive, measurable component of a place (in the sense that we can measure the elements of a place, their distances, rhythm, orientations, extension, etc., which are all quantitative determinants). That’s why Norberg-Schulz says that places, because of their complex nature, cannot be described by means of analytic or scientific concepts (which are only referred to as quantitative determinants), and a ‘phenomenology of architecture is therefore urgently needed.’[26] The phenomenology of architecture has place as its ultimate concern, its ‘subject’. Here, Norberg-Schulz aims to unveil the structure of place (see Figure 01a, above). Overall, in the initial part of the essay, Norberg-Schulz is in complete agreement with Heidegger’s critics of spatiality elaborated in Building Dwelling Thinking, were it not for the fact that he advanced the hypothesis of employing a comprehensive concept – ‘lived space’ – to surpass the distinction between space and character; a hypothesis which he fortunately resisted, at least in the first part of the essay, since that ‘lived space’ would have played the role of ‘place’, thereby creating a superposition between the two concepts, place and space.[27]
However, as the analysis goes on, we come to what I consider a problematic question in Norberg-Schulz’s pioneering study – a divergence from Heidegger’s secure paths: the introduction of a new genealogy of ‘concrete’ spaces derived from the phenomenology of Bollnow. The proliferation and diffusion of spatial concepts (such as ‘experienced space’, ‘lived space’, ‘sacred space’, ‘hodological space’…), which we are now used to, create confusion between different domains – concrete/abstract, qualitative/quantitative – which Heidegger carefully avoided in order to preserve the clear-cut contours of the two complementary spatial notions: place on the one side, the primary entity foreboding existential (i.e., qualitative) meanings and values; space, on the other side, emerging from place (i.e., derived from place) and complementary to it, foreboding quantitative or dimensional meaning and values. This question of complementarity and opposition is characteristic of Heidegger’s methodologic inquiry: we have seen it in Being as Place: Introduction to Metaphysics – Part Two. We shouldn’t underestimate this aspect when we are dealing with concepts of space and place: quite the contrary, that difference should be taken as a litmus test to see whether we are going too far from the secure path traced by Heidegger. Concepts such as ‘lived space’ ‘existential space’, ‘green, brown, or white spaces’, or the oxymoronic ‘concrete space’, which are an addition to the abstract isotropic space of geometrical origin (i.e., mathematical space) 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.
For me, the strategy to enlarge the horizons of space beyond its original quantitative, abstract aspect, is highly problematic for a couple of important, related aspects: first, it goes too far away from Heidegger’s original interpretation of spatiality, where, with a clear-cut strategy, the ‘existential’, i.e., the qualitative and concrete part, is an exclusive condition of place, while the ‘quantitative’ or ‘numerical’ part, an abstract aspect, is a condition of space as a derivation from place (hence, here, Heidegger preserves a logical necessity: the abstract, space, emerges from the concrete, place). In this way, Heidegger created and preserved a dynamic opposition, a tension between place and space – the concrete and the abstract – as the prerequisite for their complementarity and unification: reality is one, comprised of both concrete and abstract aspects. That tension, now, is almost lost with the attribution of concrete qualities to space and its reification. Norberg-Schulz’s strategy, which was the strategy that a few phenomenological thinkers anticipated (Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard and, most of all, Bollnow), and many others followed, for me, had no appreciable results in terms of clearness or elucidation of both concepts, place and space. But most of all – this is a second aspect – I saw no appreciable results in terms of understanding, managing, and transforming the environment, in between concrete (place-based) and abstract (space-based) considerations. The current environmental crisis is before all an epistemological crisis – a crisis of knowledge and understanding of environmental dynamics – where no real discernment between space and place has been made, which means no real discernment between abstraction and potentiality, on the one side (space), concreteness and actuality, on the other side (place). By attributing concrete qualities to space, we have reduced its original, unlimited potential of abstract notion; also, we reduced the explicatory power of place since place is now divested of qualities assigned to space. Fundamentally, an anthology of newly created spaces coming from phenomenological accounts of reality – e.g., lived space, bodily space, physical space, concrete space, perceptual space, experienced space, human space, etc. etc. – coupled with their metaphorical use in many descriptions of concrete environmental situations erased differences between concrete and abstract realms diminishing their specific explicative power and possibilities.
