Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space and place. This is my reformulation of Mies van der Rohe’s famous definition of Architecture: “Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space”. [1] Space, alone, is no more sufficient to describe the systemic complexity of architecture, which, at the beginning of a new era, is better understood…
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…
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…
The previous article could be read as a prologue to the present one: that article — Place Space and the Unicorn — unveils the premises and the reasons which took me to analyze an ancient text like De Architectura, written by the Roman architect Vitruvius in the first century B.C., to understand how the notion of space was interpreted during…
“… static patterns of value are divided into four systems: inorganic patterns, biological patterns, social patterns and intellectual patterns. They are exhaustive. That’s all there are. If you construct an encyclopedia of four topics – Inorganic, Biological, Social and Intellectual — nothing is left out. No ‘thing’, that is. Only Dynamic Quality, which cannot be described in any encyclopedia, is…