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Space: The undefinable space of architecture

Conference Paper · September 2011

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Space: The undefinable space of architecture
Erdem Üngür

1.Introduction
It’s a possible assumption that today at the most of the architectural schools the concept
of space is built as an anachronistic and quasi-homogeneous element. Especially through
architectural history lessons and architectural design studios, the concept of space is being
established with only traces of certain periods of the history of Western thought
disregarding its complex and obscure nature. It’s also thought-provoking that in an
educational system, introducing space as one of the integral parts of the discipline, there
is a huge ambiguity and recklessness about the history and nature of the concept of
space.
It can be argued that after the intensive interest of architects to the concept of space
between 1890-1970 and finally after the stabilization of the concept as a key stone of
architecture, the discipline has begun to shift out of the spatial studies (excluding ‘place’
theories between 1970-1990). Although space has become the dominant paradigm
particularly in social sciences with the spatial turn after 1980s, it seems like that this
socio-political transition of the concept of space has not so much affected the
architectural theory deep inside its epistemology. Herein it may play a role that in a
Cartesian/capitalist direction matured and freezed epistemology of space of the
architectural practice, which has to take part directly in the market being used by whether
public or private sector as an economic/politic regulatory, is not exactly corresponding to
the spatial approaches which were shifted from aesthetic to social, building critical
thinking in subjects like social injustice or bio-politics and hence organizing directly or
indirectly resistance against present power and political institutions.
In order to trace the way how the concept of space positions itself inside the
epistemology of architecture and how this position configurates the discipline, it must be
asserted first that space is a historical (1980s) and spatial (Germany) early modern
concept diffused into the discipline of architecture rather than being an essential part
inherent to it. Therefore the concept of space in architecture has to be read as a historical
phenomenon within Western history and in relation with modernity.

2.Space as an amalgam of the physical and the mental

Limiting ourself with the history of Western Thought, we can draw a disciplinary route for
space beginning with philosophy and cosmology, coming over a breakpoint at physics with
Newton and diffusing to the varied specialized disciplines after the Enlightenment. One of
these disciplines was surely architecture. In the discipline of architecture, the term ‘space’
began to emerge at the end of the 19th century with the volumetric theories of Semper in
Germany, which continued with aesthetic theories, enriched with the early modern
thinking and finally opened itself to the English spoken world with Giedion. So, the term
‘space’ entered the everyday vocabulary of architecture. However the term ‘space’ still
preserves its janus character. Its German origin Raum has a double meaning as ‘a material
enclosure’ (room) and as ‘a philosophical concept’ (space), which obscures the use of
term.

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 According to Forty (2000) ‘space’ -which did not exist in architectural vocabulary as a
term until the 1890s- was developed as an architectural category in Germany by German
writers and took its place in the architectural literature within modernism project. Forty
begins to investigate the roots of the concept of space by separating two schools of
thought emerging from 19th century German Philosophy. One attempts to create a theory
of architecture out of philosophy in relation with Hegel rather than out of architectural
tradition and centers on Gottfried Semper (1803-1879). The other one emerges in the
1890s concerned with a psychological approach to aesthetics, though it has some links to
Kant’s philosophy (Figure 1).