If we enlarge our historical horizon far beyond Heidegger and go back to the origins of the debate on spatiality aired by Aristotle, we see that place/topos was the only conveyor of the environmental, qualitative and concrete characters of reality: in Aristotle’s analysis of spatiality, there is no room for space or for alternative pseudo-concrete vacuum-entities (i.e., there is no room for the void/to kenon – while space did not even exist as a concept for the ancient Greeks).[28] Therefore, we deduce that those qualities, call them ‘concrete’, ‘lived’, ‘perceptual’, ‘experiential’, ‘human’ or whatever qualitative attributes you want, originally belonged to place (or to the things as the constituent of places, as also Norberg-Schulz correctly noted: ‘place… a totality made up of concrete things’) not to space; therefore, places, or things-as-places, are ‘concrete’, ‘lived’, ‘perceptual’, ‘experiential’, not spaces like Bollnow, and after him Norberg-Schulz, maintained. 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 to refer to the analysis of the concrete world of things and events so dear to phenomenologists, and it is curious that phenomenologists created an entire genealogy of concrete, ‘physical’ spaces when space never appears… (the term ‘phenomenon’ comes from the Greek verb ‘phaino’ which means appear; only matter ‘appears’ concretely unless we speak of dreams, fantasies, illusions, imagination, thoughts, etc. which appear in our minds, but in no way can they be defined ‘concrete’ or ‘physical’).
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. First, I want to return to the close relationship (not to say identification) between the concrete nature of place and the things, evaluated on the basis of linguistic considerations. Norberg-Schulz says that when we name places such as ‘countries’, ‘regions’, ‘landscapes’, ‘settlement’, or ‘buildings’, ‘we return to the concrete things’, that is, he is saying that, when we classify places, we should use terms such as ‘island, promontory, bay, forest… square, street, courtyard… floor, wall, roof, ceiling, window, and door’; therefore, he is saying that places, as things, are designated by nouns, 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 that thesis even if I cannot help but observe how far we are from that, today, 40 years after that pronouncement: now, we commonly substitute the name for things and places with the abstract, neutral term ‘space’ (e.g., the phenomenon I have described as Spatiophilia suggests that ‘space’ often usurps the role and name of things and places substituting to them – so, we read ‘space’ instead of ‘shop’ or ‘school’ or even ‘space’ instead of ‘square’, ‘courtyard’, or ‘park’, which are all 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). In this highly relevant linguistic picture, there is one important element of language which is missing: the verb. I would complement Norberg-Schulz’s fascinating thesis by saying that, within the place-based processual hypothesis of reality I am suggesting at RSaP, the mode of presencing of things as places, that is, their disclosure or revelation and constant presence, is the description of an event; as such, this revelation is defined by processes, that is, by verbs, ultimately (see Being as Place: Introduction to Metaphysics – Part One and Part Two and What is a Thing?).[31]
Speaking about place and things as events means introducing the question of ‘time’ as another characteristic component of the identity of places (see Figure 01b, below, which completes Figure 01a, above). The role of time is directly acknowledged by Norberg-Schulz when he says: ‘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 the Genius Loci, which is the argument that characterizes the second part of the 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 important to understand, ‘protect and conserve the genius loci’ to give stability to human existence. 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. That existential necessity, which is implicit in dwelling, Norberg-Schulz continues, is structured on two basic psychological functions: orientation and identification. To feel at home and not out-of-place, or alienated, it is important that the environment has a spatial structure that facilitates orientation and a character (which is made of concrete objects) that facilitates identification so that complementarity between man and the environment can be established, if not a reflection of one into the other: ‘Human identity presupposes the identity of place’.[35] The existential dimension implicit in dwelling and place is also unveiled in linguistic terms when Norberg-Schulz refers to Heidegger’s etymological analysis of the word to ‘dwell’ which also means to be at ‘peace, to remain in peace’, and connects the German word for ‘peace’ (Friede), to be ‘free’, that is ‘protected from harm and danger’, a protection which is achieved by means of an enclosure (Umfriedung),[36] the characteristic trait of places and, at the same time, the archetypal act of building and of dwelling, as the possibility of gathering, unveiling and sustaining 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, 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 we could consider as Norberg-Schulz’s completed effort to deliver architects a theory of place. In that book, Norberg-Schulz examined the phenomenon of natural place, of man-made place, and analysed three case studies (the city of Prague, Khartoum and Rome), before drawing conclusions on the necessity to recover place (after its loss in the modern epoch), so that a genuine form of dwelling can be possible. 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.
