Beyond Architectural Realities: Place, Space, and the In-Between

Concerning the last issue on the ambiguity of spatial language and its specific application to the domain of […]

On the Ambiguous Language of Space

With this article, I shall turn my attention back to the diffusion of the concept of space in […]

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 city a bunch of places no less.

— ALDO VAN EYCK

Mind, Space, Architecture: On The International Style

In the captions that describe the images of the 74 buildings contained in the seminal book for architects, […]

Same Space Different Place

The recent spread of a new biological menace — the novel virus SARS-CoV-2 (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus […]

Limit, Place, Appearance

Since I was an undergraduate student at the School of Architecture, Politecnico di Milano, in the 1990s, the […]

The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name.

— attributed to CONFUCIUS

What Is a Thing?

One of the main tenets of my inquiry into the concepts of space and place can be synthesized […]

Place Kicks Us Back, Space…

… does not. Heidegger’s introductive paragraph of the book What Is a Thing? — which is the extended […]

Place, Space, and the Fabric of Reality

1. The Fabric of Reality and its Continuum In this article, I will use the terms continuum, physical […]

The ‘Topos’ of a Thing

I briefly come back to the renewed sense of place I’ve spoken about in the previous article – […]

I am also asking the reader to suppose that the concept of space has nothing to do with perception. Geometrical space is a pure abstraction… The visual third dimension is a misapplication of Descartes’s notion of three axes for a coordinate system. The doctrine that we could not perceive the world around us unless we already had the concept of space is nonsense. It is quite the other way around: We could not conceive of empty space unless we could see the ground under our feet and the sky above. Space is a myth, a ghost, a fiction for geometers. All that sounds very strange, no doubt, but I urge the reader to entertain the hypothesis.

— JAMES J. GIBSON