Space

For his part, Gehry has noted in defense of his recent museum extravaganzas: “artists want to be in an important building, not a neutral one.” At Dia:Beacon, Irwin pursued the opposite logic. As Govan has pointed out: “The money was spent to make it look like nothing was done to the building.” Or, as a partner from Open Office observes: “We talked often about the idea of doing nothing with precision. Do it right and they’ll never know we were here.” As one critic has written, what the result showed was, as he puts it, “Irwin’s unwavering conviction that museum spaces should serve the art and not the other way around.”

Problem

When they have a choice, people will always gravitate to those rooms which have light on two sides, and leave the rooms which are lit only from one side unused and empty.

Solution

Locate each room so that it has outdoor space outside it on at least two sides, and then place windows in these outdoor walls so that natural light falls into every room from more than one direction.

There was a fence with spaces you
could look through if you wanted to.

An architect who saw this thing
stood there one summer evening.

Took out the spaces with great care
and built a castle in the air.

The fence was utterly dumbfounded,
each post stood there with nothing round it.

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).

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.

Je suis l’espace où je suis.

This is a great line. But nowhere can it be better appreciated than in a corner.

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.

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.

Focus on the negative spaces surrounding the object to give yourself a fresh perspective on the form.

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.

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.

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.”