In the book, the systematic analysis of the phenomenon of natural and man-made places follows the same methodological framework already used in the article The Phenomenon of Place, which was structured on: 1) the presentation of the phenomenon of place in its general traits, which are composed of concrete elements and which are attributed human meaning; 2) the analysis of the elements that give a structure to place; 3) the delineation of its spirit or the 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 threw 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: ‘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 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 having described the elements of the natural environment and their basic subdivision into earth and sky dynamics, Norberg-Schulz goes on to describe the spirit of natural place, which is delineated as theresult of one dominant element of the previous analysis: meaning, structure, or their interplay. What results from the analysis are 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 having delineated The Phenomenon of Natural Place Norberg-Schulz goes on to the description of The Phenomenon of Man-made Place according to the known framework, that is, starting from the description of its meaning. According to Norberg-Schulz, given that the man-made environment is not merely a practical tool to allow the life of a community but, most of all, it has a meaning traceable to the embodiment of man’s understanding of the natural environment, the study of man-made places ‘should take the relationship to the natural environment as its point of departure.’[48] The elements of the natural environment subjected to transposition into man-made forms are already known from the previous analysis: 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 having presented the phenomenon of natural place and the phenomenon of man-made place, Norberg-Schulz analyses three different urban environments (Prague, Khartoum and Rome, explained in terms of ‘image’, ‘space’ – i.e., spatial/territorial organization –, ‘character’ and ‘genius loci’) to show how the various architectural and urban elements defined so far – character and space – determine the essence of the place, its genius loci.
The Phenomenon of Place
In the final part of the book, Norberg-Schulz returns to the analysis of the phenomenon of place in more general terms, pointing out those elements that characterize the nature of place (which were already presented in the previous chapters and paragraphs), on the background of the following themes: meaning, identity and history. I will briefly give a sketch of them.
Meaning. In the paragraph dedicated to meaning – i.e., the meaning of place – Norberg-Schulz returns to the basic existential question posed by Heidegger, which subtends 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 analyses that relationship. While the direct influence of the environment on man has always been considered since the time of G.W.F. Hegel (who associated the characters of people to 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 specific psychological and existential shade of the meaning of place for human dwelling was never considered appropriately. It was because of that omission – Norberg-Schulz argues – that Marxism did not arrive at a full understanding of ‘dwelling’ and failed in his attempt to win human alienation.[67] Alienation, a characteristic trait of human dwelling conditioned by modernity, is due to the loss of orientation and identification with places, i.e., the natural and man-made things that constitute the environment; that loss is a ‘loss of place’. To recover the sense of place we need to recover the sense of dwelling since the two are intimately connected. Here, Norberg-Schulz appeals to Heidegger’s existential notion of dwelling (as developed in Building Dwelling Thinking), which is intimately connected with place and the things in place through the notion of ‘gathering’. In the modern epoch, Norberg-Schulz observes, the things that compose the environment (the things that determine the character of place) have become ‘mere objects of consumption’ and unless man arrives at a full understanding of the meaning of the things he will never recover his place in nature (his place on earth, under the sky, between things and before the divinities) Norberg-Schulz argues.
