Unfolding
A New View on Space
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Standing in front of space, we are faced with a phenomenon that we will have to understand and come to terms with, as we stumble through the world. It may be an empirical understanding that is formed by our experience as we interact with the world around us; when we experience the spatial disposition of the city we live in, when we experience the distance from point a to b, or when we enclose space with structure and surface and call it architecture. It may also be an abstract understanding that is formed by reasoning in our minds, when we deal with the mathematical space as a coordinate system, when we construct the narrative space of a novel or when we give spatial attributes to words and place them in a virtual space.
However, none of these understandings or experiences of space are static: Each person has an individual idea of space that may be changed, distorted or fooled. In fact, many of the characteristics of space that we take for granted may be questioned by theories in physics like the big bang and quantum mechanics, or by the virtual construction of hyper textural spaces, mass communication and data. What, at one point in time, seems to be as a self-evident understanding constructed by pure reason, may at another point in time turn out to be quite the opposite. Positions in space, for instance, can be shared so that an object can be at several locations at the same time, which goes against even the most rudimental definition of space in classic physics, but has been proven by the probability of positions in quantum physics. A crisis, like that, in the structure of our understanding of space, should cause our understanding to be scattered and later redefined.(1)
However, it seems that our understanding of space is united by a strong cultural consensus of what space is, and what space may do, while everybody is well aware that such a consensus is a set of constructed constraints for our understanding.(2) To the historian of architecture, Anthony Vidler, such a dynamic construction of crisis and consensus formed the starting point for his book Warped Space in which he writes:
Space, in these various iterations, has been increasingly defined as a product of subjective projection and introjection, as opposed to a stable container of objects and bodies (and later) ... – the psychology of space was devoted to calibrating the endlessly shifting sensations and moods of a perceiving subject whose perceptions had less to do with what was objectively ‘there’ than with what was projected as seen.(3)
The same paradox may be found in the philosopher Karsten Harries’ discussion of what space in architecture should be: “When all places count the same we cannot place ourselves and become displaced persons. The ease with which we relocate ourselves and replace our buildings is witness to this displacement … we can speak of the terror of space …”(4) The philosopher John Rajchman, on the other hand, wants to escape from it: “What if the Kantian “schematism” were only a temporary construction always to be reinvented through a free artifice no longer based in the rules of a “productive” any more than a “reproductive” imagination?”(5) To Vidler, Harris and Rajchman the crisis between our individual experience of space and the cultural consensus of the concepts, we apply to space, is a dynamic resource that lies at the heart of our understanding of space.
How do we then come to terms with an understanding of space as a phenomenon at the same time as we perform a conceptual description of space? One way, is to divide space into a gamut of categories by the use of a concept: by location (in physical reality, in our minds, in our perception), by parameter (color, rotation, transparency, proportions, scale), by system (semiotic, political, economic, ethnic) and so forth. Hence, we may speak of a social space or a color space, if that particular space has been devoted just to show spatial aspects of either social or color issues. This is a convenient way to analyze a given space – to divide a larger, complex space into a range of simpler spaces, as if they were seen through a specific filter or conceptual lens. However, it is also a convenient way to construct a space – to construct the simpler parts before the larger and more complex whole. In other words, the categorization of space in smaller and larger parts is both an effective way to analyze and to construct space. This makes the categorization of space an activity that is important to everybody, who is taking part in a discussion or design process, since it constructs a conceptual lens or matrix that will serve as a shared terminology for that space.(6) This process shall not be taken lightly. It is in this categorization that content may be lost or an automatic presumption may cover vital and yet unknown issues. It is what the physicist Albert Einstein cautions, when he writes:
He (the scientist) uses this conceptual material, or, speaking more exactly, these conceptual tools of thought, as something obviously, immutably given; something having an objective value of truth which is hardly ever, and in any case not seriously, to be doubted … in the interests of science it is necessary over and over again to engage in the critique of these fundamental concepts, in order that we may not unconsciously be ruled by them.(7)
Therefore, just as there is a need for being aware of the concepts we use to ground the arguments, there is a need for a critical discussion of these concepts.
We can argue, however, that the view on space as either phenomenological or conceptual therefore is far too rigid and far too general to take us any further. Conceptual spaces constructed in our minds can indeed become almost too real as nightmare, vertigo, agoraphobia, claustrophobia and other spatial abnormalities of our minds as described by medical doctor and neurologist Oliver Sacks(8) and more recently in an architectural context by architectural historian Anthony Vidler as mentioned above.(9) Spatial phenomena, on the other hand, can be given a strong abstract articulation, as it was the case in the architect Robert Venturi’s critique of the modern city; that an urban space was made from more than just material form – it was also constructed by the abstract resources of symbols and signs.(10) So it often turns out that what we may understand as the real physical space is in fact a construct of our individual minds trying to decipher the phenomenon of the real and what we on the other hand may think is an entirely abstract construction is a deliberate conceptualization of the real, enforced upon us. The real space is not entirely real, and the abstract space neither entirely abstract.
