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…
Building on the issue of ambiguous spatial language and its application to architecture (see On the Ambiguous Language of Space), I want to make a digression. My aim is to extend the scope of our architectural discussion and deepen the spatial/placial question in relation to humanity’s understanding of reality. At the same time, I wish to return to the reasons…
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 — Place Space and the Unicorn — could be seen as a prologue to this one, as it lays out the premises and reasons that led me to analyze Vitruvius’s ancient text De Architectura, written by the Roman architect in the first century B.C., in order to understand how the concept of space was interpreted across the…