Space
159. Light on Two Sides of Every Room
The picket fence
The measuring unit of all space
Light and Space
The reality of the building
One day I went to my study at Taliesen to sit down and rest. I picked up a little book just received from the ambassador to America from Japan. It was called The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzo. I wonder how many of you have read it? Well, in that little book I came upon quotations from the great Chinese poet-prophet Laotze, things he had said five hundred years before Jesus. As I turned the pages I suddenly came across this: "The reality of the building does not consist in the four walls and the roof but in the space within to be lived in..."
The answer is, reality is the space within, into which you can put something. In other words, the idea. And so it is with architecture; so it is with your lives; and so it is with everything you can experience as reality. You will soon find out for yourselves if you begin to work with this principle in mind, that things will open to you...Therein lies the secret of great peace, missing in Western Civilization today.
Content-responsive space
Content-responsive spaces in text can be as meaningful as spaces and line breaks in computer code, poetry, math, dialogues, cartoons.
For 1500 years, printed text has used grids indifferent/hostile to meaning. Content-responsive grids are better than imperious grid-possessed layouts. To clarify and intensity meaning, authors and editors can remodel relations between spaces and words...insisting on control of line breaks by authors (who, after all, know the content).
The spaces between things
It's easy to underestimate the significance of the spaces between things...as soon as you frame a section of the view with architecture, the eye has a place to rest and previously invisible details come into focus.
I am the space where I am
Je suis l'espace où je suis.
This is a great line. But nowhere can it be better appreciated than in a corner.
At a uniformly comfortable termperature
In America our tendency has been to get away from thermal conditions as a determinant of behavior. Instead, we have used our technology to keep entire living and working complexes at a uniformly comfortable temperature. As a result, our spatial habits have become diffused, and activities that were once localized by thermal conditions have spread out over a whole house or building. We forget, unless a system breaks down, that such wide-ranging use of space is extremely dependent upon the available heating and cooling equipment.
(an architectural stem cell that might transform itself into any organ for living)
Topology by other means
The burglar is a three-dimensional actor amid the two-dimensional surfaces and objects of the city. This means operating with a fundamentally different spatial sense of how architecture should work, and how one room could be connected to another. It means seeing how a building can be stented: engineering short-circuits where mere civilians, altogether less aggressive users of the city, would never expect to find them. Burglary is topology pursued by other means: a new science of the city, proceeding by way of shortcuts, splices, and wormholes.
The negative spaces
Focus on the negative spaces surrounding the object to give yourself a fresh perspective on the form.
The weather in the space
The architect's special preoccupation is first to decide what kinds of spaces shall be enclosed.
All manner of different considerations will influence an architect's decisions about the shape of the spaces they are to enclose, but the chief of them will always be the probable activities of the people who will enjoy the weather in the space.
Room continuum
The Modernist aspiration for continuous, flowing space and open interconnections between spaces has a tendency to reduce the sense of room-ness by turning space into a continuum, creating a flow through units instead of projecting a spatial object.
Overlays
The awkwardness of the room itself forced Irwin toward the next phase of his endeavor: each installation from there on would have to arise out of the unique configurations of each new site. As Irwin put it, "Instead of my overlaying my ideas onto that space, that space overlaid itself on me."
Spatial Web Browsing
An Article by Maggie AppletonThere are some new apps appearing that offer alternative ways of browsing the web...This canvas-based approach adds spatial dimension to the web browsing experience; they allow us to arrange browser windows above, below, to the left, and right of other browser windows.
The same way we're able to put an open book next to a piece of paper and below a row of sticky notes in meatspace. Arranging objects in space to create groupings, indicate relationships, and build hierarchies is one of those classical human skills that never goes out of style.
The Method of Loci
An ArticleFrom the time we learn to walk, we start building up spatial memories—recollections of the layouts of physical spaces and their relationships to the objects in them. These memories tend to form fast and stick around for a long time.
The method of loci hijacks our innate aptitude for remembering physical spaces, using it to help us remember other kinds of information with greater ease.
Nototo
An ApplicationThe visual workspace for notes. Humans have incredible visual-spatial memory. Leverage that with Nototo.
Makespace.fun
An ApplicationIn today’s software, live video feeds are stuck inside static rectangles that can’t go anywhere. MakeSpace flips all that on its head. Your cursor is your live face, and you can roam free, controlling who and what you want to be close to.
The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses
Thin ice
Today the 'depth of our being' stands on thin ice.
Extensions of the tactile sense
"Touch is the parent of our eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. It is the sense which became differentiated into the others." — Ashley Montagu
All the senses, including vision, are extensions of the tactile sense; the senses are specializations of skin tissue, and all sensory experiences are modes of touching, and thus related to tactility.