Further, the concept that is eventually chosen to describe space is often constructed in a specific way by specific bodies of knowledge. If a given urban space for example is observed and constructed from a sociological context, one could apply the ornithological concept of activity spaces of male tree sparrows to it, as done by the urban geographer Edward W. Soja.(11) But if a similar urban space is observed from an architectural context, one may apply the concepts of symbols in space, visual scale and ornaments from art history and advertising, as done by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour.(12) The same urban space – the postmodern North American cities of Las Vegas and Los Angeles – can be studied at the same time in history, through the application of two entirely different concepts from two entirely different areas, and still arrive at a useful and relevant conceptualization of that particular space.(13) It shows that our conceptualization of space may be bend and exchanged creatively to construct new views of the spaces that surrounds us. So, on the one hand, space is not to much use, since it is described by too many concepts and is too heavily based on individual perception that a shared notion of space is far from possible. On the other hand, since space and concepts of space are so widely shared among so many, it could turn out to be just the right agent for constructing a shared terminology for integrated design. A sign of this could be that the term ‘space’ has become one of the most used terms in recent architectural discussion and theoretical discourse, as the presence of dematerialized media, diagrams, programs, abstraction machines, collaboration and so forth, has become even more noticeable in architecture. In a way ‘space’ has become synonymous with all that is complex, diffuse, affective, fluent, mediated and modern in architecture. In the words of the media artist and theorist Frances Dyson: “‘space’ provides a means of negotiating such a dilemma, having sufficient ambiguity to enable the discourse to drift between a cornucopia of real and mythic spaces, between for instance, the ‘space of the screen’, the ‘space of the imagination’, ‘outer space’, ‘cosmic space’, and literal, three-dimensional physical ‘space’.”(14) In this way, space becomes a series of categories in architectural praxis and theory, as a sliding non-discrete progression from the abstract affective space of the architectural idea, across the real effective space of the architectural manifestation to the critical spatial analysis of the beholder.
Lived and Unlived SpaceThe architect Franz Xaver Baier offers a conceptualization of space by introducing three categories of spaces: lived space, unlived space and expanded space.(15)
Lived space or ‘Der gelebte Raum’ is a synthesis of all the elements that together make up the space that we live in – it is the space that our bodies can occupy and interact with through living. It is a large category with almost endless layers, some of which are of an ancient origin and difficult to ignore. Baier writes:
Lebensraum ist eine synästhetische Totalkategorie, die viele Sinne, viele Dinge, viele Disziplinen, viele Wissenschaften erfaßt. Um Lebensbewegungen zu beschreiben und zu diskutieren, reichen die klassischen Wissenschaftsmethoden nicht aus. ... Gelebter Raum besteht aus einer Vielzahl verschiedener Raumstrukturen in denen wir uns zugleich aufhalten: Geometrischer Raum, geschichtlicher, soziale, dinglicher, allgemeiner, privater. Dazu gehören verschiedene Virulenzgrade, aktuale, kurzfristige bis langfristige Dauer. Wetterlagen, politische Lagen, wirtschaftliche Lagen. Auch sehr archaische und chthonische, also alte Lagen, de noch gegenwärtig sind.(16)
To Baier the unlived space or ‘Der ungelebte Raum’ is the space, which is in contrast to the lived space and cannot be inhabited, which is beyond our immediate control or which is incompatible with the human body. He includes in this category first, the geometric space – ‘Der geometrische Raum’(17) – as the topological aspect of space that never changes but offers parameters to describe space. Second, he includes the common space or the space of cross sections – ‘Der allgemeine Raum: Durch-Schnitt und Kontinuum’(18) – which is the space that levels all differences much like artist Robert Smithson’s concept of entropy.(19) Accelerated by electronic means this space distributes everything evenly.(20) Last, and perhaps most interesting, Baier also includes a reduced space in his category of unlived space. ‘Der reduzierte Raum: Die Welt als Spielzeug’ is a space that is constructed exactly to be secluded from the lived space, as the two dimensional movie or television screen or as a scaled down version of the world, as Disneyworld or Legoland.(21) The reduced space has been reduced either in scale or in number of parameters and can be seen as a projection or model out of sync with the real space. These spaces are designed not to be lived, and therefore attain a certain status as dream, fantasy or utopia.
