Homogeneous Space

Definition

Homogeneous space is modernism's spatial ideal: "a type of homogenous space that was a universal space – one of the key paradigms for establishing the desired democratic space" (Carraher, after Hensel and Menges). Its social logic was egalitarian universalism — designers "conceived housing, furniture, and landscapes for the ubiquitous everyday man (exchangeable with every other man and woman of the same class, and in most cases, the same race)" — realized in an aesthetic of "the austerity of white walls, the elimination of ornament, and rigid formal orders." Its architectural forms are the neutral, multipurpose, flexible box "mastered by Mies van der Rohe (and copied by countless lesser architects)," "born of technological conditions of mass production." Gropius gave the ideal its doctrine: rationalization is only the "purifying role"; what matters more is "the intellectual achievement which has made possible a new spatial vision – for whereas the practical side of building is a matter of construction and materials, the very nature of architecture makes it dependent on the mastery of space."

The concept's critical content is the gap between the ideal and the effect. The Movement's "desire for egalitarianism turned to standardization, and standardization made architecture disappear by attempting to hide its effects and power"; its built environments "feigned neutrality, but in fact imposed a heavy-handed formal structure that overwrote the local context." Yet Carraher also records the ideal's suppressed strength: "Modernist space may have allowed greater agency for inhabitants because of its neutrality" — the unprogrammed neutral box left inhabitants room to act, a capacity the active, self-displaying space of digital practice trades away for conspicuousness. Adrian Forty's vocabulary survey supplies the concept's three modernist senses: space as enclosure (building elements as devices enclosing space — "the principal theme of modernism"), space as continuum (the continuous connection of inside and outside), and space as extension of the body (formed by human activity).

Key Thinkers

• Walter Gropius — the doctrine: the "new spatial vision" as modern architecture's intellectual achievement beyond economy; the breach with the past and the "mastery of space" (not yet paged — see log).
• Henri Lefebvre — the production-regime analysis: the Bauhaus (Gropius's school) and Fordist manufacturing as the production of homogeneous space — "things could not be created independently of each other in space… without taking into account their interrelationships and their relationship to the whole."
• Mies van der Rohe — the "neutral, multipurpose, flexible box" as the concept's built form (discussed in the source, not yet paged — see log).
• Adrian Forty — Words and Buildings (2013): the vocabulary history (space entering architecture's language only in the 1890s from German philosophy) and the three modernist definitions (not yet paged — see log).
• Erin Carraher — the critical reconstruction: homogeneous space as hidden agency, and its suppressed inhabitant-agency dividend.

Related Concepts

• Heterogeneous Space — the successor concept: "differential relationships between diverse systems" against uniform order; the pair forms Carraher's central contrast.
• Modernism — the movement whose spatial ideal this is; the concept operationalizes modernism's egalitarianism-to-standardization trajectory.
• Machine for Living — the domestic face of the same universalism: standardized equipment for the standardized inhabitant.
• Space — the parent concept: homogeneous space is the modernist inflection of the architectural vocabulary of space (Forty's "enclosure" and "continuum" senses).
• Spatial Agency — the concept's political charge: space that hides its agency vs. space that displays it — and the paradox that hidden agency may have served inhabitants better.
• The Decorative / Ornament vs. Purity — the aesthetic regime: the "elimination of ornament" as homogeneous space's visible signature.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Technologies: The spatial agency of digital praxis (Carraher 2018) — the concept's full account: universal space as modernism's democratic paradigm; the exchangeable everyday man; the Mies box and mass production; Gropius's two 1934 statements; standardization as architecture's disappearance; neutrality as feigned agency-overwriting; the three Forty definitions; the Berlage enclosure thesis ("a building should not be considered primarily from the outside"); the Lefebvre/Bauhaus production regime; and the counter-turn — modernist neutrality "may have allowed greater agency for inhabitants."

• A history of style and the modern interior (Deyong 2018) — the suppressed complement: modernism's alternate, interior-centred lineage against the canonical universal-space narrative.

• Inside-out and outside-in (Vanucci 2018) — the concept widened to both poles of recent discourse: "Whereas modern and postmodern architecture sought for homogeneous spaces, undifferentiated fields provided a homogeneous environment" — homogeneity as the shared product of formal and programmatic search alike, "as a result of a formal and programmatic search" statically provided by the uniform envelope. The chapter also supplies the concept's modernist premise: "The modernist paradigm was predicated on the assumption that 'form follows function' and implied the correspondence between internal articulation and external manifestation of built form" — the correspondence between inside articulation and outside manifestation as homogeneity's doctrinal form. Its successor is the differentiated envelope (performative-envelope, heterogeneous-space).

• Event-space: A performance model for spatial design (Hannah 2018) — the concept's evental statement of its own container-form: the Deleuzian transformation of architecture "through the element of time; from passive, homogeneous container/object into something more uneven, contracting and expanding" — homogeneity here not as modernism's spatial ideal (Carraher's universal space) but as the object's ontological condition (Lefebvre's "objectality": the logic of space "as implacably hard as a concrete wall"), against which the objectile's "continual unfolding" and Kwinter's "temporalization of space" define the alternative. Where the Carraher register critiques homogeneous space's politics, the Hannah register names its temporality: the static as the homogeneity of time itself. See objectile, event-space, temporality.

• Altered (e)states (Erdman 2018) — the practice-side counter-register: homogeneity as the thing alteration confronts, at tower and at software scale. The original Repulse Bay towers are "standardized and homogeneous, surrounded by a series of landscape and club elements that were disconnected architecturally, diminishing the complex's experiential identity" (an "Arquitectonica 'knock-off'"); adaptation's ground-up whole is "continuous, smooth, singular, and fully integrated," and "the contemporary field of architectural software favors this continuous, smooth, singular, and fully integrated approach" — homogeneity as the default of both the standardized type and the design system. Erdman's counter is not heterogeneity-by-ordering (H/H/M) but by intervention: "amplifying the heterogeneity of the tower units while simultaneously imbuing the property at large with a greater sense of cohesion." See alteration, heterogeneous-space.

Open Questions

• Was homogeneous space ever actually homogeneous — or did the universal box always encode the (class-, race-, gender-) particular body it claimed to be "exchangeable with every other"?
• Carraher's counter-turn (neutrality "may have allowed greater agency for inhabitants") against the concealment critique (standardization "hid its effects and power"): can modernist neutrality be both empowerment and ideology — and which assessment does the historical record of mass housing support?
• If digital practice "swaps modernist universalism for cultural relativism," what happens to the democratic claim — is plurality (mass-customized difference) democratic, or the end of the shared spatial world universal space promised?
• Does the Berlage enclosure thesis ("a building should not be considered primarily from the outside") anticipate interior architecture's whole disciplinary claim — and does homogeneous space's collapse into Bilbao's "spatially challenged form" prove him right?