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 merely determined by economic, social, political, or cultural phenomena but, being in the world, between earth and sky, between mortals and divinities, they have to make that existential state manifest: this gathering of the Heideggerian ‘fourfold’ within the things-as-places ‘implies 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] So, the function of things is exposed: 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 is through symbolization (others means are ‘visualization’ and ‘complementation’), that is, starting from the analysis of the natural environment, abstracting its characters and concretizing them into new forms that inevitably belong to place since they came from the place. 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, by symbolization, men may interpret and make evident 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]
As an aside with respect to the themes I am dealing with at RSaP, and, specifically, with respect to the systemic notion of place I am illustrating, when I speak of symbolic or intellectual processes (processes that exclusively belong to the human realm), I am speaking about the argumentation presented here by Norberg-Schulz, that is: by way of symbolization man assigns meanings to the things that he produces and with those meanings inscribed in what he produces, either concrete or abstract things (e.g., an architecture, a painting, an equation, a poetry, a music, a dance, etc. as specific products of different languages) he changes the state of the world and, by that, he changes the state of place, from social (social realms are made by humans as well as by other living beings) to symbolic or intellectual. That means that places can only be modified and never created, since place is always a pre-existent state to human (or animal) activity: that’s why I define architecture as a modification of places for dwelling and not as a creation. What is created by architects is space since space belongs to the symbolic domain of creative and imaginary faculty, which is exclusive to humans. So, architects create spaces and modify places for dwelling: that’s what architecture is about (What Is Architecture?).
Identity. Norberg-Schulz then proceeds to analyse the identity of place. At the outset, after having illustrated the meaning of things, place, and dwelling, he can specify the subject of the phenomenology of architecture: ‘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?’) denotes the primary relationship between man-made and natural elements: reminding us that orientation in and identification with places are the elements that influence our psychic relation to them, Norberg-Schulz points out the importance of ‘enclosure’ (for establishing spatial relations that facilitate our orientation) and of ‘meaningful things’, such as mountains, sea, rivers, trees, rocks, etc. to enhance the 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 often have determined the spatial configuration of settlements (e.g., rows parallel to the direction of the land in defined valleys, or more centralized patterns in urban valley-settlements), even if more abstract spatial configurations can superimpose to the natural environment, e.g., the Roman cardo-decumanus, or the ‘cosmic orientation’ along the east-west axis of Christian churches. 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 ground, rise towards the sky, and by their particular ‘motifs’ (disposition of the openings -doors and windows), concurs to define the identity of a place. All of those internal relationships between dwelling, things, and places that Norberg-Schulz is taking to the attention of architects and planners, are the plastic representation of Heidegger’s words: ‘we would have to learn to recognize 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, what characterizes the nature of place also concerns its history, that is: the preservation of its identity and genius loci over time, under the pressure of always new functional demands (i.e., practical changes 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 such elements hardly accept big changes if our aim is to preserve man’s 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 preservation of urban and specific architectural elements (squares, streets and buildings) means understanding 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 – and their genius loci – are not crystallized entities but evolve over time: what is important is that economic, social, political and cultural changes ‘have to 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]
The final section of the book Genius Loci is reserved for two basic considerations: the first regards the state of Place Today, which is highly problematic, as already anticipated when Norberg-Schulz talked about the alienation of modern man, which is ultimately an alienation from place, that’s why the author now speaks of The Loss of Place. The second, the concluding chapter of the book, is a message of hope concerning the possibility of recovering the meaning of place – i.e., The Recovery of Place – after its loss in the modern epoch.
