While space is, at first glance, such a simple part of daily experience, an agreeable description of space (as descriptions of pretty much anything) fails to be formulated in the philosophical community.
18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant says of space: "Space is not something objective and real, nor a substance, nor an accident, nor a relation; instead, it is subjective and ideal, and originates from the mind's nature in accord with a stable law as a scheme, as it were, for coordinating everything sensed externally."
Kant is saying that space is subjective and reflective of one’s ideas; space is created by one’s mind to graph or project what is sensed in one’s environment.
Nikolas Davies and Erkki Jokiniemi’s Dictionary of Architecture and Building Construction (1st ed. 2008) defines space as: “An area or volume bounded actually or theoretically; a continuous extension in three dimensions; a bounded area within a building.”
Regardless of one’s choice for articulating whatever ‘space’ is, the architect mindfully engages this thing and participates in its manifestation. Although a description of space itself may not be accurate, there is certainly accuracy in describing the way people are influenced in and of space, and this description helps guide the architect in transforming space.
Sarah Susanka has distilled this guidance into three categories: Space, Light, and Order. A principle called Ceiling Height Variety describes the way ceiling height affects a person’s experience of space: “…vary the heights of parts of rooms, as well as the connections between spaces, to define one activity place from another, without resorting to solid walls. This results in a house that’s more open from place to place but also has a greater sense of intimacy to it. So the whole house ends up feeling more comfortable.” Light is workable by an architect so that it “not only enlivens the space, but also somehow draws attention to the surfaces of the building in a way that makes you want to explore it more. Light is the great animator of space…” For example, the Reflecting Surfaces principle: Place a window/skylight adjacent to a perpendicular wall and the space is filled with light, “giving it a brighter, cheerier feel.” Architects are, says Susanka, “magicians of space and light, where magic is simply something that isn’t readily understood by just looking at it. They use the art of illusion to make less seem like more, and they use contrast, like the difference between a bright window and a darker surrounding wall, to make our senses take note.” Such note may be taken of the third category, Order. Order refers to “the way in which the elements in a design are arranged to give it an identity all its own… Most houses are lacking features like these that tell you, as you move from room to room, that they are all parts of a singular whole.” Theme and Variation is one way of communicating this wholeness: "when used thoughtfully, a house with a theme and variations is like a well-composed piece of music. From one movement to the next, you know it’s the same piece because themes will return as it proceeds, though never repeated exactly as before.”
So, an architect employs space as an agent of intention. An architect looks at a space and asks “What does this feel like?” Relative to the answer, or lack thereof, the place is altered or unaltered using space, light, and order to evoke the feeling an architect intends to convey.
‘Whereas “space” denotes the three-dimensional organization of the elements which make up a place, “character" denotes the general “atmosphere” which is the most comprehensive property of any place… Similar spatial organizations may possess very different characters according to the" treatment of the space-defining elements: light in relation to spatial order. Furthermore, "spatial organization puts certain limits to characterization, and that the two concepts are interdependent.’ (Norberg-Schulz, p. 129)
But these character limits are quickly dissolving. Technology “has dismantled the walls between spaces. As anyone who has ever checked e-mail from a bathroom stall or browsed eBay from a chairlift can attest, what once occurred in just one space now happens in practically every space. This has revolutionized design, media, most workplaces and especially the lives of children, who routinely tap into vast social and information pools outside school. Yet, generally speaking, it has hardly touched public education.” (Corbett, p. 3)
As an architect works their magic and uses the tools of space, light, and order to carefully construct places of comfort, places of commune, places of business, and places of play (obviously not an exhaustive list of places), people with no title (those considered “general” or “ordinary”) are exercising their inherited magic (technology) and in effect reforming the composure and imbued intent of arranged spaces. Consequently, or effectually, there is a depletion of any need for a fixed ‘learning place’, otherwise known as a school. Individual schools have discernible characteristics:
If one visits university campuses across the country [the U.S.], one is struck by both their sameness and their differences. Some universities monitor or attempt to monitor students' behavior in much the same way as some high schools. Others give the impression that within their hallowed walls reside the seeds of social revolution. Still others have a kind of cool intellectual pride, a sense of scholarly self-esteem that sets the institution aside from the more prosaic forms of cultural life. Such environments, developed through tradition, have selection procedures for staff as well as students that provide an implicit curriculum whose specific goals are not articulated and might not even be consciously recognized. It is something one senses. Many parents as well as students recognize such qualities and guide their children to places whose implicit curriculum is compatible with their values...
“Schools are educational churches, and our gods, judging from the altars we build, are economy and efficiency: Hardly a nod is given to the spirit.” (Eisner, p. 82) Yet the spirit of education – of enriching one’s self, one’s community, and one’s environment – is working through technology and transmuting the morphological properties of the dominator social structure. With the rise of technology there is a concurrent descent of fetal perspective: Humankind and technology have found themselves virtually in a womb, conjoining and co-creating one another: The perspective of strict spatial delineations – the attitude that learning takes place here and play over there, that government functions in this place and people in that place – is immature; fetal, like unbaked cookies.
