(Non-)Essential Knowledge for (New) Architecture

306090 books, Volume 15

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(Non-)Essential Knowledge for (New) Architecture
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thirtysixtyninetyfifteen
306090, Inc. — New York — 2013
 What
about SPACE?
Eeva-Liisa
Pelkonen
It has been a while since I last heard the word
“space” uttered in an architectural school setting,
if I don’t count the studio called “In Space” taught
by Turner Brooks at Yale College (full disclosure:
he happens to be my husband). Asking students
to imagine and model space, his take is based
on a reading of Gaston Bachelard’s La Poétique
de l'espace (1957) [The Poetics of Space (1964)],
with the emphasis on human experience. As for
Bachelard, the goal of the studio is to restore
intimacy with the world to the point where an
architectural space becomes homologous to the
movements of our minds. Although not a very fash-
ionable read any longer, the book is worth a second
look as it ties to contemporary discussions about
human cognition and our ability to process infor-
mation, particularly visual information. I not so
sure how many contemporary architects share this
preoccupation. It is thus worth asking: when did
space—one of the key concepts of modern archi-
tectural discourse—disappear from our discussions
about architecture, and seemingly our very vocab-
ulary? In recent years, the focus has been on skins
and surfaces, which makes the lack of discussion
about space doubly puzzling. Skins and surfaces do,
after all, define and enclose space and ultimately
produce spatial effects.
102 thirtysixtyninetyfifteen 103
Historical Space
Two key aspects of twentieth-century notions
of space have great potential for illuminating and
providing a conceptual scaffold for our contem-
porary architectural, urban, and environmental
discourse. Ideas about space have been, and con-
tinue to be, integrally linked to our thinking about
(Non-)Essential Knowledge for (New) Architecture
modern subjectivity and society and its extensions
to the architectural, urban, and environmental
realms. They are also inherent to our thinking
about the processes of the human mind, whether
framed as cognitive, psychological, epistemologi-
cal, or phenomenal. Furthermore, space has been
integrally linked to political and social thought, as
well as to thinking about human geography and
the expanded geographic realm of urban to global
space. To be sure, for those who have thought about
space in any of those terms, the concept embodies
perhaps the most important question of all: what
does it mean to exist in the world.
˚ ˚ ˚
The origins of modern understanding and cen-
trality of space has been brilliantly outlined by
architectural historians Harry Mallgrave and
Eleftherios Ikonomou in their book Empathy,
Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics,
1873-1893 (1994). A century earlier, art historian

Figure 1. Oscar Schlemmer, illustration from “Mensch und Kunstfigur,” in Die Bühne im Bauhaus [Stages at the Bauhaus] (1924).
August Schmarsow set the stage by defining spa-
tial structure [Raumgebilde] as the fundamental
premise of all architecture. For Scharmsow, an ar-
chitect was first and foremost a designer of spaces
[Raumgestalterin]. He defined architectural expe-
rience as fundamentally different from any other
kind of aesthetic experience because it involves our
whole body. He believed that human beings have a
predisposition towards the creation of space, and
he wrote about spatial imagination. It was a way of
being in the world.
From then on, space was a central theme in
the formulation of modern architectural theory
and historiography, particularly in the German-
speaking realm. Critic and historian Adolf Behne’s
Der Moderne Zweckbau [The Modern Functional
Building] (1925) culminates with the new architec-
tural maxim: architecture not only perceived as
sculpted space but also conceived as a constructed
reality engaging and encompassing every aspect
of human life, while Sigfried Giedion’s influential
Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a
104
Pelkonen, Eeva-Liisa
New Tradition (1941) frames space as a synthesiz-
ing force allowing simultaneities and connections
to occur and opposites to merge.