The Loss of Place
The Loss of Place – Norberg-Schulz says – is a phenomenon of modernity which became especially evident in Europe after the reconstruction of the Second World War, where old canons and traditional ways of planning and building were lost in the name of a 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 was flat and offered little of the ‘surprises and discoveries’ typical of the experiences in old European towns and ‘when attempts to break the general monotony are made, they mostly appear as arbitrary fancies… 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, and we come to what I consider the fundamental reason 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 not sensitive of the external environment.[79] This takes to the inevitable conclusion that, following this loss of character and qualities of the environment, we entered a time of ‘environmental crisis’ (the reference is exclusively to human phenomena – i.e., the perception of the environment from the human perspective and as a human value). An environmental crisis that implied a loss of orientation and identification with places, which means alienation from place, ultimately.
Image 28: Aerial view of Levittown, Pennsylvania, USA, c 1959.
Image 29: Skyline of Detroit, Michigan, USA.
Norberg-Schulz goes even further in his analysis of the problem proposing an interesting thesis: it was the plain translation into planning of successful and specific architectural values introduced by the pioneers of the modern movement (Frank Lloyd Wright, Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe) which led to the loss of place; to put it differently: what was a success for architecture did not work for planning. Again, a question of space: space as a flowing continuum and open plan applied to architecture created a new, outstanding architectural style (i.e., modern architecture which became famous as ‘The International Style’); the same concept applied to urban planning resulted in a lack of character, monotony and loss of local specificity: ‘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 regarded the fact that the idea of an international style implied the rejection of local or regional instances (that is the rejection of place-based instances) in favour of more abstract (space-based) principles to be applied everywhere. This abstract tendency, Norberg-Schulz sustains, was soon abandoned, at least by the leaders of the modern movement, and when S. Giedion, in 1944, asked for ‘a new monumentality’ or when, in 1954, Giedion himself spoke about a ‘New Regionalism’ it was now clear that the blind application to architecture and planning of standards irrespective of specific environmental conditions could be the harbinger of 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 Ricovery of Place
In the conclusive section of Genius Loci Norberg-Schulz illustrates how The Recovery of Place has been pursued by the activity of the leaders of the second phase of modern architecture whose basic 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 activity of Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier in the second part of his career, Louis Kahn, or more recent representative cases exemplified by the activity of the third generation of modern architects such as Jorn Utzon, Atelier 5, Reima Pietila, James Stirling, MLTW, or Ricardo Bofill – these are the names mentioned by Norberg-Schulz – show ‘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 rejoining the theses already presented by Kenneth Frampton, Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre on Critical Regionalism (see The Place of Architecture The Architecture of Place – Part II: A Historical Survey). However, Norberg-Schulz points out, those are just ‘scattered and quantitatively scarce’ examples, whose scarcity is due to ‘a general social inertia… vested interests’ and – this is what interests us – ‘the lack of a clear understanding of the environmental problem’.[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
Those illuminating remarks which conclude the book Genius Loci – the first systematic presentation of a theory of place for architecture and planning – should always accompany the formation of architects and are always valid, today 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 on the subject-place – The Concept of Dwelling (1985) and, most of all, Architecture: Presence, Language and Place (2000) – are an attempt to clarify his positions offering a more detailed view of some specific questions already developed in his previous 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 rigorous 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 faithfully interpreted according to the Heideggerian perspective on spatiality expressed in Building Dwelling Thinking or in Art and Space, 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 must be credited with the merit of having taken Heidegger’s writings on spatiality to the attention of architects, and, in the wake of the Heideggerian