2.1.Volumetric Theories: space as an enclosure

In his wholly original theory about the origins of architecture Semper proposed that the
first impulse of architecture was the enclosing of space, without reference to the orders
and with material components being only secondary to spatial enclosure. The wall as an
architectural element makes this enclosed space visible. According to Forty (2000), Hegel’s
Aesthetics was also influential on Semper so that he sees the future of architecture laying
in space creation. The Hegelian aesthetic system, which formed the 19th century thinking,
had two fundamental parts: Beauty in art was achieved with the perfect expression of an
Idea and according to this, the hierarchy of the arts was determined with the
immateriality of the expression (Van de Ven, 1978). So, architecture was in the lowest
level of the hierarchy because of its materiality and functionality. However Hegel was
fascinated by the Gothic religious architecture and for the embodiment of the religious
idea in Gothic cathedrals he was briefly pointing the enclosing of space.
According to Harry Mallgrave, ‘enclosure’ was being talked about amongst architects as
a theme of architecture in Germany in the 1840s -he cites Karl Bötticher’s essay Principles
of Hellenic and Germanic Ways of Building (1846)- however no one went so far as Semper
suggesting spatial enclosure as the fundamental part of architecture (Forty, 2000). Unlike
Bötticher's tectonic preoccupation, Semper imagined architectural space as a nexus of
social activity. Continuing a tradition dating back to Vitruvius, Semper considered the built
enclosure and the separation of interior from exterior space to be the essential aspect of
architecture (Schwarzer, 1991).
In the first decade of the 20th century Semper was surely the source for those German-
speaking proto-modern architects who first articulated ‘space’ as the subject of
architecture. Adolf Loos in 1898, H.P.Berlage in 1905, Peter Behrens in 1910 have had
declarations and publications presenting enclosed space as the ultimate essence and
purpose of architecture (Forty, 2000).
Hight, Hensel and Menges (2009) are also stating that the first architectural discourse
about space was Semper’s volumetric theory defining the main task of architecture as
‘enclosing space’.The double meaning of the German word Raum as space and also as the
room, which is a physical closed space, makes this approach more understandable. The
emphasis on ‘room’ is important in the late 19th century residential and urban spaces and
it will rise again in the 20th century architecture.

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2.2.Aesthetic Theories: space as a mental construction
Another school of thought forming the ‘space’ conception in the 1920s was the Post-
Kantian aesthetic theory comprehending space as the aesthetic effect of architecture on
subjects. According to Kant, who was trying to reduce the tension between the absolute
space of Newton and the relative space of Leibniz, space is a part of the apparatus by
which the mind makes the world intelligible (Hight, Hensel and Menges 2009). In Kritik der
reinen Vernunft (1781) Kant states that space is not an empirical concept which has been
derived from external experiences, nor does it represent any property of things in
themselves or in their relation to one another. Instead, space exists in the mind a priori as
a pure intuition. However the possibilities that space, as a faculty of mind, might have for
aesthetic judgments were not developed by Kant. These possibilities, of which
Schopenhauer mentioned in his writing about architecture in Die Welt als Wille und
Vorstellung (1818), were not developed further until three essays appeared almost
simultaneously in 1893 (Forty, 2000).
The first of these, Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst written by German
sculptor Adolf Hildebrand, was claiming that ‘attention to the process of perception of
things in the world might itself lead to grasping the inherent themes not only of sculpture
but also of painting and of architecture’. Hildebrand was important because of leaving
Semper’s ‘spatial enclosure’ concept far behind by suggesting three important ideas of the
1920s: space itself is the subject matter of art, space is a continuum and it is animated
from within (Forty, 2000).
The second essay titled Das Wesen von architektonischen Schöpfung belonged to the
art historian August Schmarsow. Schmarsow recuperated spatial thinking for an inquiry
into man's kinetic relation to the built environment with his spatial doctrines displacing
the proportions of a static figure with the charged musculature of human movement
(Schwarzer, 1991). According to Forty, Schmarsow stresses that the ‘spatial construct’ is a
property of mind and should not be confused with the actual geometrical space present in
buildings. He claims that this point, developed later by Martin Heidegger, largely passed
architects by.
The third spatial account in the year 1893 was stated in Raumaesthetik und
Geometrisch-Optische Tauschungen of the aesthetic philosopher Theodor Lipps. Very
usefully for architects, Lipps established that ‘the shape of the object was its mass; and
the form was what remained after moving the mass: an abstract spatial structure’. So
Lipps identified two types of space: a geometric one and an aesthetic one. What remains
after elimination of the mass of the object is called geometric space, while aesthetic space
is the forceful, vital, formed space. Lipps paved the way for the later abstract spaces and
had influenced architects more then Hildebrand and Schmarsow in the short term (Van de
Ven, 1978; Forty, 2000; Holt-Damant, 2005).
From 1900 to 1914 was an active period in the history of architecture rethinking spatial
concepts of the previous decade and trying to define ‘spatiality’, the space-perceiving
faculty of the human mind. In Stillfragen (1893) and Spaetrömische Kunstindustrie (1901)
art historian Alois Riegl argued that the development of art was not due to external
factors like material or technique but due to internal factors like different aesthetic
perceptions at successive stages of history. According to Riegl this development could be