We should also be reminded about the mani-
fold spatial ideas and techniques that fueled early
twentieth-century architecture: Le Corbusier’s
open plan, Mies’s universal space, Adolf Loos’s
Raumplan, and Alvar Aalto’s nameless, forest-
like, multi-directional spaces. In different ways, all
of them posited completely new types of spatial
experience by enticing movement, proposing fluid
transitions between different programmatic zones,
and calibrating views both within and without the
building envelope. The second half of the twenti-
eth century added to those paradigms new spatial
types that were endlessly mutable, both literally
and phenomenally. Yona Friedman’s Spatial City
project put forward an idea of open spatial ma-
trix, which invited different forms of habitation;
Cedric Price’s unbuilt Fun Palace, Peter Celsing’s
Kulturhuset in Stockholm, and Richard Rogers
and Renzo Piano’s Centre Georges Pompidou
Figure 2. El Lissitzky, Proun Room (1921).
pioneered the idea of Großraum—a big non-pro-
grammatic space; while Aldo van Eyck, Louis Kahn,
Charles Moore, Reima Pietilä, and Paul Rudolph—
all in different ways—merged structural, experien-
tial, and symbolic elements into their multi-layered
spaces that operate on multiple cognitive levels, not
just visual ones. Indeed, the history of twentieth-
century architecture can be written as exploration
of spatial ideas and concepts that corresponded
with changing ideas about the subject and its rela-
tionship to the built environment. It seemed that, at
least into mid-1970s, every great architect had an
idea about space.
However, our history lesson should begin with
the early avant-garde, which produced much of the
conceptual thinking about space upon which archi-
tects later drew. Importantly, the various artistic
movements in the early part of the twentieth cen-
tury did not rely on the notion of bound, architec-
tural space. Theirs was an extended notion of space
considered as a kind of ethereal substance that
connected everything into one dynamic system. All
activity depended on space: it was life and a source
of life. As a worldview, that idea cast the relation-
ship between an individual subject and the world in
a new light: man was both a product and a producer
of the surrounding world. The idea that all life, all
105
thirtysixtyninetyfifteen
activity, evolves in space is best presented in artist
and choreographer Oscar Schlemmer’s diagrams
showing a human body being wired literally into
the surrounding space through this sort of dynamic
lattice (Figure 1).
The Futurists proposed this on a larger, ur-
(Non-)Essential Knowledge for (New) Architecture
ban scale. Architect Antonio Sant’Elia made the
contour lines of buildings always extend into space
because he conceived of buildings not as individual
objects but as integral parts of the ever-extending,
dynamic force field of modernity. Importantly, he
imagined space not as an empty container but as
being saturated with energy and movement. A
building was not designed as much as it emerged as
a moment or node within that force field.1
Russian Constructivists centered their argu-
ment on space. In El Lissitzky’s Proun Room (1921),
the viewer was invited to engage and activate space
in three-dimensions (Figure 2). In the magazine
“G,” Lissitzky wrote, “Space is not for our eyes
alone; it is not an image; it is for living.” The subject
and space were to be codependent, but conceived as
a continuous topology folding into one another.
Moholy-Nagy’s interest in transparency put
forward an idea of relational space. Images such as
the one he pro- 1. My discussion about Sant’Elia is
duced for his informed by Sanford Kwinter’s excel-
lent Architectures of Time: Toward a
Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002).
 Historical Space
Figure 3. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, image from Von Material zu Architektur [From Figure 4. Hans Ebeling, illustration from Der Raum als Membran [Space as
Material to Architecture] (1929). Membrane] (1926).

book Von Material zu Architektur [From Material
to Architecture] (1929) depict overlapping, inter-
secting planes with spaces in-between (Figure 3). In
that spatial proposition, elements interweave, coex-
ist, and mutate. The relationship is both literal—we
see these elements intersect and overlap optically—
Space has been reduced to a stale, insignificant or-
bital mass (Schalenmasse) surrounding the symbolic
nuclei of much more finely graded relations between
human being and human being, between human
being and matter, between human being and the
world-spirit.3
architecture that is “inscribed by real space meets
all the functional and human needs from the basic
to the more elevated.5
Those ideas gained currency as a critique of
the increasingly rationalizing capitalized system.
As historian Larry Busbea has pointed out, texts
is not merely an absence of matter but an index of
intense emotional investment, which carves space
out of matter.
