This article is about a distinction we often tend to overlook: the difference between ‘place’ and ‘site’. Although both terms refer to a territory or land, I argue, as others have before me,[1] that the shift from ‘place’ to ‘site’ involves a loss of meaning, which is not just a matter of scale, as a site is typically a specific…
A few weeks ago, I responded to a call issued by the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in partnership with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for their Multidisciplinary Research Project. This initiative seeks to promote ‘new modes for collective research.’[1] In its sixth edition, the program proposed the theme In the Hurricane, On the Land, inviting participants to explore the…
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 people perceive and use the concepts of space and place with communicative intent in the streets of Milano, Italy. The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. MICHEL FOUCAULT, Of Other Spaces…
These considerations arose from a recent conversation I had with a colleague architect about the reception of the concept of space in architecture before the modern epoch. I hope they can help avoid possible misinterpretations where, in a previous article — Concepts of Space in Vitruvius —, I discussed the possibility of interpreting space (spatium) in a three-dimensional sense in…