Even though Baier’s categories are somewhat unusual, they are still founded on the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre and positioned in a postmodern spatial critique of Henri Lefebvre.(22) They still have a traditional dichotomatic – almost taxonomatic – structure of lived space negated by unlived space plus a category for the aspects of space that occur as a construct of the two – expanded space or ‘Der enwiertete Raum, with all other kinds of space listed according to these three kingdoms.(23)
The problem is that Baier’s lived space has become so wide a category and has so much influence on the expanded space that it almost turns out to be just one single category needing a more detailed structure. Further, we can argue that the two first sub-categories of unlived space are of an almost Kantian a priori nature, sealed off from further discussion, and thereby different in nature than the other constructed lived and unlived spaces. The reduced spaces in unlived space is also questionable since many of the spaces can in fact be directly experienced as virtual model spaces,(24) or is already lived in as theme parks or designer cities.(25) So, if the expanded space gives meaning as a construct of the lived and unlived spaces, it is only to be seen as a result of, or attribute to, lived, space, which leaves us with only one category. And suddenly the categories that Baier spends the least time on defining become the most interesting, the ones with openings and conceptual bridges. It shows that the rigid categorization of space is an (almost) impossible project, but also that transgressive categories can be very productive, which we will return to in the experiments in the part Construction.
A Third Inclusive spaceJust like Franz Xaver Baier’s construction of lived space, unlived space and expanded space is an attempt to give order to a complex and confusing understanding of space, so is the concept of Thirdspace by the urban geographer Edward W. Soja. He writes: “Everything comes together in Thirdspace: subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdiciplinary, everyday life and unending history.”(26) Which is the opposite of Baier’s observation:
Die Postmodernediskussion hat das ‘Ende der großen Erzählungen’ proklamiert. Damit hat sie, wenigstens theoretisch, den Menschen von allen ideologiverdächtinge, vereinnahmenden Superkonstruktionen befreit und stattdessen die Gleichberechtigung der unterschiedlichen Lebensformen hervorgehoben. Auf den Raum bezogen bedeutet das: Es gibt auch keinen gemeinsamen und für alle verbindlichen Raum. Wir leben in verschiedenen Räumen, das muß erst einmal anerkannt werden.(27)
While Baier tries to give order to space by defining the fragments of what once was one, Soja accepts that the world is fragmented and tries to define a new meta-concept, which may contain almost everything.
Therefore, Soja goes another way than Baier. Instead of constructing a taxonomy of fragmented space Soja’s Thirdspace is just that; a third position that does not accept the easy dualities, which are too often applied to space: “This all-inclusive simultaneity opens up endless worlds to explore and, at the same, presents daunting challenges. Any attempt to capture this all-encompassing space in words and texts, for example, invokes an immediate sense of impossibility …”(28) and Soja continues:
Anything which fragments Thirdspace into separate specialized knowledges or exclusive domains – even on the pretext of handling its infinite complexity – destroys its meaning and openness … For Lefebvre (and for Borges), spatial knowledge, as a means ‘to thread through the complexities of the modern world,’ is achievable only through approximations, a constant search to move beyond (meta-) what is known.(29)
Thirdspace is both a critique of the supremacy of time in western thinking and a suggestion to exchange time with space, history with geography and duration with distance. This would mean that the position in space – where something happens – is more important than the position in time – when it happens. Through this exchange, Soja observes the contemporary urban space as a geographer rather than as an historian and in this way, Thirdspace becomes the ground for at possible new way to understand space:
That is to say, it does not derive simply from an additive combination of its binary antecedents but rather from a disordering, deconstruction, and tentative reconstitution of their presumed totalization producing an open alternative that is both similar and strikingly different. Thirding recomposes the dialectic through an intrusive disruption that explicitly spatializes dialectical reasoning … Thirding produces what might best be called a cumulative trialectics that is radically open to additional othernesses, to a continuing expansion of spatial knowledge.(30)
So, what if we could construct a new view on space without the dichotomies that have for so long dominated the architectural conception of space? What if we could replace all the dualities of figure/ground, materiality/immateriality, lived/unlived, and real/abstract with a conceptualization, which acknowledges that all these concepts are nothing but concepts, and that space is a concurrent and simultaneous presence of an endless range of aspects? Soja finds such an idea in the description of the aleph by Louis Borges, which in many ways is the opposite of Baier’s reduced space. The aleph is inclusive and overlapping, almost overexposed, where all spaces are accumulated in one place and though it is placed in the real world, it is marginalized and different.