critics of spatiality, the merit of having realized and taken into the limelight the primacy of place for architecture and planning, in more universal terms than social scientists and architects usually did in the ‘60s and ‘70s, when they mostly considered place a sociocultural construct. But most of all, he had the merit of having attempted the first systematic analysis of the meaning of place for architecture and planning, therefore creating the first valuable Theory of Place available to architects and planners, basing it on existential and phenomenological considerations. As for the content of that theory, which was inevitably interlaced with the interpretative analysis of space, there are great insights as well as problematic questions for a spatial epistemology of architecture: the most relevant of which is the fundamental ambiguity between the existential roles that place and space played in his writings, a fact which only partially contributed to elucidate the different roles and meanings of the two concepts. The modern adumbration of place into space was not overturned as a faithful interpretation of Heidegger’s existential sense of spatiality would have required and as Norberg-Schulz himself would have probably wished for. Quite contrary, it seems to me he contributed to an understanding of space as place augmenting the sense of con-fusion of the two concepts. To put it otherwise, even if Norberg-Schulz helped create the image of a different space with respect to the neutral, ‘mathematical-technological’ space of modernity – a space now charged with existential or ‘lived’ and ‘concrete’ qualities – he contradicted the existential premises of his own theoretical discourse which, in the wake of a rigorous interpretation of Heidegger’s conception of spatiality, implied the unambiguous priority of place over space (Figures 1a, 1b, above), i.e., their stark ontological separation (abstract/concrete), and, simultaneously, their epistemological continuity (one requires the other, and vice versa, to have a complete understanding of reality). The reason for that spatial short-circuit between place and space, which is recurrent in many contemporary narratives of space and place, in different disciplines, can be attributed to a shift of Norberg-Schulz’s attention from Heidegger’s existentialism, which correctly interpreted the relevant difference and continuity between place and space, to Bollnow’s phenomenology which overshadowed that difference (abstract/concrete) delivering many physical or quasi-physical descriptions of space (‘existential space’, ‘lived space’, ‘experienced space’, ‘concrete space’, etc.) which, by reifying space and taking it into a concrete dimension, almost erased the profound difference and simultaneous continuity traced by Heidegger: the abstract – space – emerging from the concrete – place, and both necessary (i.e., complementarity) to square the spatial meaning of existence between concrete and abstract determinations. How can place and space be opposite and complementary, if they both have existential values and concrete presence? This short-circuit between spatial concepts became especially evident after second and third-hand phenomenological interpretations of architecture, and continues these days, in almost any phenomenological account 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 important question another way, Norberg-Schulz, like Kenneth Frampton, understood that the cause of the ‘loss of place’ or the flattening of urban and architectural environments was caused by 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. Influenced by phenomenological accounts of reality (one name above all others: O.F. Bollnow), his strategy for the recovery of places has been that of attributing space concrete and qualitative values (e.g., existential, experiential, lived, physical, psychological, etc.), which almost superposed with the intrinsic qualitative, concrete character of place, substituting it and erasing their differences and specific explicatory powers. That was an epistemological error, the error of an epoch that keeps producing fruits. Rather than erasing differences by understanding space as place, the strategy should have been their starkest ontological division, and make it clear that any place is the place of processes (Whitehead), where existential (Heidegger) and pragmatic dynamics are interwoven, like I sustain when I say that place is the system of physicochemical, biological, social and symbolic processes. These existential and practical values that intrinsically belong to place are the natural antidote against abstraction and the human alienation from reality, not space or space disguised as place. Place is the antidote and space – as abstract, quantitative and dimensional determination of place – is its complement. Only in this way can we preserve their stark ontological difference and epistemological complementarity necessary to understand reality as one integrative whole of concrete-and-abstract values.