The main premise of all twentieth-century
discussions about space is that human beings are
integrally linked to the world around them and that

(Non-)Essential Knowledge for (New) Architecture

as well as conceptual—a model for a phenomenal such as Abraham Moles and Elisabeth Rohmer’s architectural space can reconfigure and animate
counter of what Giedion calls “relational space,” The 1950s and 1960s witnessed another surge thesis, Psychologie de l’espace [Psychology of that relationship. Architectural space is nothing
“a field where objects, figures, and arguments of interest in how man occupies and engages space. Space] (1972), outlined a new kind of topological more and nothing less than the extension of the
acquire meaning when seen analogically with one At this point, the Baroque became the new stan- diagram that would allow the individual phenom- human mind and body, the locus of human life and
another.”2 dard for how to imagine and think about architec- enal experience to coexist with the structural human thought. In an era when architecture seems
Siegfried Ebeling’s little known book Der Raum tural space. In his book Barocco nell’architettura demands of society, a model which allowed “per- to be too often reduced to a stand-alone object, and
als Membran (1926)—recently translated as Space moderna [Baroque in Modern Architecture] mutations and transformation within an ordered individuals into mere observers, an influx of spatial
as Membrane (2010)—offers a direction to today’s (1951), Gillo Dorfles maintained that the Baroque environment.”6 imagination would go a long way to constituting [a
environmental thinking, which sees man, nature, was coterminous with the pantheistic and univer- Space disappeared from architectural dis- new kind of relationship/new kinds of relationship/a
and world as one, with the resulting implication sal impulse within modernity, which had a whole course sometime in the early 1980s with postmod- new kind of relationships] that would ultimately
that man’s intellect is not autonomous (Figure 4). set of architectural consequences: walls become ernism, which laid its focus on symbol and image. help moderate more meaningful relationships be-
In Ebeling’s view, space is not an empty tableau ceiling in which the dynamic overcomes the static, Gilles Deleuze’s book Le Pli: Leibniz et le Baroque tween people and buildings, buildings and their en-
where people and things exist but, rather, a mate- the tactile, the optical, the organic or plastic, the (1988) [The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993)] vironments, and, ultimately, activate and enhance
rial reality, a connective tissue or plasma between geometric.4 Something similar was at stake with renewed an interest in space by proposing a new social relationships.
people and things in all different scales. The mes- the manifesto of the Paris-based Groupe Espace kind of spatial paradigm where human emotions
sage is clear: the world is not out there for us simply that Dorfles helped to craft in 1951, arguing that and architectural space and form folded into a con- 5. Groupe Espace, Manifesto, October
1951, reprinted in Luciano Berni Canani
to analyze and observe; instead, tinuous topology. For Deleuze, the folds of the un- and Giorgio Di Genova, eds., MAC/
we are integral to the world. We 2. My discussion about transparency is in- 3. Siegfried Ebeling, Space as Membrane, dulating walls in Baroque architecture act as a kind ESPACE: Arte concreta in Italia e in
are engrained within it. Ebeling’s formed by a book review written by Spyros trans. Spyros Papapetros (London: of seismographic notation of the movements of the Francia, 1948-1958 (Bologna: Edizioni
Papapetros entitled “Transparencies that Architectural Association, 2010; 1st edi- Bora, 1999), 27.
criticism would apply to contem- passed and plenty more to come: A review tion, Raum als Membran, 1926), 12. human mind, and vice versa. The word “space” is 6. Abraham Moles and Elisabeth Rohmer,
porary architecture as well: of Modernity Unbound: Other Histories 4. Gillo Dorfles, Barocco nell’architettura substituted by “substance;” space so understood Psychologie de l’espace (1972), quoted
of Architectural Modernity (London: AA moderna (Milan: Libreria Editrice in Larry Busbea, Topologies: the Urban

107
Publications 2011),” forthcoming, Journal Politecnica Tamburini, 1951), 10-11. Utopia in France, 1960-1970 (Cambridge:
Pelkonen, Eeva-Liisa of Architecture. thirtysixtyninetyfifteen The MIT Press, 2007).

The Essential Seagram
Clutter, McLain 244
About the Contributors
Greg Barton
Greg Barton is an MSc candidate in Critical,
Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in
Architecture at Columbia University. Previous
publications include texts in Volume and CLOG.
Barton was recently a research fellow at Storefront
for Art and Architecture, New York, NY.
McLain Clutter
McLain Clutter, BArch (Syracuse), MED (Yale),
is an architect, writer, assistant professor at the
University of Michigan's Taubman College of
Architecture and Urban Planning, and principal of
the design and research practice MCRD. Clutter
lectures and exhibits internationally, and his essays
have appeared in Grey Room, MONU, and the
edited volume Formerly Urban: Projecting Rustbelt
Futures (2012).