We could argue that the reason why Soja chooses the aleph as an anti-categorization tool is that a rigid categorization and separation of a social and political space would exclude minor issues and individuals from our understanding and conceptualization of space. (31) Hence, Soja often refers to Lefebvre’s political aim of constructing a different space and to his meta-Marxist project – aims that Soja shares,(32) and which have been central to the post-colonial and post-modern urban and spatial critique in the US.(33) Thirdspace therefore becomes just as much a manifest of a new approach to urban spaces as it is a conceptualization tool in itself. As an example of Thirdspace as an anti-categorization understanding of space, Soja has applied his idea to a real urban space in the exhibition project Citadel-LA. In this application, Soja relates his active space to the heterotopologies of Michel Foucault, which should be seen as real spaces where all other spaces of our culture are represented, and as such shares a great deal with Borges’ aleph as an understanding of space.(34) Soja writes: “These combinatorial, microcosmic, concretely abstract heterotopias were placed in contrast not only to the ‘real sites’ themselves but also to their apparent reflections in utopias, sites with no real place, no-where lands, fundamentally unrealized spaces which present society in either a perfected form or else turned upside down.”(35) Foucault provides in this way Soja with a concept of heterotopologies that does not fit in the consensus of how to understand space, which reminds us about similar spaces described by anthropologist Marc Augé as non-place,(36) by architect and urbanist Albert Pope as imploded space or ellipsis,(37) and by Yve-Alain Bois as informe or zone with reference to artists Gordon Matta-Clark and Edward Ruscha.(38) These are all spaces that are real, but deterritorialized and imploded and do evade the rigid conceptualization of Baier and others. In the hands of Soja, they form a very active critique of the spaces they might have been planned to be, but are not – like the formless spaces that Robert Venturi describes in Las Vegas, which are filled with symbols rather than form – or of the spaces that they have come to overexpose as theme parks or the shopping malls.
Therefore, we may conclude that in coming to terms with space, we construct and use concepts that are neither objective nor exclusive. They may be transferred from one area to another, transformed and bend to fit our needs.
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(1) This crisis should be compared to the crisis in the structure of science that Thomas Kuhn has described, see the chapter On Doing Architectural Research.
(2) I have dedicated the chapter The Culture of Space to the cultural construction of space based on Kern, Stephen (1983), The Culture of Time and Space, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
(3) Vidler, Anthony (2000), Warped Space, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, p. 1 and 3.
(4) Harries, Karsten (1975), “The Ethical Function of Architecture,” in Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965-1995, ed. Kate Nesbitt (1996), New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press (first published in Journal of Architectural Education 29, no. 1, September 1975), p. 395.
(5) Rajchman, John (1998), Constructions, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, p. 1.
(6) From the selective way that these concepts are applied to space, it should be clear that the categories and even the concepts themselves are entirely human constructions and not any given absolutes – space itself is still out there, no matter how we label it.
(7) Albert Einstein in foreword to Jammer, Max (1993 Dover Edition (1954)), Concepts of Space, The History of Theories of Space in Physics, New York, NY: Dover Publications, Inc, p. xiii-xiv.
(8) See Sacks, Oliver (1995), An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales, New York, NY: Vintage Books, and Sacks, Oliver (1985), The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales, New York, NY: Touchstone Books.
(9) Vidler, Anthony (2000), Warped Space, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
(10) As Venturi/Scott Brown/Izenour states in one of the headlines in Learning from Las Vegas: “Symbol in Space before Form in Space: Las Vegas as a Communication System,” Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown & Steven Izenour (1977 (1972)), Learning from Las Vegas, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
(11) Soja, Edward W. (1971), “The Political Organization of Space,” in Resource Paper No. 8, Washington D.C.: Association of American Geographers). The space that Soja organizes in the paper both serves as analysis of the modern city and as a tool for it future organization.
(12) Venturi, Scott Brown & Izenour ((1977 (1972)), op. cit.
(13) Soja’s study was published in 1971 and although, it was general in terms of location, Los Angeles later became his main focus. The Venturi/Scott Brown/Izenour study was published in 1972, with Las Vegas as the main focus.
(14) Frances Dyson (1998), “‘Space,’ ‘Being,’ and Other Fictions in the Domain of the Virtual” in The Virtual Dimension, ed. John Beckman (1998), New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, p. 28.
(15) The three kinds of space are divided further into 3 unlived, 25 lived and 16 expanded spaces.
(16) Baier, Franz Xaver (2000), Der Raum, Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung, Walther König, p. 8-9.
