With this article, I shall turn my attention back to the diffusion of the concept of space in architecture, in the first decades of the XX century. Again, this is to show that space should be preferably understood as an ideal entity (to grasp not without epistemological ambiguities) rather than a physical entity existing ‘out there’; an abstract conceptualization or…
I arrived at the conclusion that whatever space and time mean, place and occasion mean more, for space in the image of man is place, and time in the image of man is occasion. Split apart by the schizophrenic mechanism of determinist thinking, time and space remain frozen abstractions… A house should therefore be a bunch of places – a…
Images 01-02: Early study painting for the Vitra Fire Station, © Zaha Hadid Foundation (left). Encounter on the roof at the Vitra Fire Station, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects (1990-1993), Weil am Rhein, DE, 17 April 1995 (right). Slideshow: Event-place — Encounter with and Celebration at the Messner Mountain Museum, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects (2012-2015), Plan de Corones, IT,…
In the captions that describe the images of the 74 buildings contained in the seminal book for architects, The International Style,[1] the two American authors — architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock and architect Philip Johnson — speak about every element of the so-called modern style of architecture. With hindsight, we can rightly affirm that just one ingredient is missing from those…
The previous article — Place Space and the Unicorn — could be seen as a prologue to this one, as it lays out the premises and reasons that led me to analyze Vitruvius’s ancient text De Architectura, written by the Roman architect in the first century B.C., in order to understand how the concept of space was interpreted across the…