Ineffable Space

Definition

Le Corbusier's term for the highest register of architectural space — space that produces a state of feeling that cannot be described in words — which he made central to the design of the chapel at Ronchamp (1955). Goldberger takes the term as naming the limit-case of architecture as space: "ineffable space," like great music and poetry, "can never be described adequately," and it is "where the architect's highest aesthetic achievement comes." The religious building is its natural home, because a religious programme both justifies spatial extravagance and lifts the ordinary limits on architectural creativity; Goldberger's examples are Borromini's Sant'Ivo and San Carlino, Le Corbusier's Ronchamp (criticised as "irrational" by Pevsner, who conceded that "some visitors say that the effect is movingly mysterious"), Tadao Ando's Church of the Light, Norman Jaffe's Gates of the Grove, and Wright's Unity Temple. What these spaces share is a construction of light and a blurring of support, so that the visitor is taken "a bit away from the secular life, away from the rational." Goldberger links the term to the sublime: such rooms "seem harsh at first; it is in their haunting quality that they achieve the sublime."

Key Thinkers

• Le Corbusier — coiner of the term; Ronchamp as its built exposition.
• Paul Goldberger — the critic's account of ineffable space and its religious register.
• Tadao Ando — Church of the Light (1989): a rectangle of concrete cut by a cross of light. (PAGE NEEDED — see log.)
• Norman Jaffe — Gates of the Grove (1989): blurred walls and ceilings, light from hidden sources. (PAGE NEEDED — see log.)
• Louis Kahn — the Unitarian Church, Rochester, where light washes rough concrete block. (PAGE NEEDED — see log.)

Related Concepts

• architecture-as-space — the general category in which ineffable space is the extreme.
• sublime — the aesthetic category to which Goldberger links the haunting quality of these rooms.
• procession — the sequence by which the space is revealed.
• non-static-architecture — the Baroque intensity that prepares the term.
• atmosphere — the affective register theorised by Böhme and Borch, adjacent to Goldberger's account.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• source-notes/goldberger-2009-why-architecture-matters — ch. 4 (pp. 104–107) develops ineffable space through Ronchamp, Ando, Jaffe, and Kahn.
• source-notes/norberg-schulz-1971-existence-space-architecture — the phenomenological account of existential and sacred space.

Open Questions

• If ineffable space cannot be described, can it be taught or designed deliberately — or is Le Corbusier's term a name for luck?
• Does the term survive secularisation, or is it necessarily tied to the sacred programme that licenses extravagance?