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.
Stealth Architecture: The Rooms of Light and Space
To absorb it or build your own
Robert Smithson and other so-called land artists simply disengaged from architecture, placing their works in America's open landscape, leaving behind the museums and galleries Smithson referred to as "tombs". A new "expanded field" allowed artists to contextualize their work beyond the institutional frame of the museum or the commercial structure of a gallery. Richard Serra, who also began to move outdoors, at times chose to "attack" architecture, creating structures that disrupted or overwhelmed the buildings around them.
The artists of the Light and Space movement took another tack. Rather than fight or flee the architecture, they explored and manipulated it, approaching architecture as a kind of found object, creating a series of rooms that incorporated architecture and architectural structures directly into their art. Bruce Nauman summarized it well: "When you work in a gallery or museum, the architecture is a given. If you wanted to have a show, you didn't have a choice, except to deal with it. You had to find a way to either absorb architecture into the piece of build your own."
A stealth architect
By the 1970s, Irwin was in effect a stealth architect. We often talk about the ephemeral qualities of light and space in Irwin's installations, but what make those qualities palpable to our perception are practical structures—windows, walls, corridors, doorways, and skylights—in other words, architecture. And Irwin was keenly aware of how best to use all of those structures. One of his greatest talents has been to engage bad or benign architectural situations, disappearing into their details, changing them, and creating and entirely new quality of space.
The measuring unit of all space
The piece was titled The Portal, referring to a large opening in the center of the wall. Whether you want to call it art or architecture, it was a testament to the amazing presence that can be shown by a simple wall, which [Tadao Ando] has referred to as "the measuring unit of all space."
The walls are reserved for the sun
Maria Nordman always insisted, "Nothing should hang on a wall. The walls are reserved for the sun." It was like being inside a large cardboard box that had been gently slit open with an X-Acto knife, allowing thin planes of light to emerge. It is well known that Nordman avoided using the camera to document her installations, feeling that it abstracted and framed various aspects of the experience, which is best absorbed more holistically. It is ironic that Nordman's rooms often took the form of a kind of architectural camera in which slits in walls and corners created mysterious apertures that allowed light to leak into a room at a glacial pace. Being inside one of Nordman's spaces is like being inside a camera operating in exceedingly slow motion.
A little too something
As Irwin had chosen a stairwell for his UCLA installation because it was curious in its banality and innocuousness, Bruce Nauman became interested in corridors and shafts as overlooked and slightly eccentric spaces. He was particularly interested in those that had "a kind of constriction that wasn't natural or was a little too long or a little too something—like the architect just hadn't really thought it out."
Various titles of Bruce Nauman artworks
- Sound Breaking Wall
- Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room
- False Silence
- Flayed Earth Flayed Self (Skin/Sink)
- Room with My Soul Left Out, Room That Does Not Care