This spatial understanding has found its way into, derives its origins from, or concurrently developed with our self understanding – as theorists assume and reason that there are all sorts of differentiations in the human mind that segregate one ‘process’ from another, like thinking and feeling. Hence, school curriculum has been divided between the “arts” for feeling and the “sciences” for thinking - spatially, temporally, and neurologically - and students are taught accordingly. “The idea that the arts deal with feeling and that” science deals with “thinking is a part of the intellectual belief structure that separates cognition from affect, a structure whose consequences are as deleterious for” education as for one’s psyche. (Eisner, 78)
“Cognition” refers to thinking. “Cognition is supposed to be contrasted with affect, which in turn is contrasted with psychomotor activity.” (Eisner, 83) Yet, cognition has come to refer to thinking with words/numbers by logical procedure for their organization and manipulation, rather than thinking in a broad sense. “What school programs tend to emphasize is the development of a restricted concept of thinking. Not all thinking is mediated by word or numbers, nor is all thinking rule abiding.”
“Many of the most productive modes of thought are nonverbal and alogical. These modes operate in visual, auditory, metaphoric, synesthetic ways and utilize forms of conception and expression that far exceed the limits of logically prescribed criteria or discursive or mathematical forms of thinking…" Feeling and thought have identifiable neurological structures: The left hemisphere of the brain associates with reason, calculation, and language (science, ‘cognition’) and the right hemisphere of the brain with creativity, emotion, and intuition (art, feeling; ‘affect’). The "neglect or absence from school programs of nondiscursive forms of knowing skew what can be known and expressed in schools, it also biases the criteria through which human competence and intelligence are appraised.” (Eisner, 84) “The neglect of such processes within schools, assuming they are not adequately fostered outside of schools, can lead to a kind of literalness in perception and thought that impedes the appreciation of those objects or ideas that best exemplify metaphorical modes of thinking.” Thus, in a fashion of classical conditioning, it divides the complementary mentalities of thought and feeling: Just as science is the realm of thought and art the realm of feeling, one space is the place of art (feeling) and another space the place of science (thought).
This division of self and the division of space have had a rogue marriage.
Account for state-dependent learning - that what one may learn and/or recall and reemploy depends on one’s neurological state, reverse engineer the concept of architecture – that spatial arrangements effect neural states (emotion - right brain hemisphere), and consider that the hippocampus has ‘”place cells” which play a role in spatial mapping’, acting like a compass and coordinating the individual in respect to their environment (Austin, p. 182), and it is reasonably inferred that space defines neurological programs (as architecture evidences by enabling space to be a measure of the neurological code being run, hence feeling X in space Z). In other words, the design of space reflects the composition of the neurological system; for it is the neurological state that the architect seeks to compose – space, light, and order are tools they use to make it happen.
Perhaps, then, Kant had it right; maybe space is a mirror of our subjective states, and architecture is one method (of many) for neurological navigation. “The nervous system is basically simple: it receives information, then translates it into appropriate action.” (Austin, p. 152) “No response is determined by one structure or even one system, and responses are not based on simple yes-no decisions but on the interactions of numerous yes-no decisions.” Synchronously, Susanka says of architecture: It “is the interrelationship between spaces, walls and ceilings, and windows that shape our experience.” Susanka’s examples of Varying Ceiling Height, Reflecting Surfaces, and Theme and Variation exemplify accurate descriptions of the way space may affect people, via their neurological response to spatial information. The arrangement of space acts like a language which speaks directly to the nervous system (rendering what is said an unconscious interaction), which deciphers and encodes the interrelationship of environmental information (spatial structures, light, patterning) – like Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas process human language - through the neural-circuity of the vestibular sense and exercises itself in such phenomenon as “field sense”.
The unconscious mind operates below the threshold of consciousness – meaning one is not directly involved in what is happening. But unconscious does not mean unaware. There is a certain degree of awareness, a subconscious awareness, of the impacts resonant with environmental design. After all, we do go to particular spaces for certain feelings, don’t we? Home for comfort and relaxation. A club or bar for excitement and socializing. A gymnasium or dance studio for physical enthrallment and exercise. The spatial structures that compose our social arrangements have thus robbed the individual of their own self worth. Comfort, relaxation, excitement, feelings of belonging, etc., etc. – all of these reside within, yet are sought without. The Tao Te Ching emphasizes:
The five colors blind the eye.
The five tones deafen the ear.
The five flavors dull the taste.
Racing and hunting madden the mind.
Precious things lead one astray.
Therefore the sage is guided by what he feels and not what he sees.
He let’s go of that and this.
To interpret: Your ability to see is taken by looking; hearing is given up by listening; tasting, lost to predilection. Decompetition and thrill-seeking disturb inner peace. The mindful individual does not move to move, but moves because it is necessary.