3
seen in architecturally built spaces (Forty, 2000). Similarly, and again without the
specifically corporeal ingredients of Schmarsow, Paul Frankl, in his thesis Die
Entwicklungsphasen der neueren Baukunst (1914), grafted a spatial history of architecture
since the Renaissance on the timehonored periodization of historicism (Vidler, 2000).
According to Forty, Frankl’s thesis was showing the relationship between spatiality and
built spaces much better than any other account on space but also it has lost the
distinction between mental space and actual geometrical space present in buildings,
which was made by Schmarsow. So, spatiality had become a property of buildings and also
a more practical concept for those involved with architecture. Holt-Damant (2005) also
states that Frankl’s critique and process of understanding architecture was critical in
bridging the gap between a theoretical but non-architectural base of German aesthetic
theory and the practice of European Modernism.

2.3.Internationalization of the modern space concept

According to Van de Ven (1978) between 1920 -1930 every modernist architect has had its
own space definition. For example Moholy-Nagy listed in his book The New Vision (1928)
forty four distinct adjectives defining different types of space. This period was important
because while space concepts of the aesthetics were concerned with the perception of
architecture, especially in this period architects started to investigate how to apply them
to the creation of a new work. However the entrance of the concept into English was not
so fast. Except Architecture of Humanism of Geoffrey Scott in 1914, nothing was written
about space before 1940. Wright has not used the word until 1928. When Hitchcock and
Johnson wrote The International Style for MOMA, they used the old ‘volume’ instead of
space venturing only one reference to ‘space’: ‘volume is felt as immaterial and
weightless, a geometrically bounded space’.
In general, it appears that ‘space’ as an English term became widespread following the
emigration of German architects to Britain and USA. The New Vision –translated in 1930
into English- was the main source for English-speaking world to understand the concept of
space. In 1940, the term ’space’ became accepted in English with Giedion’s Space, Time
and Architecture, which presented architectural space not as a concept but as an existing
built work (Forty, 2000). Similarly in Architecture as Space (1957), Bruno Zevi asserted that
space is the protagonist of the architectural and urban design. Zevi has not only suggested
a modernist polemic about space, but also opened a space centered page in the history of
architecture (Hight, Hensel and Menges 2009). Finally with the influence of Giedion and
the authority of first generation modernist architects the concept of ‘space’ became a
normal category in architectural discourse throughout the world by the 1950s and 1960s.

3.Towards a criticism of the modern space concept

After the concept of space was placed in the epistemology of architecture in an
Euclidean/Cartesian way with the result of producing abstract space, criticisms began to
come from a range of formations. According to Forty (2000), the attempt to lessen the
importance of space was one characteristic of the postmodern architecture in the late
1970s and 1980s. To define this movement which is shaped around traditional urban
patterns, building typologies, historical styles, popular culture and linguistics, we can cite

