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…
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…
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…
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…