Space

Definition

Space is the fundamental dimension in which architecture operates — but "space" is not a single concept. Multiple, competing accounts circulate in this wiki. For phenomenology (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Norberg-Schulz), space is not geometric container but existential: space is "cleared" by dwelling, experienced through the lived body, and qualified by atmosphere and place. For Foucault, space is political: the "distribution of people in space," the discipline of enclosure, the counter-site of heterotopia, and the canalization of circulation. For Benjamin, urban space is an archive of memory and a field of dialectical images. For Virilio, space is annihilated by speed — the "poliorectic machine" of the city becomes a logistics of perception. These accounts are not interchangeable; their tension is productive, and this wiki's architectural thinking operates across all of them.

Carraher adds the vocabulary-historical and production-of-space registers. Historically: "Space has existed in the architectural vocabulary only since the 1890s, when it emerged from the lexicon of German philosophers and gained relevance through its association with modernism" — and, per Adrian Forty, the term wavers between "an abstract theoretical concept and a lived social production," so that "a willingness to connive in a confusion between these two unrelated properties seems to be an essential qualification for talking about architectural space." Lefebvre's productionist account supplies the consequence: physical space is "both an a priori phenomenon and an a posteriori social construct" — "Life and thought need space in which to take place. These acts do not occur separate from space, but within it, immediately transforming it forever." The modernist definitions Forty catalogues (enclosure, continuum, extension of the body — see homogeneous-space) and Hight/Hensel/Menges's heterogeneous space ("a multiplicity of atmospheres") bracket the term's twentieth-century career.

Key Thinkers

• Martin Heidegger — space from locations, not Cartesian extension; space as "cleared" by dwelling.

• Maurice Merleau-Ponty — spatiality of the lived body; body schema and motility.

• Michel Foucault — political space: distribution, enclosure, heterotopia.

• Walter Benjamin — urban space as memory's archive.

• Paul Virilio — dromology: the annihilation of space by speed.

• Shirley Ardener — the anthropological account: space as an ordering principle partitioned by ground rules; once bounded, "it is no longer merely a neutral background: it exerts its own influence"; coloured space (Zuni, Atoni, Irish) as space saturated with symbolic classification.

• Gaston Bachelard — the poetic-phenomenological account: "The opposition of outside and inside ceases to have as coefficient its geometrical evidence" — space lived as a play of values; Balzac's "indifferent space" as the container-conception meditation puts "behind" itself; space tonalized by being ("intimate geometry grounded in imagination").

• Michel de Certeau — the practiced-place account: place (lieu) as "an instantaneous configuration of positions" ruled by the law of the 'proper' vs space (espace) as "intersections of mobile elements" — "in short, space is a practiced place"; the street geometrically defined by urban planning "is transformed into a space by walkers."

• (Named in the source, not yet paged — see log: René Descartes — the homogeneous mathematical counter-account: "a continuous body or a space indefinitely extended in length, breadth, and height or depth," three equivalent axes without hierarchy.)

• Adrian Forty — Words and Buildings (2013): the vocabulary history — space entering architecture's language only in the 1890s from German philosophy; the thing/concept confusion; the three modernist definitions (enclosure, continuum, extension of the body) (not yet paged — see log).

• Erin Carraher — the digital-age inflection: homogeneous modernist space vs. heterogeneous space; existence as spatial and space as historical.

• Graeme Brooker — the reuse register of the space/place pair (2018, via Alistair Bonnet): "Space sounds modern in a way that place doesn't: it evokes mobility and the absence of restrictions; it promises empty landscapes filled with promise. When confronted with the filled-in busyness and oddity of place, the reaction of modern society has been to straighten and rationalize, to prioritize connections and erase obstacles, to overcome place with space" (p. 13) — the pair as one of interior architecture's dialectics of appropriation, constructed "through changes in use as well as the processes of decay, obsoletion, and reoccupation, and then the same again." See dialectics-of-appropriation, practiced-place.

• David Erdman — the space-making register (2018): space-making as the built-out city's necessity and the interior's method — "As populations increase, cities become denser, resources diminish, and economies sober, architects will need to confront new methods of space making" — with the method specified as growth "inward," reconfiguration of the interior, and design "for the discontinuities and temporal layering of their urbanity." Where the other accounts define what space is (cleared, political, practiced, produced, heterogeneous), Erdman's asks how space is made when there is no more of it: space as the yield of alteration rather than of building outward.

Related Concepts

• Dwelling — the existential mode of spatial inhabitation.
• Lived Body — the phenomenological subject of spatial experience.
• Enclosure — the political technique of spatial control.
• Atmosphere — the felt quality of inhabited space.
• Practiced Place (Space vs. Place) — de Certeau's distinction: place as the law of the 'proper', space as practiced place — one of this page's competing accounts given its own page.
• Partition of Space — space as an ordering system: bounded space's rules, gate-keepers, and influence on behaviour.
• The Dialectics of Outside and Inside — the lived division of space whose coefficient is value, not geometry (Bachelard).
• Intimate Immensity — immensity as a lived value rising within the subject, not a measurable expanse (Bachelard, via Rilke).
• Ground Rules and Social Maps — the social structure of which spatial divisions are the realization.
• Gendered Space — gender as a spatial ordering principle, cross-culturally.
• Spatial Metaphors — the spatial terms through which social life "is given shape."
• Heterogeneous Space — the contemporary inflection: differential ordering and "a multiplicity of atmospheres" against modernist homogeneity.
• Homogeneous Space — the modernist inflection: universal, standardized space and the thing/concept confusion Forty diagnoses.