Ludwig Engel
Ludwig Engel studied cultural sciences, economics,
and communication sciences in Berlin, Shanghai
and Frankfurt/Oder. With raumtaktik-office from a
better future (www.raumtaktik.de), he works at the
intersection of urban planning, architecture, and
futurology addressing strategic questions concern-
ing the future of the city. His forthcoming doctoral
dissertation concerns urban utopias at the begin-
ning of the 21st century.
Mark Ericson
Mark Ericson, BA (Rutgers), MArch (SCI-Arc), is
an assistant professor of architecture at Woodbury
University in Los Angeles and has also taught at
the University of Pennsylvania. He has worked for
AGPS in Los Angeles/Zurich and Erdy McHenry
in Philadelphia. His research and teaching focus on
the construction of representational strategies rela-
tive to technological developments in the discipline
of architecture.
thirtysixtyninetyfifteen
Simone Ferracina
Simone Ferracina, MArch (Accademia di
Architettura/USI-AAM, Mendrisio, Switzerland),
is a New York-based designer and founding editor
of Organs Everywhere (Œ), an independent online
journal at the intersection of architecture, technol-
ogy, media, and ecology (organseverywhere.com).
His research and writing have appeared in Kerb
(2011), Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices
and Architectural Inventions (2012), and prominent
online blogs. His project Theriomorphous Cyborg
took first place in the 2011 Animal Architecture
Awards.
Johannes Gabriel
Johannes Gabriel is a freelance researcher, con-
sultant, and doctoral candidate working on envi-
ronmental analysis, future studies, and scenario
planning. He is a non-resident fellow of the Global
Public Policy Institute (GPPi), Berlin, and is en-
gaged in its Global Governance 2022 Program. He
is also a fellow with Berlin-based consultancy Die
Denkbank. Research interests include philosophy of
science, Asia's transition societies, informal net-
works, and international security.
Ellen Hartman
(Non-)Essential Knowledge for (New) Architecture
Ellen Hartman researches military landscapes
at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Engineer
Research and Development Center. Her work with
the Department of Defense encompasses historic
landscape preservation planning, environmental
policy effects on Army operations, and land and
resource management patterns on military instal-
lations. She holds an MLA from the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
David L. Hays
David L. Hays, MArch (Princeton), PhD (Yale), is
an associate professor of landscape architecture
at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
and a founding principal of Analog Media Lab. His
research interests include garden and landscape de-
sign in early modern Europe, with a special focus on
France; contemporary theory and practice of land-
scape architecture; and the history of cartography.
245
Irene Hwang
Irene Hwang, BA (UPenn), MArch (Harvard),
teaches architecture at Northeastern University
and has also taught at the University of
Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture
and Urban Planning, where she was the 2010-11
Oberdick Teaching Fellow. A founding partner of
Constructing Communication (Barcelona), her
work focuses on the discursive and productive con-
texts by which the project and artifact
of architectural activity can be re-imagined and
re-deployed.
Miriam Kelly
Miriam Kelly is a senior architect at Feilden Clegg
Bradley Studios in Bath, UK, where she special-
izes in the creative reuse of historic buildings. She
worked previously in Edinburgh, London, and
with the German Development Service in Nepal.
Accredited in building conservation, her current
projects include restoration of Lowther Castle and
Gardens, improving visitor facilities at Windsor
Castle, and housing the British Postal Museum and
Archive in London.
Robert J. Krawczyk
Robert J. Krawczyk is a professor of architecture
and Associate Dean of Undergraduate Academics
Affairs in the College of Architecture at IIT. His
teaching and research of over three decades focus
on digital craftsmanship, and his work covers
digital methods and artwork integrating science,
mathematics, architecture, and technology. He is
the author of The Codewriting Workbook: Creating
Computational Architecture in AutoLISP (2008).
Jonathan Massey
J
onathan Massey is an architect, historian, and
associate professor at Syracuse University. His
research showing how architecture mediates power
by giving form to civil society, shaping social rela-
tions, and regulating consumption has appeared in
many journals and essay collections as well as the
books Crystal and Arabesque (2009) and Governing
by Design (2012). Massey is a co-founder of the
Transdisciplinary Media Studio and the Aggregate
Architectural History Collaborative.
246
Gisli Palsson
Gísli Pálsson holds a BA from Harvard, an MA
in landscape archaeology from the University of
Iceland, and an MSc in landscape architecture
with a focus on the historic environment from the
University of Bath. He is currently involved with
archaeological research in Iceland and Malaysia.