The computer creates a distance
Computer imaging tends to flatten our magnificent, multi-sensory, simultaneous and synchronic capacities of imagination by turning the design process into a passive visual manipulation, a retinal journey. The computer creates a distance between the maker and the object, whereas drawing by hand as well as working with models put the designer in a haptic contact with the object, or space.
The quality of an architectural reality
The quality of an architectural reality seems to depend fundamentally on peripheral vision, which enfolds the subject in the space...neurological investigations suggest that our processes of perception and cognition advance from the instantaneous grasp of entities towards the identification of details, rather than the other way around.
A hierarchical system of sense
During the Renaissance, the five senses were understood to form a hierarchical system from the highest sense of vision down to touch. Vision was correlated to fire and light, hearing to air, smell to vapour, taste to water, and touch to earth.
The inhumanity of contemporary architecture
The inhumanity of contemporary architecture and cities can be understood as the consequence of the neglect of the body and the senses, and an imbalance in our sensory system.
The art of the eye has certainly produced imposing and thought-provoking structures, but it has not facilitated human rootedness in the world.
Modernist design at large has housed the intellect and the eye, but it has left the body and the other senses, as well as our memories, imagination and dreams, homeless.
Estrangement and detachment, hospitals and airports
It is thought-provoking that this sense of estrangement and detachment is often evoked by the technologically most advanced settings, such as hospitals and airports.
Sonorisms IV
'an unending rainfall of images' (Calvino)
a cancerous growth of vision
we are unable to see or imagine life behind these walls
the patina of wear
to carve a volume into the void of darkness
time turned into shapeThe tacit wisdom of the body
It is evident that the architecture of traditional cultures is also essentially connected with the tacit wisdom of the body, instead of being visually and conceptually dominated. Construction in traditional cultures is guided by the body in the same way that a bird shapes its nest by movements of its body.
Mere retinal art
Instead of an existentially grounded plastic and spatial experience, architecture has adopted the psychological strategy of advertising and instant persuasion; buildings have turned into image products detached from existential depth and sincerity.
Architecture of our time often appears as mere retinal art.
Stage sets for the eye
With the loss of tactility, measures and details crafted for the human body – and particularly for the hand – architectural structures become repulsively flat, sharp-edged, immaterial and unreal. The detachment of construction from the realities of matter and craft further turns architecture into stage sets for the eye, into a scenography devoid of the authenticity of matter and construction. The sense of 'aura', the authority of presence, that Walter Benjamin regards as a necessary quality for an authentic piece of art, has been lost.
Vision reveals what the touch already knows
Deep shadows and darkness are essential
During overpowering emotional experiences, we tend to close off the distancing sense of vision; we close the eyes when dreaming, listening to music, or caressing our beloved ones. Deep shadows and darkness are essential, because they dim the sharpness of vision, make depth and distance ambiguous, and invite unconscious peripheral vision and tactile fantasy.
The street of an old town
How much more mysterious and inviting is the street of an old town with its alternating realms of darkness and light than are the brightly and evenly lit streets of today! Homogenous bright light paralyzes the imagination in the same way that homogenization of space weakens the experience of being, and wipes away the sense of place. The human eye is most perfectly tuned for twilight rather than bright daylight.
To carve a volume into the void of darkness
The nocturnal sound is a reminder of human solitude and mortality, and it makes one conscious of the entire slumbering city. Anyone who has become entranced by the sound of dripping water in the darkness of a ruin can attest to the extraordinary capacity of the ear to carve a volume into the void of darkness. The space traced by the ear in the darkness becomes a cavity sculpted directly in the interior of the mind.
The door handle is the handshake of a building
Time turned into shape
A pebble polished by waves is pleasurable to the hand, not only because of its soothing shape, but because it expresses the slow process of its formation; a perfect pebble on the palm materializes duration, it is time turned into shape.
Authentic architectural experiences
Authentic architectural experiences consist of approaching or confronting a building, rather than the formal apprehension of a facade; of the act of entering, and not simply the visual design of the door; of looking in or out through a window, rather than the window itself as a material object; or of occupying the sphere of warmth, rather than the fireplace as an object of visual design.
Architectural space is lived space rather than physical space, and lived space always transcends geometry and measurability.
From body to body
During the design process, the architect gradually internalizes the landscape, the entire context, and the functional requirements as well as his/her conceived building: movement, balance and scale are felt unconsciously through the body of the observer, the experience mirrors the bodily sensations of the maker. Consequently, architecture is communication from the body of the architect directly to the body of the person who encounters the work, perhaps centuries later.