4
names like Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi, Steven Izenour, Aldo Rossi, Colin Rowe,
Fred Koetter and keep this sentence from Learning from Las Vegas (1972) in mind:
‘Perhaps the most tyrannical element in our architecture now is space. Space has been
contrived by architects and deified by critics’.
Another branch of resistance against modern space may be called as ‘place’ theories
which are mostly based on Martin Heidegger and became popular in architecture between
1970s and 1990s. However the linguistic models of postmodern architecture were also
criticized during the 1980s and 1990s particularly by Bernard Tschumi who was familiar
with the works of Henry Lefebvre. These complex and interrelated approaches against
modern space will be classified historically and qualitatively in three groups as historical
and neo-avant-garde Postmodernism [typological/vernacular examinations and linguistic
formalisms] (Hight, Hensel and Menges 2009), ‘place’ theories [mostly based on
Heidegger] and ‘new’ space theories [as a resistance to ‘place’ theories and also as a
transition from them into social space theories]. This paper will go through ‘place’
theories, concentrate on ‘new space’ theories and try to problematize their relationship
with the spatial turn in social sciences.

3.1.‘Place’ theories
The examinations made through semiotics and linguistics to put the meaning back, which
has been lost after modern space, were followed with concepts like ‘dasein’, ‘memory’,
‘body’ and ‘place’ especially after 1970s. According to Dovey (1999) ‘place’ theory gained
popularity among architects between 1970 and 1990 with Heideggerian phenomenology
and particularly with Frampton’s Critical Regionalism (1983) and Schultz’s Genius Loci
(1980,85). Gaston Bachelard, Merleau Ponty and Edward Casey can also be counted in this
approach reminding the importance of place against space.
According to Heidegger space is a modern concept and in fact there was no need to the
concept of space in Ancient Greece. As Nalbantoğlu (2008) states, a process beginning
with the Roman Empire evolves and reaches a crucial point with Galileo and Newton,
where a new conception comes up: movement of the objects, which are presented as
points in a void, are conceived as taking place in an abstract, homogeneous three-
dimensional extension. After this point a different notion, which will dominate the
modern thinking was reigning: ‘Space is three-dimensional extension, extensio’.
Heidegger argues with his place centered spatial theories against this absolute space
conception which influenced modernism deeply. According to Forty(2000) Heidegger’s
understanding of space was that space is neither a part of the apparatus by which the
mind makes the world intelligible nor does it exist previous to one’s being in the world. In
short, there is no space independently of one’s being in it. Forty states that Heidegger’s
notion of space contradicts almost all the notions about space developed by the architects
between 1890 and 1930. The effects of Heidegger’s ideas were not noticeable until the
early 1960s in architecture and the interpretations of his ideas offered in Christian
Norberg-Schulz’s books and Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1958) were more
influential for architects.
Bachelard analyses space with its psychoanalytic and semantic sides over the
relationship between our daily built environment and body (and also memory) in a ‘poetic’

5
way. According to Dovey (1999), in Bachelard’s work there are two spatial dialectics
coming forward: First of them, the vertical/horizontal dialectic, beginning with the
horizontal plane where we live between earth and sky, the upright stance of our body, the
relationship between verticality and power and the dynamic affect of diagonal forms,
continues with the association between garret/dream and cellar/subconscious. Therefore
it can be described as psychoanalytic and semantic. The second one, inside/outside
dialectic, becomes likewise ordered along the lines of enclosure/openness, safety/danger,
home/journey, familiar/strange, self/other and private/public. So, spatial dialectics
organize physical outer world along with our conceptual/mental world.