(17) Which we also could describe as the proportions of the topologies of a certain space, described by certain parameters. This is essential to the difference between parameters and properties, as we will return to in the part Construction.
(18) The German ‘Durch-Schnitt’ literally translates into ‘through-section’.
(19) Descriptions of such a spatial entropy in an urban context has for example been observed by Edward Ruscha in the project Thirty-Four Parking Lots from 1967, by Gordon Matta-Clark in the project Reality Properties: Fake Estates from 1973, and in the description of Los Angeles by Robert Smithson as “a place swarming with dematerialized distances. A pale copy of a bad movie.” It has also been expressed in Rem Koolhaas’ critique of the postmodern city in the article “Generic City” from 1994, while the electronic acceleration has been widely described by Paul Virilio.
(20) In media science, ‘entropy’ refers to the degree of distribution of information; a high degree of ‘entropy’ means that a high degree of a population has the same information. In that context, ‘entropy’ is entirely based on the addition of information and not the additive/reductive leveling of thermodynamics.
(21) This categorization is problematic since people in fact live in these ‘reduced spaces’ of gated communities and designer cities like Disney’s Celebration in Florida, The City of Leisure World in California, and Newhall Ranch, also in California, which has the slogan: “A place where you can live in the middle of it all, yet away from it all.”
(22) Baier (2000), op. cit., p. 9-10 and Baier, Franz Xaver (1999), “Erected Space, Zur Ästhetic Des Lebensraumes,” from http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~architektur/wowen/d_baier.htm.
(23) In biology, taxonomy describes the structure of evolution by placing the individual animal or flower in kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. Once an individual has been categorized, it has a static position and a precise ‘path’ of relation to other individuals. See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Taxonomy/. The same can be argued of Baier’s classification of space – as for many other classifications of space for that matter. It becomes an increasingly complex construction with little room for the maneuverability that characterizes architecture.
(24) I will return to this matter in the chapter Informed Space.
(25) To the list of theme parks, gated communities and ‘designer cities’ could be added the neighborhood Venice in Los Angeles, which from 1904 until 1920 was a theme park called Venice of America. In the mid 1920s and the 1930s, the rest of Los Angeles (‘lived space’) had incorporated the theme park (‘unlived space’), and by the 1960s, Venice had become home for beatniks, writers, artists and best-known The Doors. Pitt, Leonard & Dale Pitt (1997), Los Angles A to Z – An Encyclopedia of the City and County, Berkeley CA: University of California Press, s. v. “Venice”.
(26) Edward W. Soja (1996), Thirdspace, Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, Cambridge MA: Blackwell, p. 56-7. Soja is paraphrasing the official slogan for The City of Los Angeles, “It All Comes Together in Los Angeles,” and referring to his chapter in Postmodern Geographies – The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory from 1989 with that title.
(27) Baier (2000), op. cit., p. 10.
(28) Edward W. Soja, op. cit., p. 57.
(29) Ibid. With the term ‘meta’ Soja refers to Lefebvre’s nomadic meta-Marxism. Another and more current reference could be to the MVRDV project META CITY/DATA TOWN that tries to establish an urban territory of almost infinite possibilities to respond to given circumstances, and constantly go beyond what could be expected of an urban context. This topic will be further discussed in the chapters Critical Space and to some extent in Informed Space.
(30) Ibid., p. 61.
(31) Minor in the sense of Deleuze’s article ‘Minor Literature’.
(32) Soja, op. cit., p. 59-60. As mentioned above, the initial focus or conceptual ‘lens’ through which, space is observed, often serves as a moral, ideological or even political aim. We should therefore be careful not to uncritically see Soja’s all-inclusive space as a truism.
(33) See the literature of Edward Soja, Mike Davis, bell hooks, Homi K. Bhabha, Edward Said, Elizabeth Grosz, Peter Marcuse, Jennifer Bloomer et al.
(34) Foucault, Michel (1967), “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” in Architecture Culture 1943-1968, ed. Joan Ockman (1993), New York, NY: Rizzoli.
(35) Soja, Edward W. (1995), “Heterotopologies: A Remembrance of Other Spaces in the Citadel-LA,” in Postmodern Cities & Spaces, ed. Sophie Watson & Katherine Gibson (1995), Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, p. 14.
(36) Augé, Marc (1995), Non-places Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, London: Verso.
(37) Pope, Albert (1996), Ladders, Architecture at Rice 34, Houston, TX: Rice University School of Architecture, p. 118.
(38) Bois, Yve-Alain & Rosalind Krauss (1997), Formless, New York, NY: Zone Books, p. 224-231.
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