Sense of Place

Definition

Sense of place is the felt distinctiveness of a locale — the quality by which a place is experienced as particular, rooted, and memorable rather than as generic space — and Goldberger's chapter on "the making of place" is largely an elegy for its erosion. He adopts Christian Norberg-Schulz's diagnosis of "the loss of the poetic, imaginative understanding of the world" and his call for "a return to 'the things themselves,'" and he cites the landscape historian J. B. Jackson's 1994 claim that "architecture in its oldest and most formal sense has ceased, at least in our newest landscapes, to symbolize hierarchy and permanence and sacredness and collective identity." Goldberger's own contribution is to connect this loss to technology and globalisation: the road and the highway "make places more and more the same," and cyberspace completes the work, since "physical surroundings do not matter in cyberspace" and architecture "becomes invisible" there. His response is not nostalgia but a reassertion of architecture's task: "Architecture, I will say again, is the making of place and the making of memory." Following Mumford, the city's function is "to permit, indeed to encourage and incite the greatest possible number of meetings, encounters, challenges between all persons, classes and groups."

Key Thinkers

• Paul Goldberger — the elegy for sense of place and the reassertion of architecture's place-making task.
• Christian Norberg-Schulz — Architecture: Meaning and Place and the phenomenological loss of place.
• J. B. Jackson — the road and the highway as the generators of a placeless landscape. (PAGE NEEDED — see log.)
• Lewis Mumford — the city as the stage of social life; "in a city, time becomes visible." (PAGE NEEDED — see log.)

Related Concepts

• place-identity — identity as a property of places in becoming.
• genius-loci — the classical name for the spirit of a particular place.
• new-urban-paradigm — the privatised pseudo-urban model that displaces place.
• street-as-room — the street as the everyday carrier of place.
• dwelling — being-at-home as the existential ground of place.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• source-notes/goldberger-2009-why-architecture-matters — ch. 7 (pp. 166–73) develops the loss of sense of place and architecture's place-making task against homogenisation and cyberspace.
• source-notes/norberg-schulz-1971-existence-space-architecture — the primary phenomenological theory of existential space and place.

Open Questions

• Is sense of place genuinely eroded, or merely redistributed — into themed and curated environments, and into digitally mediated attachments to place?
• Can a globally circulated architectural language (the glass tower, the museum-icon) produce place at all, or only identity-by-branding?
• If "architecture represents the real" and that is "ever more precious in an age of the virtual," what follows for design — more physicality, or better-designed virtuality?