Spacing

Definition

Spacing is Jacques Derrida's term for the dynamic articulation of space and time — in Dorita Hannah's architectural reading, the performative operation that architecture and spatial design perform when they "take place." In Of Grammatology, Derrida aligns the dynamic action of punctuation to a "spacing" that "speaks the articulation of space and time, the becoming-space of time and the becoming-time of space" (p. 68); in Positions, spacing names "a 'productive,' 'genetic,' 'practical' movement, an 'operation'" (p. 76). Hannah's chapter converts this into spatial design's master operation: "Spacing is an architectural act for both the designer formulating architecture and for the inhabitant experiencing it." Unlike design, "which focuses on designer and creative output, spacing articulates the acts of both designer and inhabitant as always in the making, whereby both are constantly reconstructing their perception of, and engagement with, the built environment through time-based, embodied occupation." The definition's grammatical twist: "Spacing, like design, represents both noun and verb, thing and action" — and its choreographic echo: "the choreographic notion of spacing as a means of registering and apprehending changing relationships between bodies in motion and the place they occupy."

Hannah's signature extension is typographic: event-space's hyphen "simultaneously separates and joins while enacting a break or interruption," and "the hyphen operates like a necessary membrane holding the fluid from the solid, the dynamic from the static, event from space. The pairing of these two terms, however, must not be understood as existing in opposition." The "simple dash adopts a performative gesture… forming an-other space for productive expression." Via Derrida's Parc de la Villette critique, architecture "by 'taking place,' becomes 'the event of spacing'" — the folies as madnesses "acting out dissociation."

Key Thinkers

• Jacques Derrida — the concept's author (Of Grammatology, 1967; Positions, 1972; "Point de Folie – Maintenant l'Architecture," 1986): spacing as "the becoming-space of time and the becoming-time of space," and architecture as "the event of spacing."
• Dorita Hannah — the spatial-design theorization: spacing as "an architectural act for both the designer formulating architecture and for the inhabitant experiencing it"; the hyphen as "a necessary membrane"; the illocutionary reading of construction (2018).
• Bernard Tschumi — the project that drew Derrida "into the space of architecture": the Parc de la Villette's folies, the built occasion of architectural performativity.

Related Concepts

• event-space — the compound spacing helps define: the hyphen as "the articulation of space and time"; every event-space is a spacing in progress.
• spatial-performativity — the broader condition spacing names an operation within: "within the illocutionary act of architectural construction something is being done through spacing."
• deconstruction — the reading practice from which spacing emerges; punctuation as deconstruction's smallest spatial unit.
• temporality — spacing's other axis: time becoming space and space becoming time, against the static container.
• boundaries — the hyphen as "a necessary membrane": the boundary that joins what it separates.
• practiced-place — de Certeau's cognate: space as "the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it" — the everyday-practice version of spacing.
• differance — Derrida's parent neologism: spacing as its spatial-temporal face.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Event-space: A performance model for spatial design (Hannah 2018) — the concept's architectural theorization: the hyphen's membrane; spacing as "both the act of designing/building and embodied time-based inhabitation"; Derrida's Of Grammatology (p. 68) and Positions (p. 76) citations; the Parc de la Villette reading; the noun/verb doubleness.
• Derrida for Architects (Coyne 2011) — the concept's parent vocabulary in its architectural reception: Derrida's deconstructive reading of architecture (différance, trace, the Chora L Works collaboration with Eisenman and Tschumi) — the corpus from which spacing's spatial-temporal operation derives; Hannah's chapter is that vocabulary's conversion into a design discipline's concept.
• Ornament and Order (Soulillou 2002/2006) — a second, semantic register of spacing, independent of Derrida's temporal operation: the decorative's logic as "the very spacing between these pairs of opposites incessantly dividing and displacing themselves" (p. 319) — spacing not as becoming-space-of-time but as the interval between founding oppositions that the decorative's logic "endlessly re-divide[s]… by intercalating additional terms" (p. 319). Where Hannah's spacing is performative and temporal (the act of taking place), Soulillou's is structural and discursive: the gap in which oppositions (man/woman, free/not-free, appropriate/inappropriate) hold themselves apart — the gap the decorative occupies and thereby blurs. The two registers converge on the same intuition: what space is made of is not objects but articulations. See the-decorative, differance.

Open Questions

• If spacing is "always in the making," can any drawing, model, or completed building record it — or does spacing (like Weinthal's movement) defeat orthographic representation by definition? See orthographic-projection.
• Is the hyphen-membrane a theory of boundary in general — the wall as simultaneous separation and joining — and does Massumi's "not its boundedness… what elements it lets pass" give the membrane its filter logic?
• Derrida's spacing is a textual operation applied to architecture by invitation ("thrown… into the space of architecture, rather than architectural space"). Does the import succeed — is "spacing" architectural only insofar as architecture permits the textual — or does the hyphen's typographic origin remain a limit of the concept?
• Hannah pairs spacing with the choreographic ("bodies in motion and the place they occupy"). Does spacing therefore belong to spatial-dramaturgy rather than to grammar — and which discipline owns the operation?