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,…
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]…
By the term spatiophilia, I present the result of the photographic survey I have been conducting for a couple of years now on how the concepts of space and place are perceived and used with communicative intent through the streets of Milano, Italy. The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. MICHEL FOUCAULT, Of Other Spaces…
These are some considerations suggested to me by a recent conversation I had with a colleague architect, concerning the reception of the concept of space in architecture, before the modern epoch. I hope it can contribute to avoiding some possible misinterpretations, where, in a previous article — Concepts of Space in Vitruvius — I spoke about the possibility to interpret…