Arkitectur3 & Art

We all understand this need to have our own space and not to be crowded in by other people, at least for some part of our life. So before we at last turn exclusively to the behavior of humans, it is valuable to describe two more animal distances for which there seem to be obvious human parallels; the minimum and maximum distances maintained between animals of the same species under particular circumstances. The lesser of these distances is the minimum distance a species will maintain separating its members under normal circumstances. Confusingly Hediger first used the phrase ‘personal distance’ to apply to this, and hence the common use of ‘personal space’ . This use of the word ‘personal’ is understandable, since the distance is not one universally followed by a species but rather depends upon the social status of the individual animal in its society. Dominant animals are given greater personal distances by the other members of their family, group, tribe, pack or whatever soc...

Think of the very high level emotional needs we expect space to help us to satisfy. Most of us hate being bored, and want some form of amusement or entertainment. We might see this as a need for stimulation, and we demand that the spaces around us should provide this. On the whole we also seek to avoid high levels of uncertainty and change, and we require a degree of stability and structure in our lives. We might see this as a need for security, and so we require a space to keep us secure. Most of us seem to have a strong desire to belong somewhere. Many people I have known who have traveled widely in their lives describe an increasingly strong need to return to their roots in later life. We might see this as a need for identity and to belong somewhere, or in other words a need to be located somewhere. All these are examples of needs that a space we inhabit can help to satisfy. Robert Audrey was the first to suggest that not only do we seem to have these three important need...

Behavioral settings are purely physical characteristics of spaces, the objects they contain and the envelopes that define them, there is something far more important to us than that. But in general our relationship is not directly with spaces or buildings that matters most to us, but our relationships with other people. What others think and expect of us is one of the most central of the influences that govern the way we lead our lives. It is our reputation and our association with others that we feel most strongly about. So it is the way space facilitates and inhibits these relationships with which we will be mostly concerned. Places have synomorphy when there is congruence between people’s actions and the physical and social setting . There are several great forces at work here, and perhaps the most important are those of P rivacy Community It is how space enables these two appropriately that forms many of the basic components of the language we shall explore. Thes...

"Of course good architecture does not actually waste space" ( Philip Johnson ). We often need space to tell us how to behave. In fact it creates settings, which organize our lives, activities and relationships. In good architecture space does this for us without our noticing, hence the possibility of joking that such space is wasted. Great architects seem to be fluent in this language many probably without consciously studying it. It is as basic a tool of the trade for an architect as body language may be to an actor. The great Dutch architect Herman Hertzberger has shown an extraordinarily high awareness of the language of space, not only in his buildings but also through his writing. He explained this by likening an architect to the famous detective who always solves the puzzle of which character committed the crime. In such novels the detective has no more information than the rest of us he sees what we see and hears what we hear but he has learnt to read th...

(Tom Markus 1993): I take the stand that buildings are not primarily art, technical or investment objects, but social objects. Places are often very complex in terms of the opportunities they afford us for analysis. Two people visiting the same place at different times in their lives may be able to extract quite different character from it. Of course buildings can be seen in many different ways. For instance be viewed as works of art, as technical achievements, as the wallpaper of urban space and as behavioral, cultural, psychological, social and partly cultural phenomena. One of the intriguing and endlessly fascinating things about the study of architecture is that one may come at it from so many different angles. Some authors, and regrettably very many architects, will try to have you believe that their perspective is somehow right and superior to all others. This is not new; Putin claimed his ‘Gothic’ architecture to be the only truly Christian one (Putin, 1841). Gr...

Space, and that which encloses it, are much more central to all of us in our everyday lives than purely technical, aesthetic or even semiotic interpretation would suggest. Space is both that which brings us together and simultaneously that which separates us from each other. It is thus crucial to the way our relationships work. Space is the essential stuff of a very fundamental and universal form of communication. The human language of space, whilst it has its cultural variations, can be observed all over the world wherever and whenever people come together. In particular in this book we are interested in the space created in and around architecture. Architecture organizes and structures space for us, and its interiors and the objects enclosing and inhabiting its rooms can facilitate or inhibit our activities by the way they use this language. Because this language is not heard or seen directly, and certainly not written down, it gets little attention in a formal sense. Ho...

Wherever you find people gathered together collectively inhabiting some part of our world you will also find rules governing their use of space. Some of these rules may be purely a matter of local social convention, but many are a reflection of both the deep-seated needs of our psyche and of the characteristics of human beings. In our modern world most of the spaces we use have been designed for us professionally by architects, urban designers, interior designers and their ilk. It was of course not always so, nor is it so now in all societies. Before professionalism, the design and creation of space was a more social and vernacular process seamlessly integrated with all other aspects of a culture. In our sort of world, space has also become a matter of economics, of technology and of art. Many design theoreticians and critics write about architectural space as if it were some entirely abstract substance. They discuss such ideas as form, proportion, rhythm and color as if t...

Language of space is a global one, since many of its roots can be found in fundamental characteristics of the human race. Whilst Urdu, English and Spanish, etc are spoken by many millions of people in many countries, the language of space is truly international. It’s well known fact that communicating by telephone is way different then communicating ‘face to face’. It tells us how people are arranged in space. They are not ‘back to back’, because they actually want to see each other’s faces! This is very basic stuff. Unfortunately, it is so fundamental that we often forget about it when designing spaces. Not all behavior in space involves conversation, but much of our behavior in space involves communication in some way or other. If truth is served properly, throughout our lives we probably communicate far more through space than we do with formal language. When we walk into a room, others are reading this spatial language long before we speak. What we wear, how we smell, t...