3.2.‘New space’ theories

Against the ‘place’ centered spatial theories, very briefly summarized above, there are two
main branches of criticism. First of them is a critic against the potentiality of romantic
phenomenology, to become an apparatus sanctifying place and race and also serving the
political power because of its relationship with Nazism. Another branch of criticism attacks
directly place origined ontology. Rajchman also argues that to ground dwelling in place is a
source of false naturalism and a constraint on freedom (Dovey,2010). The ‘new space’
theories, appearing after the intensive fluctuation of the concept of space both with
‘language/text’ based linguistic and ‘place’ based phenomenological approaches, mostly
removed ‘place’ from being an alternative. However in general, whether they confined
themselves to define the destructive effects of global capitalism and charged architecture
with the duty of representing Zeitgeist, or they positioned architecture outside the
proposed spatial setup, holding responsible for the current situation.
Even though it has some linguistic connotations, Michel de Certeau has reversed the
on-going place/space polarity, formulating ‘place’ as limiting and distant from home and
‘space’ as a new kind of freedom (one can experience new things in space, however on
condition that not being able to maintain these things). According to de Certeau (1984)
space is a practiced place. While place is the positioning of objects to each other; space is
the experience of them. In other words, in relation to place, space is like the word when it
is spoken: reading action is a kind of space, growing out of the experience of a written text
(a place established with signs). Stories thus carry out a labor that constantly transforms
places into spaces or spaces into places. The symbol of this new ‘space’ is the pavement,
on which pedestrians are walking (Buchanan and Lambert, 2005).
Marc Augé moves in a different way and portrays the increasingly fleeting and
fragmented nature of ‘supermodernity’ as a disappearance of place (Dovey, 1999). Augé’s
‘non-places’ are spaces of transit and temporal occupation, deprived of historical
reference and strong symbolism. ‘If a place can be defined as relational, historical and
concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical,
or concerned with identity will be a non-place’ (Augé, 1995). The hypothesis here is that
supermodernity produces non-places. Non-places emerge spontaneously in spaces like
airports, supermarkets, hotel rooms or leisure parks, which are produced by capitalist
relations and where capitalist relations continue to grow. Both Dovey (2010) and Castells
(1996) -with his ‘space of flows’- indicate Rem Koolhaas, who introduces the concept of
‘junkspace’, for the architectural expression of non-places.

6
 The term ‘junkspace’ defines a space, which is shaped by technology (as a tool of global
capitalism) after the failure of modernism project and which brings consumption into
focus, instead of individuals and society. Koolhaas describes the junkspace of
supermodernity as the exaggeration of ‘non-places’: an agglomeration of conditional and
conditioned places like shopping malls, precincts, entertainment venues etc..The common
property of all of these places is that they all lost their ‘public space’ quality and are totally
under the control of the capital. According to Koolhaas this ‘global style’ diffused
everywhere like a virus. Jameson states that the virus ascribed to junkspace is in fact the
virus of shopping itself; which, like Disneyfication, gradually spreads like a toxic moss
across the known universe (Jameson, 2003; Buchanan and Lambert, 2005).
Castells (1996) characterizes a similar space with his ‘space of flows’, in which
information, money and culture are constantly put in motion through ‘a circuit of
electronic exchanges’ and ‘nodes and hubs’ by the dominant, managerial elites. Castells
positiones the space of flows against the historically rooted spatial organization which we
experience in common, namely the ‘space of places’. While new technologies become
tools for new spatial politics, ‘the space of flows’ preponderate over ‘the space of places’.
In other words, ‘space’ and ‘place’ are reconceptionalized (Ödekan and Erek, 2008).
Henry Lefebvre with his space triology (or spatial trialectics) and ‘differential space’,
which he put historically after the abstract space of capitalism, builds a general space
theory parallel with ‘place’ and ‘new space’ theories, however leaving architecture outside
again. As Merrifield (2000) states Lefebvre tries to find a solution to the increasing
pressure of the modern space, formed by the Cartesian tradition, on daily life particularly
after 1950s. However Lefebvre does not follow Heideggerian atavistic model of
authenticity, but produce an utopic nostalgia directed to the future.
Lefebvre explains his spatial theory especially in Production of Space (POS) and defines
it as an initiative for blowing up the modern thinking. Openly he curses Giedion and Zevi
as theoreticians of the modern space. In a more direct way, he refuses what he calls
‘abstract space’ which is separated from the lived practice of space or from the local and
physical properties of place. According to Lefebvre, abstract space is a powerful means of
hegemony and an agent of capital for alienation of the subject (Hight, Hensel and Menges
2009).
According to Forty (2000), Lefebvre questionize with POS the nature of the relationship
between the space produced by thought, and the space within which thought happens.
Lefebvre stresses that this schism has not been a feature of all societies but of the modern
culture. Modern societies and the whole Western history are inclined to reduce the
sophisticated space, which is perceived (through social relations of daily life), conceived
(with thought) and lived (through bodily experience), into an abstraction. Lefebvre’s aim
can be described as the reconnection of the physical space with abstract space (which he
briefly names ‘mental’) via social space. According to him, in our society lived and
perceived are secondary to conceived and the conceived is mostly an oppressive and
objective abstraction. Lefebvre’s ‘abstract space’ bears close resemblance to Marx’s
notion of ‘abstract labour’. Marx held that qualitatively different labour activities under
the bourgeois system got reduced to one quantitative measure, which is money. In
abstract labour the important point is the quantity of labour achieved in a definite time,