Another problematic question in Norberg-Schulz’s approach regards his constant reference to the linguistic function of architecture intended in a figurative sense. 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, the figurative bias adumbrated the phenomenological and existential content of Heidegger’s spatial analysis. The risk of what I call ‘symbolic approach’ (to architecture), if not framed within other complementary aspects of reality as consistent as the symbolic approach (i.e., physicochemical, biological, ecological, and sociocultural approaches), is that of falling into too abstract or 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 continuous thread of interplaying processes, which should be concretized or synthesized by architects and planners into meaningful architectures and human environments. The risk behind such formal approaches generative of -isms (stylistic approaches ‘which – to say it with Norberg-Schulz – do not take their origins from the specific beings of things’) [111] is to lose the ultimate sense of design professions, above all architecture, a risk Norberg-Schulz was aware of when he somehow reconsidered his position on postmodernism and, more generally, on the questions of style in his final major work – Architecture: Presence, Language and Place – where he got closer to the positions expressed by (critical) regionalism.[112] For these reasons, I prefer to call the architects’ initial attention directly to processes intended holistically, rather than to their figurative expression through forms (forms = formalization of processes), because if we focus on processes, we are in the best position possible to understand how they may evolve into forms so that we can also trace back the meaning of such forms out of original processes; the contrary is not true or, at least, the risk to see forms independently of the many intersecting processes that generate form is always present (e.g., postmodernism and many later examples of deconstructivism). As an architect in the years of my formation (especially as an undergraduate student), when competencies and knowledge were inevitably limited, I personally experienced that difficulty, since I could not successfully access the world of architecture and its forms in all their ramified complexities through the study of history or even through Gestalt theory as Norberg-Schulz somehow suggested in his writings. The production of architecture is a creative activity connected with the understanding of the environment considered at 360 degrees – physicochemical, biological (i.e., psychological and physiological), ecological, sociocultural and symbolic processes – and cannot begin with or be exclusively related to the analysis of forms, which represent the ultimate step (symbolic) of a long chain through which processes present themselves to us and to the 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 planning. However, the problematic issues I have pointed out also suggest that the Theory of Place Norberg-Schulz proposed ought to be subjected to critical revision putting existential and phenomenological approaches to place and space in the right perspective, and giving primacy to the processual rather than to the figurative approach, even if both approaches need careful inspection. Not to mention another obvious criticality intrinsic to Norberg-Schulz’s theory of place: the fact that his work has been eclipsed by more contemporary phenomena that should be taken into account by modern theories of place; I refer to the digital revolution, i.e., the diffusion of information technology, and the environmental question that impact any level of reality, especially ecological and symbolic levels (in the conclusive part of Architecture: Presence, Language and Place Norberg-Schulz hinted at those two aspects, and I suspect that he would have probably focused on them in later works had he lived enough). Those critical revisions I am advancing at RSaP to promote Norberg-Schulz’s theory of place and space; that is necessary decades after his works were published.
As I had the occasion to say in recent articles, to stay at the pace with and manage the complex nature of reality, architecture and urban planning should be understood with a transdisciplinary approach. That would be another step ahead of Norberg-Schulz’s theorization, which was mostly conceived in interdisciplinary terms (on the difference between transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches, see Note [16] in On the Modernity of Patrick Geddes). Transdisciplinarity would imply the emergence of architecture and urban planning as disciplines that go beyond their traditional limits to embrace 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: they should understand place as the evolutionary dynamics of interplaying physicochemical, biological, ecological, sociocultural and symbolic processes, all at once. This is a new realism for the disciplines of design: it does not mean that they will lose their specificities; it just means that design practitioners should develop non-hierarchical visions and modalities of collaboration to envisage an even more unified and synthetic vision of reality, which is seamlessly conditioned by natural and human/cultural processes. This was, after all, the same conviction that glimpsed through 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: as Heidegger showed, place has an existential dimension, while space, emerging from the ‘aperture’ left open by place, has a dimensional or extensional existence, that is, space is the measure or extension inherent in place or between the things in place (‘measure’ 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 the same way Heidegger derived it: space, for me, is the openness afforded by place, its measure and extension (see the note on spatiality, above), in the same sense Heidegger considered the ‘spatium’ or ‘extensio’ afforded by place in Building Dwelling Thinking. 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 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. 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. 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
Image 22: New York from above, by Luis Dilger, on behance.com
Image 23: Ospedale degli Innocenti, on istitutodegliinnocenti.it
Image 24: The Acropolis of Athens, Photography: Vladimir Drodzin, on drodzin.com
Image 25: Stasbourg Cathedral, Photography: Christophe Hamm, on visitstrasbourg.fr
Image 28: Levittown, on wikipedia.org
Image 29: Skyline of Detroit, on shutterstock.com
Image 30: Richards Medical Research Laboratories, on louiskahn.org
Figures 01a, 01b: Alessandro Calvi Rollino, CC, BY-NC-SA
All other images in the public domain.
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