Architecture as Space

Definition

The dimension of architecture that consists not of walls and masses but of the enclosed void and its felt qualities. Goldberger follows the standard modern claim that "the reality of architecture consists as much of space as form," and adds the critic's observation that interior space "will almost always provoke a greater emotional response than the outside of a building does." Space can be directed (funnelling you forward, as at Foster's Beijing airport) or focused (holding you, as at the Pantheon); it can feel generous or mean, clear or mysterious, soft or hard. Great space "makes you feel something in the pit of your stomach" — "a sense of awe and contentment, somehow joined" — and Goldberger argues that if architecture ever brings you to something like nirvana "it will almost be because of a space you are in, not because of a facade you are looking at." The chapter also supplies the conceptual history: before the nineteenth century architects built rooms, courtyards, and halls rather than "space"; the twentieth century made space architecture's "aesthetic reality." Space is inseparable from movement (procession) and from the plan, which is its two-dimensional guide, and Le Corbusier's "ineffable space" names its highest register.

Key Thinkers

• Paul Goldberger — the affective account of space and its priority over the facade.
• Le Corbusier — "ineffable space" and space as architecture's aesthetic reality.
• Francesco Borromini — Sant'Ivo and San Carlino as the extreme of fluid, moulded space. (PAGE NEEDED — see log.)
• Eero Saarinen — the TWA Terminal as a modern equivalent of Baroque "non-static" space. (PAGE NEEDED — see log.)
• Louis Kahn — the Unitarian Church, Rochester: the softness of light joined to the hardness of concrete. (PAGE NEEDED — see log.)

Related Concepts

• architecture-as-object — the complementary dimension; the object's inside.
• procession — space experienced as movement through time.
• ineffable-space — the limit-case of great religious space.
• interior-architecture — the discipline that takes space's interior as its primary object.
• non-static-architecture — space that appears to move of itself.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• source-notes/goldberger-2009-why-architecture-matters — ch. 4 (pp. 87–107) is the book's treatment of architecture as space.
• source-notes/norberg-schulz-1971-existence-space-architecture — the phenomenological theory of existential space that Goldberger's chapter presupposes.

Open Questions

• If space cannot be quantified and each person responds differently, how does the critic avoid mere assertion? Goldberger's answer is experience plus description — is it enough?
• Is the priority of interior space over the facade compatible with the image economy, in which buildings circulate as photographs of their exteriors?