This article is about a distinction we often tend to overlook: the difference between ‘place’ and ‘site’. Even if the two terms are both used to denote a territory or a piece of land, I hold – as others have done before me –[1] there is a reduction of meaning in the passage from ‘place’ to ‘site’: a reduction which…
A few weeks ago, I answered a call launched by the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), in association with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, for one of their programs – the Multidisciplinary Research Project. That project aims to promote ‘new modes for collective research’.[1] This year, the sixth edition of the Research Project had the following theme: In the Hurricane,…
In 1982 renowned architects and theorists Christopher Alexander and Peter Eisenman met at Harvard University — Graduate School of Design — to debate on the concept of harmony in architecture: ‘Contrasting Concepts of Harmony in Architecture’ was the argument of that witty, biting, and ironic debate, which was originally published in the magazine Lotus International n° 40 (1983), and later…
It is inherent in the methodological principles of science that certain fundamental questions are not posed. Physics, as it is practiced in modern times, characteristically does not really ask what matter is, biology does not ask what life is, and psychology does not ask what the soul is; instead, these terms just vaguely circumscribe the area one intends to investigate.[1]…
I return to one of the arguments that interested me the most since I entered the spatial debate: the realism of space. This question inevitably connects to the spatial language we use to describe phenomena between concrete and abstract aspects of reality. But, most of all — I will especially argue in the final part of the text — this…