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 could be read as a prologue to the present one: that article — Place Space and the Unicorn — unveils the premises and the reasons which took me to analyze an ancient text like De Architectura, written by the Roman architect Vitruvius in the first century B.C., to understand how the notion of space was interpreted during…
In October 1933 the British philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead delivered two lectures at the University of Chicago, published with the title ‘Nature and Life’, the following year.[1] The content of those two lectures, now in the public domain, is available in the Internet Archive. What follows is the integral transcription of the second lecture. Many of the arguments…
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…