![]()
1 Introduction
Life in space
Architecture is so generally regarded as an art of space, meaning actual, practical space, and building is so certainly the making of something that defines and arranges spatial units, that everybody talks about architecture as “spatial creation” without asking what is created, or how space is involved. The concepts of arrangement in space and creation of space are constantly interchanged; and the primary illusion seems to have given way to a primary actuality. Nothing is more haphazard than the employment of the words: illusion, reality, creation, construction, arrangement, expression, form, and space, in the writings of modern architects.
After nearly seven decades, philosopher Susanne Langer’s disappointment with architects’ use of the term space still resounds with us. For architects, urban designers, landscape architects and all those who are engaged in the transformation of the environment, space represents a central issue; nevertheless, it is difficult to get a clear picture of what is meant by it as an accurate and transmissible definition not limited to the domain of the poetic and the ineffable. As clearly reflected in Langer’s words, one does not understand if space is the cause or the effect of architecture – or if the notions of cause and effect make any sense at all in this context.
It may seem superfluous to speak about space today considering the extent to which this topic has grounded architectural debate over most of the 20th century. One could argue that architects have already said all there is to say on space: yet almost paradoxically, there is no satisfactory theoretical model capable of explaining in an articulate and convincing way what space is all about.
There has been no shortage of attempts to approach architecture through this critical category. At the end of the 1930s, Sigfried Giedion records in his book Space, Time and Architecture (1941) the relevance these terms had acquired within the scientific debate at the turn of the previous century. In 1948 Bruno Zevi exports these concepts to Italy with his successful and controversial book Architecture as Space (1957). After a period of lesser interest, in the 1980s a new wave of studies again raised the question of space, albeit with a greater critical distance. Cornelis van de Ven’s Space in Architecture (1980), dedicated to avant-garde movements and their interpretation of this concept, and Jürgen Joedicke’s Raum und Form in der Architektur (1985), which is in line with the earlier German aesthetic tradition, both investigate the matter through more rigorous methodological approaches.
Today, despite the best intentions of many authors, the concept of space continues to be an accretion of fundamental misunderstandings. It is sometimes meant that space may be a thing, or the interior of a thing built around it, or a void. In common understanding, space has more affinity with certain ways of making architecture than with others. Some imply that it can be found solely within the domain of architecture and that it is an objective factor. Finally, several authors claim that it can be directly produced. All these hypotheses, only occasionally voiced with some clarity, add up to the confusion lamented by Susanne Langer. This book, therefore, intends to make some order in this dense forest of discussion around architectural (and not only) space.
A further factor contributing to the problematic theoretical discourse on space is architectural culture’s perennial delay vis-à-vis other fields. The great fascination with space in architecture between the two wars was the belated response to a far-ranging debate that encompassed the natural sciences, philosophy, psychiatry and art at the turn of the century. Once architects started to engage with the concept it had already been overtaken by other priorities. With few exceptions, architectural theory in the 20th century displays the limited reactivity of this field to cultural transformations, since beyond its specificity of design and construction, architecture is largely fed by a secondary rather than primary production of knowledge. This is not an evidence to be condemned, but it must be acknowledged that very few of the major cultural revolutions in human history have originated in architecture.
In this sense, architectural discourse seems to have overlooked the fact that it was surpassed in its “primacy” on space by many other fields of knowledge, that in the last two decades we have witnessed a deep evolution described by some as a spatial turn. Space is today at the center of interest in many branches of natural sciences, such as neurosciences, physics and ecology, along with many fields of the human sciences including anthropology, geography, sociology, archaeology and the history of art. All these, in turn, were subtended by philosophical thought, in particular by the phenomenological tradition of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Spatial explorations
The model of space proposed in this book is centrally grounded on phenomenology. Since its origins in the early 20th century, this philosophical tradition has considered space as one of its central thematic poles, as a foundational entity of the human experience of the world. Edmund Husserl inaugurated a new way of observing the subject’s experience based on the concept of Leib – the living body as a counterpoint to the organic dimensions of the Körper – and on the interaction with spatial phenomena. His investigations paved the way for the work of Martin Heidegger, who indissolubly bound space to the affective sphere of the individual who, along with phenomena, sensed the emotions and moods these were affording. Equally picking up from Husserl’s cues, Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his 1945 Phenomenology of Perception provided a systematic exploration of the relationship between the spatial structure of the lived world and the subject’s corporeity. This canon of classical authors, integrated by further fundamental studies focused on spatial experience such as those by Jan Patočka, Jean-Paul Sartre or Otto Friedrich Bollnow, eventually established a foundation for a vast array of scientific investigations in a diversity of fields, with repercussions reaching to our day.
