In October 1933 the British philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead delivered two lectures at the University of Chicago, which were published as ‘Nature and Life’, the following year.[1] The content of those two lectures, now in the public domain, is available on the Internet Archive. What follows is the integral transcription of the second lecture. Whitehead’s arguments, in this…
Architecture creates spaces and modifies places for dwelling. That is my definition of architecture: a discipline primarily concerned with space, place, and dwelling, which is its ultimate scope. A discipline in-between the ideal (or mental) and the physical (or corporeal), the abstract and the concrete, actuality and potentiality, being and becoming. Spaces, which are ideal and abstract entities, can be…
The argument I am introducing here stems from my initial inquiry into the relationship between architecture and the concept of environmental sustainability—an issue I began working on in the latter part of the first decade of the new century. The first draft of this document dates back to late 2012, conceived as the architectural continuation of a broader inquiry into…
During the first decade of the 2000s, I grew dissatisfied with the state of architecture, which had become overly focused on form, taking to the extremes the principles of postmodernism and deconstructivism that had shaped the architectural discourse in the previous century. With the definitive capillary diffusion of CAD technologies, since the early 2000s, or shortly before, new formal possibilities…
In this article, I will analyse the traditional spatial vocabulary of a pioneer of modern architecture, Richard Neutra, as we find it in Chapter 22 — ‘Physiological Space’ – Has Direction and Ranges — of his famous 1954 book ‘Survival Through Design’.[1] My purpose is to see continuities and differences with respect to the reformed understanding of spatial concepts that…