Category Archive: SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS

Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space and place

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

… all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.

— GEORGE ELIOT

Architecture creates spaces and modifies places for dwelling

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

— attributed to CONFUCIUS

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