The recent spread of a new biological menace — the novel virus SARS-CoV-2 (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2) — has completely changed the appearance of our cities for months: during the lockdown period, the virus that caused the Coronavirus Disease 2019, or COVID-19, literally transformed the familiar places we were used to, into ghost territories. Image 1: Places are…
The argument I am introducing here stems from my initial inquiry into the relationship between architecture and the concept of environmental sustainability—an issue I began working on in the latter part of the first decade of the new century. The first draft of this document dates back to late 2012, conceived as the architectural continuation of a broader inquiry into…
In this article, I will analyse the traditional spatial vocabulary of a pioneer of modern architecture, Richard Neutra, as we find it in Chapter 22 — ‘Physiological Space’ – Has Direction and Ranges — of his famous 1954 book ‘Survival Through Design’.[1] My purpose is to see continuities and differences with respect to the reformed understanding of spatial concepts that…
The traditional and well-established meaning of a concept crystallized into a specific word should be the starting point for any investigation that aims at questioning that concept. In this article, I will list all of the different entries and the different senses that the noun place and the noun space have according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Right after the…
1. Young man at his window: places everywhere This is just common sense: look out the window of your home or office. What do you see? You only see places. A bench, a tree, a park where people converse and children play, a square, a street, a building, a mural on a building’s facade, a bridge, the sun, the sky,…