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…
“… 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…
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…
1. The Fabric of Reality and its Continuum In this article, I will use the terms continuum, physical continuum, dimensional continuum or even extensive continuum, to refer to the reciprocal order of things and bodies ingrained in the material substrate in which they exist and move.[1] This continuum is the invisible substrate we should think of as the arena (or…