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…
Since I was an undergraduate student at the School of Architecture, Politecnico di Milano, in the 1990s, the concept of space almost exclusively attracted my attention. I soon learned — from critics and architects — that Architecture was a discipline concerned with space; but it took me a while to understand what that really meant; and it took me even…
… does not. Heidegger’s introductory paragraph of the book What Is a Thing? — which is the extended subject of the forthcoming article — is particularly appropriate for further clarification concerning the concepts of place and space (or, at least, it is appropriate for clarification concerning my proposal for rethinking those concepts). As the title of the book suggests, Heidegger’s…
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…
I briefly come back to the renewed sense of place I’ve spoken about in the previous article – What Is Place? What Is Space? – where I’ve said that ‘place is any real entity emerging from inorganic, organic, social and symbolic – or intellectual – processes’ (definition I-R. a); more extendedly – and including a basic definition of reality on…