It would be fair to say that I have railed against architectural space or the “spatial turn” in architecture and architectural education quite enough elsewhere.[i] It would be unfair, however, to interpret the rejection of space-thinking as evidence of belief that architecture and architectural experience are simply matters of solid matter.
The world of architecture is just like non-architectural world in every respect, including the fact that it is comprised of three states of matter: solids, liquids and gases. All three play a role in the constitution and subsequent perception of buildings and places. More narrowly, architectural experience is the perception of surfaces which, as James J. Gibson notes, are interfaces of two states of matter. In architecture, these are typically solids such as stone or drywall and the gaseous medium in which we live, air.
Space is superfluous to the description above. But this is not a matter of mere linguistic preference. Thinking in terms of air has direct benefits for thinking about architecture. In addition to supporting biological functions such as breathing, air facilitates animate movement, transmits light and is capable of carrying ambient illumination, conveys sound and smell, has a fixed vertical orientation, etc. Given that all of these factors change as we move – here air carries a different smell and propagates different sounds, there it takes on a different hue or darkens – air provides information about the environment and places us within it. Space, as the literal absence of qualities, serves none of these roles.[ii]
Air, not space, is our home. Ecologically speaking, architecture is solid matter and air is the medium of architectural experience. This explains the lightness and ephemerality of most experiences. It is an act of consciousness in a nearly weightless medium. The encounter of consciousness with matter through the medium of air is, of course, freighted or elevated, gains weight or meaning, by the expectations we bring. A positive expectation dashed will result in pain or depression. Positive expectations met, contentment. A negative outlook thwarted by a positive outcome leads to joy or satisfaction. Negative outlooks confirmed, cynicism. Those outlooks, admittedly, are the product of myriad contingencies – the events of an individual lifetime, or week, or day, perhaps the traffic navigated only minutes ago, as framed by genetics and cultural traditions enforced and subverted. The value of air, however, resides in the way it makes the same material scene, complete with the same ecological order of up/down, north/south, east/west, available to any number of consciousnesses.
Space is neutral. It does not serve either individual or collective consciousnesses. It does not participate in confirming or subverting expectations. And it can be experienced only to the degree one could say contemplating a mathematical formula can be experienced. In an orienting medium such as air, however, certain events become plausible, certain conditions rendered improbable, and some substances appear “plausibly impossible” – that is to say, magical.[iii]And this magic is sharable only in or through matter.
[i] For evidence of this, see chapters 8, 16, and the “Interlude” of my Architecture History and Theory in Reverse.
[ii] Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 12-15.
[iii] “[M]agic involves a conflict between what we believe to be possible and what we believe we have seen.” Gustav Kuhn, Experiencing the Impossible: the science of magic, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019), 17-20.
Architecture is Fiction 