7
not the quality of it. Value, money (the universal measure of value), and exchange value
(price) set the tone of the structural conception of abstract space. Insofar as abstract
space is formal, homogeneous and quantitative, it erases all differences that originate in
the body (like sex and ethnicity) or else reifies them for its own quantitative ends
(Merrifield, 2000). According to Harvey (1992) the conquest and control of space started
with the convertion of Euclidean geometry (which allows space to be conceived as
abstract and homogeneous) into a spatially ordered physically landscape by builders,
engineers, architects, and land managers. Merchants and landowners used such practices
for their own class purposes, while the absolutist state (with its concern for taxation and
social control) intended to define and produce spaces with fixed spatial co-ordinates.

4.Spatial turn and the immunity of architecture

This multidisciplinary critical domain against modern space was substantially established
with the epistemological turn from the history based analysis of 19th century to the
spatial one, with the rise of structuralism (West-Pavlov, 2009). According to Soja (2000)
one of the most important intellectual developments of the late 20th century is that
scholars have begun to interpret space and the spatiality of human life with the same
critical insight and interpretive power that has traditionally been given to time and history
on the one hand, and to social relations and society on the other. Soja argues that the
spatial turn has involved the end of historicism, which privileged time over space, and the
reassertion of space into social theory (Warf and Arias, 2009). Similarly, Fredric Jameson
claimed that the dominant cultural mode is one defined by categories of space; we inhabit
the synchronic, he claims, rather than the diachronic (West-Pavlov, 2009).
It can be speculated that architecture is unable (or straining) to import the spatial turn
of the social sciences to its spatial epistemology because of the ambiguous character of it
(which was tried out to summarize along the paper) and because of the efficient role it
takes places in the production of abstract space. Albeit not giving any clue about how this
change might happen in architecture, Lefebvre diagnoses the awry looking of architects:

1. Space given to the architect is not the neutral, transparent stuff of

Euclidean geometry. It has already been produced by capitalism.
2. Architects don’t create in a condition of ‘pure freedom’. Their eyes are
constituted through the space in which they live.
3. The apparatus employed by architects (such as drawing techniques) are
not neutral mediators, but are themselves part of the discourse of power.
Moreover, the practice of drawing is itself one of the prime means through
which social space is turned into an abstraction, homogenized for the
purposes of exchange and drained of lived experience.
4. The techniques of drawing, indeed the whole practice of architecture,
privilege the eye above all other senses and sustain the tendency for image,
and spectacle, to take the place of reality.
5. Architecture and particularly modernism are partly responsible for
making space appear homogeneous (Lefebvre, 1991; Forty, 2000).