On the contrary, no robbery has been committed. The individual has sold their self to the gym, to the bar, to the church, to the government, to the school. The individual has sold their self for what they believe is their self: the culture – the society – the crowd. Carl Gustav Jung noted this (p. 10):
“The bigger the crowd the more negligible the individual becomes. But if the individual, overwhelmed by the sense of his own puniness and impotence, should feel that his life has lost its meaning… then he is already on the road to state slavery and, without knowing or wanting it, has become its proselyte. Under these circumstances it is small wonder that individual judgment grows increasingly uncertain of itself and that responsibility is collectivized as much as possible, i.e., is shuffled off by the individual and delegated to a corporate body. [e.g. sold to the institution] In this way the individual becomes more and more a function of society, which in its turn usurps the function of the real life carrier, whereas, in actual fact, society is nothing more than an abstract idea like the state. Both are hypostatized, that is, have become autonomous. The state in particular is turned into a quasi-animate personality from whom everything is expected. In reality it is only a camouflage for those individuals who know how to manipulate it. Thus the constitutional state drifts into the situation of a primitive form of society, namely the communism of a primitive tribe where everybody is subject to the autocratic rule of a chief or an oligarchy.
The man who looks only outside and quails before the big battalions has no resource with which to combat the evidence of his senses and his reason. But that is just what is happening today: we are all fascinated and overawed by statistical truths and large numbers and are daily apprised of the nullity and futility of the individual personality, since it is not represented and personified by any mass organization.” Conversely, those personages who strut about on the world stage and whose voices are heard far and wide seem, to the uncritical public, to be born along on some mass movement or on the tide of public opinion and for this reason are either applauded or execrated. Since mass suggestion plays the predominant role here, it remains a moot point whether their message is their own, for which they are personally responsible, or whether they merely function as a megaphone for collective opinion.
Under these circumstances it is small wonder that individual judgment grows increasingly uncertain of itself and that responsibility is collectivized as much as possible, i.e., is shuffled off by the individual and delegated to a corporate body. In this way the individual becomes more and more a function of society, which in its turn usurps the function of the real life carrier, whereas, in actual fact, society is nothing more than an abstract idea like the state. Both are hypostatized, that is, have become autonomous. The state in particular is turned into a quasi-animate personality from whom everything is expected. In reality it is only a camouflage for those individuals who know how to manipulate it. Thus the constitutional state drifts into the situation of a primitive form of society, namely the communism of a primitive tribe where everybody is subject to the autocratic rule of a chief or an oligarchy.
The dictator state has one great advantage over bourgeois reason: along with the individual it swallows up his religious forces. The state has taken the place of God; that is why, seen from this angle, the socialist dictatorships are religions and state slavery is a form of worship. But the religious function cannot be dislocated and falsified in this way without giving rise to secret doubts, which are immediately repressed so as to avoid conflict with the prevailing trends towards mass-mindedness. The result, as always in such cases, is overcompensation in the form of fanaticism, which in turn is used as a weapon for stamping out the last flicker of opposition. Free opinion is stifled and moral decision is ruthlessly suppressed, on the plea that the end justifies the means, even the vilest. The policy of the state is exalted to a creed, the leader or party boss becomes a demigod beyond good and evil, and his votaries are honored as heroes, martyrs, apostles, missionaries. There is only one truth and besides it no other. It is sacrosanct and above criticism. Anyone who thinks differently is a heretic, who as we know from history, is threatened with all manner of unpleasant things. Only the party boss, who holds the political power in his hands, can interpret the state doctrine authentically, and he does so as suits him.
Even a dictator thinks it necessary not only to accompany his acts of state with threats but to stage them with all manner of solemnities. Brass bands, flags, banners, parades and monster demonstrations are no different in principle from ecclesiastical processions, cannonades and fireworks to scare off demons. Only, the suggestive parade of state power engenders a collective feeling of security, which unlike religious demonstrations, gives the individual no protection against his inner demonism. Hence he will cling all the more to the power of the state, i.e., to the mass, thus delivering himself up to it psychically as well as morally and putting the finishing touch to his social depotentiation. The state, like the church, demands enthusiasm, self-sacrifice and love, and if religion requires or presupposes the “fear of God,” then the dictator state takes good care to provide the necessary terror.
As I have already pointed out, the dictator state, besides robbing the individual of his rights, has also cut the ground from under his feet psychically by depriving him of the metaphysical foundations of his existence. The ethical decision of the human being no longer counts- what alone matters is the blind movement of the masses, and the lie has thus become the operative principle of political action. The state has drawn the logical conclusions from this, as the existence of many millions of state slaves completely deprived of all rights mutely testifies.”
Austin, James H. Zen and the Brain: Toward an Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1999.
Eisner, Elliot W. The Educational Imagination: On the Design and Evaluation of School Programs. New York: Macmillan.
Guiley, Rosemary. The Encyclopedia of Magic and Alchemy. New York: Facts On File, 2006.
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