Source Support

• Becoming Places (Dovey 2010) — the place/space distinction's intensity thesis: "To ask 'what kind of place is New York?' may generate a variety of answers but this question has a sense that 'what kind of space is New York?' does not… A large part of what distinguishes place from space is that place has an intensity that connects sociality to spatiality in everyday life. We can say 'do you have enough space?' but not 'do you have enough place?' While a space may have physical dimensions, it is intensity that gives place its potency and its primacy" (p. 3); the intensive/extensive distinction at urban scale — "the temperature of a body of water is intensive while the volume is extensive; to double the volume does not change the temperature… It is the intensity that is most strongly linked to the sense and affect of place" (p. 26, via DeLanda); and the warning against the discourses — "What the discourse of 'site' and 'space' so often does is to strip place of its sense" (p. 25). See becoming, place-identity. Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:
• Foucault for Architects — political space and spatial analytics.
• Building Dwelling Thinking — space from locations.
• Proximities (Taylor & Preston 2006) — "While the architectural room is wrapped with abstract notions of time and space, this small alcove inhabits its periphery as a pocket where body is central, maybe even fluid, and space is temporal, perhaps even subjective" (p. 8) — space re-subjectivised at the scale of the interior.
• Quadrature (La Coe 2018) — the homogeneous mathematical pole, stated at the concept's historical root: Cartesian space as "indefinitely extended in length, breadth, and height or depth," its depth and height "equivalent mathematical positions without hierarchy and, therefore, homogenous" — and the Baroque counter-move of re-centering an embodied observer within it "in a system of meaning, both spatial and spiritual." See perspective, quadrature.
• The Partition of Space (Ardener 2006) — the social-anthropological pole: societies "have divided the social into spheres, levels and territories with invisible fences"; "once space has been bounded and shaped it is no longer merely a neutral background: it exerts its own influence" — "A dozen people in a small room 'is not the same thing' as a dozen people in a great hall"; "So: behaviour and space are mutually dependent" (p. 16); coloured space among the Zuni, Atoni and Irish (p. 18); time and space as "mutually affecting spheres of reality" (p. 20). See partition-of-space, ground-rules-and-social-maps.
• The Dialectics of Outside and Inside (Bachelard 1958/2006) — the poetic-phenomenological pole: "there exists a play of values, which makes everything in the category of simple determinations fall into second place. The opposition of outside and inside ceases to have as coefficient its geometrical evidence" (p. 24); Balzac's "indifferent space" as the declined, container-conception meditation leaves behind (pp. 24–25). See inside-outside-dialectic, intimate-immensity.
• Thick Edge (Borden 1996/2006) — the socio-political pole, named as a force: spatiality realigned "as a force, or flow, among social elements" (editors, p. 49) — "not as objects, but as the interrelation between things, spaces, individuals and ideas" — against Soja's "illusion of opacity" ("spatiality is reduced to physical objects and forms"); the boundary itself "not a spatial fact with sociological consequences but a sociological fact that is formed spatially" (Simmel, via Borden). See space-of-flows, thick-edge, power-and-space.
• Spatial Stories (de Certeau 1984/2006) — the practiced-place pole, stated definitionally: place (lieu) as "the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence" vs space (espace) as "vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables" — "in relation to place, space is like the word when it is spoken"; "In short, space is a practiced place. Thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers" (pp 79–80); aligned with Merleau-Ponty's 'geometrical' vs 'anthropological' space ("there are as many spaces as there are distinct spatial experiences," p. 80). See practiced-place.
• Technologies: The spatial agency of digital praxis (Carraher 2018) — the vocabulary-history pole: space in architecture's vocabulary "only since the 1890s," from German philosophy, via modernism; Forty's thing/concept confusion ("a willingness to connive in a confusion… an essential qualification for talking about architectural space"); the three modernist definitions (enclosure, continuum, extension of the body); Berlage's enclosure thesis; Lefebvre's Bauhaus production regime ("things could not be created independently of each other in space," p. 124) and the design as mediator between "mental activity (invention) and social activity (realization)" (pp. 27–28); and the contemporary pair — modernist homogeneous space against heterogeneous space ("a multiplicity of atmospheres").
• Altered (e)states (Erdman 2018) — the space-making register: "architects will need to confront new methods of space making"; the dying "topological city" ("open, smooth, continuous, and free to grow outward") and the twenty-first-century answer — adapt and alter existing structures "to grow inward, to reconfigure their interior, and to design for the discontinuities and temporal layering of their urbanity"; space made by reconfiguring objects' interiors rather than by extending the ground plan. See alteration, interiorized-object.
• source-notes/brooker-2018-dialectics-of-appropriation
• source-notes/dubbeldam-2006-thing-shapes
• source-notes/marinic-2018-internal-disconnect-portman