8
Lefebvre’s criticisms to the ‘space of architects’ are in fact the critique of abstract space. It
is the form into which social space has been rendered with the separation of mental space
from lived space by capitalism. So, human subjects are not just alienated, as Marx saw it,
from the result of their labour, but from the entire experience of everyday life. They don’t
experience space by living it, but via representations provided through intellectual
disciplines and other ideological practices of capitalism. According to Lefebvre, architects
and urban planners too often imitate or caricature the discourse of power with their
abstract empty space, rather then liberating the discipline of architecture (Forty, 2000).
According to Hight, Hensel and Menges (2009) the problem in Lefebvre’s argument is that
he is telling almost nothing about how to transmit the spatial multiplicity he puts forward
actively into design practices. Besides, continuing with Lefebvre’s criticisms (to the spatial
concepts of modernist architects and to the architects as authorities of space) social
geographers became experts of space. However the spatial discourse of social geography
can not be translated into architecture unproblematically. The consistent attack on
architecture whether frustrates the integration of these statements into alternative design
approaches or they remain too broad for being used in design disciplines. Furthermore;
Hight, Hensel and Menges (2009) state that the academic dominance of social
geographers can be interpreted as a reduction of space into an inconsistent,
representative and mostly semiotic repertoire of acrobatics which repeats itself.
According to them, Lefebvre does not suggest anything new rather than abstract space
and hinders new spatial approaches in architectural design by leaving architects outside of
the production area of spatial knowledge:

‘ Thus, while Lefebvre’s argument remains a milestone in offering a critical analysis of

space as heterogeneous sets of relationships, it has become a millstone for any
architect seeking innovation through heterogeneous space ’.

5.Conclusion and discussion

The modern concept of space, introduced by art historians and aestheticians into the
epistemology of architecture in the 1890s, has undergone a transdisciplinary transition
process until the 1960s and became the prevailing space apprehension in architecture.
The main character of this abstract space was the separation of the physical from the
mental. As a result, architecture became an apparatus of capitalism as the producer of
abstract space. Complex and interrelated approaches against modern space , like neo-
avant-garde Postmodernism, ‘place’ theories and ‘new space’ theories were developed in
time. Albeit involving some change in the spatial epistemology of architecture, it can not
be asserted that these approaches gave birth to a permanent transformation.
Today, architecture still assumes a world defined by Descartes and Newton and
struggle mostly with the spatial problems (without any concrete social dimension)
introduced at the beginning of the 20th century. Therefore it can be argued that the
transdisciplinary historical transformation of the concept of space is repressed as an
ambiguous and undefinable subject in the architectural epistemology.
This passive and conservative behaviour of architecture may be explained with the
immunity of its epistemology to the socio-political transition of the concept of space

9
particularly in social sciences after 1980s and this phenomenon can be possibly explained
by the awry looking of architects described by Lefebvre. Therefore, Forty (2000)
recommends to follow the path beginning with Schmarsow, passing to Heidegger and
continuing with Lefebvre. However one has to keep in mind that there are lots of different
approaches to this issue. For example Dovey (2010) suggests to replace the Heideggerian
ontology with a more Deleuzian notion and to replace the division of subject/object or
sociality/spatiality with Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus as an embodied world. Hight,
Hensel and Menges (2009), on the other hand, claim that Lefebvre’s attempt to go beyond
the gap between lived space and space as an abstract concept, was too complicated. They
assert that space has never been such an abstract and modern concept, and follow Bruno
Latour instead of Lefebvre.
As it can be seen from a few example, it is not so easy to define the broad space of
architecture. Although the relationship between the ‘space of architecture’ and the
abstract space, or the integration of the recent spatial theories of social sciences into the
discipline of architecture are intrinsic to the concept of space in architecture, these kind of
historical and theoritical approaches to space are mostly missing in architectural design
studios and architectural history lessons. Therefore, the concept of space, which is for
sure complex and comprehensive because of its transdisciplinary character, has to be re-
examined critically in the architectural epistemology. In an educational system introducing
space as one of the integral parts of the discipline, the huge ambiguity and recklessness
about the history and nature of the concept of space should be avoided as far as possible.

This paper was based on the master thesis in architectural design programme of ITU, with
the title of ‘The relationship of architecture & space through interdisciplinary historical
transformation of the concept of space’ , written by Erdem Üngür under Assoc.Prof.Dr.
Nurbin Paker’s supervision in 2011.

10
Figure 1 Enter of the concept of space into architecture according to Forty

11
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