I return to one of the arguments that interested me the most since I entered the spatial debate: the realism of space. This question inevitably connects to the spatial language we use to describe phenomena between concrete and abstract aspects of reality. But, most of all — I will especially argue in the final part of the text — this…
… it is helpful to think of architectures as ‘archi-textures’, to treat each monument or building, viewed in its surroundings and context, in the populated area and associated networks in which it is set down, as part of a particular production of space. HENRY LEFEBVRE, The Production of Space This article explores how the concepts of space and place shaped…
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…
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…