His academic interests include landscape, the visual
culture of archaeology, and the material culture of
twentieth-century public parks.
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, MArch (Tampere University
of Technology), MED (Yale), PhD (Columbia),
is an associate professor at the Yale School of
Architecture. Her research focuses on twentieth-
century European and American architecture
with special interest in the genesis and meaning
of form within national and historical contexts. A
noted authority on Alvar Aalto, Eero Saarinen, and
Kevin Roche, her work has been supported by the
Getty Foundation, the Graham Foundation, and
the Finnish Academy of Arts and Sciences, among
other agencies.
Eduard Sancho Pou
Eduard Sancho Pou holds graduate degrees in
architecture and construction engineering and a
PhD cum laude from the Polytechnic University of
Barcelona (UPC). His book Architectural Strategies
(2012), studying the approaches used by architects
to secure commissions, sell projects, and erect
buildings, was published with support from the
Graham Foundation. Sancho Pou is a member
of the Cercle d´Arquitectura research group at
UPC and is the founder and former director of the
Barcelona Centro de Arquitectura gallery.
Catherine
Seavitt-Nordenson
Catherine Seavitt Nordenson, BArch (Cooper
Union), BLA (CCNY), MArch (Princeton), is an
associate professor of landscape architecture at the
City College of New York and principal of Catherine
Seavitt Studio, a practice integrating architecture,
landscape, and infrastructure. Research interests
include design adaptation to sea level rise in urban
and natural environments; rethinking landscape
restoration practices given the dynamics of climate
change; and the history, processes, and ethics of the
de-domestication of large herbivores for grassland
restoration and land management.
Amir Soltani
Amir Soltani, BA (Fine Arts, San Francisco State),
MA (Environmental Design, Berkeley), is a designer
and researcher in architecture and audio-visual
studies and a doctoral candidate in architecture
at Cambridge University, where he is a researcher
at DIGIS (Digital Studios for Research in Design,
Visualization and Communication). He is actively
involved in the production of electroacoustic music
and contributes regularly to electronic arts publica-
tions and festivals in the UK and abroad.
Hermione Spriggs
Hermione Spriggs, BSc (Anthropology, University
College London), is an MFA candidate at the
University of California, San Diego. She is inter-
ested in the overlap between being human and
being “thing.” Spriggs is a fellow of Mildred's Lane
and part of the research networks The Culture of
Preservation (AHRC, UCL) and Something from
Nothing: Fearless Speculations in Art, Science and
Activism (UCSD Centre for the Humanities).
Jimmy Stamp
Jimmy Stamp, MED (Yale), is a writer, researcher,
and recovering architect whose work has been
featured in numerous print and web publications.
Interests include contemporary interpretations of
Postmodernism, the integration of new media tech-
nologies into the built environment, and the role of
narrative in architecture. He is currently writing
a book documenting the history of architectural
education at Yale.
thirtysixtyninetyfifteen
Chris Teeter
Chris Teeter, BArch (UKansas), MArch (UPenn)
is a licensed architect based in New York City
and teaches 3D modeling software at Parsons the
New School of Design. He consults for architects,
landscape architects, artists, and engineers and is
the founding principal of the design build company
Metamechanics. He writes electronic music and is
a board member for the Center for Contemporary
Environmental Art.
Nora Wendl
Nora Wendl, BArch and MArch (Iowa State), is an
assistant professor of architecture at Portland State
University. Her research explores intersections
between contemporary art, literature, and archi-
tecture and their historiography. Wendl is co-editor,
with Isabelle Loring Wallace, of Contemporary Art
about Architecture: A Strange Utility (2013) and
has collaborated with artists Harmen Liemburg
and Theaster Gates. She was a resident at the Jack
Straw Writers Program and, with Michael Allen,
co-organized the international design competition
Pruitt Igoe Now (2012).
Andrew Witt
Andrew Witt, MArch and MDes-History and
Theory (Harvard), is a Los Angeles-based de-
signer, Director of Research at Gehry Technologies
(GT), and a lecturer in architecture at Harvard
(Non-)Essential Knowledge for (New) Architecture
University, where he teaches about geometry and
digital design. Trained as both an architect and
mathematician, he has consulted on parametric
design, geometric approaches, new technologies,
and integrated practice for clients including Gehry
Partners, Atelier Jean Nouvel, UN Studio, and Coop
Himmelb(l)au.
247