Yet outside this central lineage, another phenomenological school emerged in the late 1960s with the declared intention of providing a new foundation for this philosophical approach. German philosopher Hermann Schmitz, who published his ten-volume magnum opus between 1964 and 1980 under the title System der Philosophie, states that his “new” phenomenology simply intends to make our spontaneous experience of the world available to a coherent reflection (2019, p. 43). In order to achieve this apparently elementary goal, however, he sets out to systematically challenge the breadth of human thought from the very origins of Western philosophy onwards, including the entire previous phenomenological tradition. The radical philosophical system emerging from Schmitz’s work, articulated in his massive and ongoing production (1966, 1967, 1969, 2011, 2014), fundamentally revolves around the subject’s spatial experience and emotional life, defined by an enriched corporeality sustaining all vital processes.
Despite being complex, sometimes obscure, and only scantly translated into languages other than German, Schmitz’s phenomenology is increasingly entering the wider debate in and outside philosophy, for its unique description of corporeal dynamics and the introduction of the notion of atmosphere as spatially extended emotion. Two further philosophers, German Gernot Böhme and Italian Tonino Griffero, have widely expanded Schmitz’s thought, with crucial contributions on the topics of atmospheres, space, embodiment and moods, reserving special attention to the built environment. The theoretical foundations for this book are mainly to be found in the work of these three authors, who often openly acknowledge the manifold intersections between their phenomenology and the investigations performed in adjacent fields of research.
Clearly enough however, space is not a phenomenologists’ game only. Stephan Günzel (2017, p. 7) observes that the spatial turn agitating the humanities since the early 1990s is not merely the academic formulation of a new theoretical paradigm, but in fact mirrors far-reaching changes that have occurred in our lifeworld. If in speaking of other spaces Michel Foucault had pinpointed, as early as 1967 (1986), the 19th century’s obsession with history and time, in the final years of the 20th the quest would be for a “spatialization of the temporal” (Döring & Thielmann, 2008, p. 9). This transition was first marked by geographer Edward W. Soja, who with the notion of thirdspace (1996) attempted to describe a new paradigm for the interpretation of the spatiality of human life.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is in the field of geography that the spatial turn has witnessed the earliest and most radical developments. Various strains of research have provided intersections between the threefold polarity subject-affect-space. Nigel Thrift’s non-representational theory (2008) strives to produce a “geography of what happens”, considering human agency in its constant becoming, the omnipresence of movement and the subjects’ precognitive domain. Setting out from an altogether different position related to Schmitzian phenomenology, Jürgen Hasse produces accurate micrologic phenomenographies of urban situations, where subjects are affected by spatially poured moods (2012, 2014, 2015).
Further spatial interpretations of human experience emerge in several fields related to the ecological environment, from landscape studies to ethnography and anthropology, all variously sustained by James Gibson’s theory of ecological perception (1979). Tim Ingold (2000, p. 25) discusses a notion of “sentient ecology”, a form of knowledge and praxis people have of their environment. This set of skills becomes entrained by means of a process of development and spatial experience that is diversified by a historically specific environment. The enquiry on differentiated forms of perception and the individuals’ cultural constructs is a further attempt to sidestep the representational paradigm in favor of theories of presentation, similarly to what had occurred in the philosophy of the arts in the previous decades (Langer, 1948, pp. 63–83; Wollheim, 1980, pp. 26–29). What merges these apparently unrelated fields is the centrality of the spatial hinge between the subjects and the world they perceive.
Equally attempting to overcome the hermeneutic paradigm is the work of literary theorist Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. His claim is that while we usually seek in texts meanings sustaining the construction of sense, we are in fact frequently set before effects of presence that are indeed spatial. A poem, for example, can remain obscure and conceal its meaning but nevertheless evoke a potent atmosphere that corporeally engages the reader. Beyond the hermeneutic field, and especially in those cultures Gumbrecht describes as articulated by presence over meaning, the human self-reference is primarily the body (2004, p. 80). Exactly as is the case with architecture, literary texts afford “moods and atmospheres [that] are experienced on a continuum, like musical scales. They present themselves to us as nuances that challenge our powers of discernment and description, as well as the potential of language to capture them” (Gumbrecht, 2012, p. 4).
A further field where space has played a pivotal role in recent years is that of gender studies, which in turn has produced declinations toward the theory of architecture (Colomina, 1992; Rendell, Penner, & Borden, 2000). Urban studies and geography have both seen the emergence of a significant strain of feminist theory, exploring how gender relations vary across space and place (Massey, 1994, p. 178). The social aspects hinged to these relations enter the biopolitical sphere of urban life, influencing how we as subjects experience the built environment and, in turn, the way we are observed, controlled or confined as we make use of it. As we will see later in the book, the individual interacting with the environment is not a neutral and universal automaton, rather a specific subject dynamically defined by a range of nuanced characters, among which gender plays a primary role.
These diverse approaches share some fundamental features in their concern for space. First, they all eschew a physicalist model wherein space is only conceived as a container of things, but rather a plastic entity that can only be defined in relation to who experiences it. Second, the subject of this experience is neither disembodied nor neutral: it is a specific agent encountering the environment from a particular point of view, built upon both corporeal skills and conceptions of the world. Finally, space is not something that only manifests itself through representations: it is already there, in a givenness making it (and us) present.
Phenomenology in architectural theory
In architectural theory, the last two decades have witnessed a growing body of important studies that have again shifted the axis toward a discussion on space. From the mid-1990s, authors such as Juhani Pallasmaa, Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Harry Francis Mallgrave have variously addressed the question of space, mainly through a vindication of the centrality of sensorial experience on the basis of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. More recently, along with other authors, they have embraced the notion of atmospheres, as introduced in the field of architecture through the work of Gernot Böhme. However, their interest seems to revolve more around the perceptual dynamics of the experiencing subject rather than on a more comprehensive consideration of the nature of space. In various instances their ideas seem biased by an ideological prejudice regarding the superiority of some types of architecture over others, again implying that space is only the prerogative of specific design practices or “styles”.
Only two recent architectural books, based on two very different phenomenological traditions, have provided rigorous investigations of the dynamics of the subject’s spatial experience: the first, Dalibor Vesely’s Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation, published in 2004; the second, Böhme’s 2006 Architektur und Atmosphäre. The strength of these two works resides in their ability of describing the dynamics of space as the grounding structure of the experience of the environment rather than a phenomenon solely emerging through architecture: the task is thus not that of formulating a value assessment on buildings or urban space but that of proposing a different way of observing them.
The phenomenological foundations of these two books make it clear that space is not a specific quality of the environment, rather the encounter between its contingent manifestation and a subject experiencing it by means of his corporeity. From the beginning of phenomenology, the subject’s spatial presence has been considered a central condition for the understanding of the world: it also lies at the base of this book, and the life in space we refer to is not that of green sentient intergalactic squids, but to our existence as it unfolds every day.
About this book
My attempt will be to describe architecture not as a system of technically and culturally articulated physical objects, but in terms of the effects that these produce on the subject within a wider horizon. By taking up the subject’s point of view, I will describe what the encounter with architecture is like: a stepping away from the discipline’s primary task – designing and building the causes of these effects – that allows us to focus more clearly the nature of these effects and how the (designed or un-designed) environments generates them.
The central character of this book’s story is thus the subject. I intend the subject as an articulation of nuances: not universal nor singular; grounded on a deep evolutionary root sustaining deep cultural differences; entrusted with some inborn skills and others acquired over time, through entrainment and the accumulation of experience; and, most of all, understood in his full lived corporeality. We are not talking of a disembodied mind ambulating through the environment nor a coarse agglomeration of sensorial stimuli elaborated in a merely computational way: this subject is emotionally affected by what he comes upon in his world, by encounters, surprises, rich emotional responses that do not allow him...
