Notes On The ‘Spatial Turn’
Architecture as Space, Again?Notes on the ‘Spatial Turn’Łukasz Stanek48
In the introduction to a recent volume on the‘spatial turn’, the authors applaud geography’sadvance from an ‘importer’ of ideas to an ‘exporter’,and embark on an exploration of “how geographershave influenced other fields of scholarshipand the many forms in which geography hasmotivated scholars to think spatially.”1 However,calculating such a balance of trade is difficult,and a quick glance at what was called the “spatialturn” in sociology or history suggests that ratherthan importing concepts, much effort goes intorewriting the spatial genealogies of these disciplinesthemselves, with sociologists returning to ÉmileDurkheim, Maurice Halbwachs or Georg Simmel;and historians rereading the Annales School.2In architectural discourse, the concept of space didnot have to be rediscovered. Indeed, it occupieda privileged place since the late 19th century inGerman art and architecture history (AugustSchmarsow, Alois Riegl), aesthetics (TheodorLipps, Herman Sörgel), and art criticism (AdolfHildebrand). The influence of this debate,spreading beyond academic disciplines and beyondGermany, led to a consensus on “space as theessence of architecture,” a consensus reached duringthe interwar period among art and architecturalhistorians, such as Sigfried Giedion, NikolausPevsner, Geoffrey Scott, but also embraced byavant-garde architects in order to bypass thestylistic revivalism of the 19th century: thedilemma aptly expressed in the title of HeinrichHübsch’s 1828 book In What Style Should WeBuild?3 Yet this consensus is no more, and some ofthe most innovative contributions to architecturediscourse and practice over the last 40 years weredeveloped explicitly against the definition of“architecture as space:” from Robert Venturi andDenise Scott-Brown arguing for “an architectureas sign rather than space”; to Rem Koolhaas’confession to having “always thought the notion of‘space’ [was] irrelevant” despite his frequent use ofthe term.4 Since the 1960s, we have also seen thehistoricization not only of the concept of space asdeveloped by the early 20th century architecturalavant-gardes, but also of the work of scholars andcritics of the interwar period who embraced spaceas the guideline for architectural knowledge.5In other words, if the ‘spatial turn’ is broadlyunderstood as the introduction of the concept ofspace into the discourse of a particular discipline,it does not seem to have much to offer currentdebates in architectural culture.However, the spatial turn does pose a fundamentalchallenge and affordance to contemporaryarchitectural research if it is addressed accordingto its historical conditions, that is to say as a setof theoretical decisions taken by critical thinkerssuch as Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, orPierre Bourdieu in response to the fundamentaleconomic, political, technological, and culturaltransformations that took place on a global scale inthe 1960s and 1970s.It was in this context that Lefebvre formulatedhis theory of the production of space in six bookspublished between 1968 (The Right to the City)and 1974 (The Production of Space), considered byEdward Soja to be central contributions to the“reassertion of space in modern critical theory,” asSoja defined the spatial turn.6 Lefebvre positedhis theory as a response to multiple phenomena:the emergence of the “bureaucratic society ofcontrolled consumption;” the crisis of Marxism andthe disappointment with state socialism; and theinstitutionalization of critical thinking – includingcritical urban theory – in the processes of state-ledplanning. At the same time, Lefebvre’s publicationswere inscribed into a revision of the modernmovement and, more specifically, into a critiqueof what he considered the modern movement’sconcept of space. Read today, his account of the‘discovery of space’ by early 20th century architectsappears characteristic of 1960s polemics againstfunctionalist urbanism and modernist architecture,a polemics itself subsequently questioned by49
Architecture as Space, Again?historiographies of the CIAM and of the modernmovement’s ‘other traditions.’7 In particular, hisattribution to ‘modern architecture’ of an ‘abstract’concept of space – at the same time homogenousand fragmented, geometric, visual, and phallic– did not reflect the multiplicity of the avantgardes’ spatial imagination: from Le Corbusier’splan libre, Gropius’s fliessendes Raumkontinuum,or El Lissitzky’s isotropic space; through theunderstanding of space as enclosure, influenced byGottfried Semper, rethought by Hendrik PetrusBerlage and Peter Behrens, and incorporatedin Adolf Loos’s Raumplan; to the concept ofspace as an extension of the body, introduced inAugust Schmarsow’s lectures on the history ofarchitecture.8Despite its limitations, what made Lefebvre’swritings central to the ‘spatial turn’ was theirattempt to problematize the understanding ofspace as a privileged medium of architecture.Rather, Lefebvre argued that if early 20th centuryarchitecture ‘discovered’ space, it is in the senseof space’s instrumentalization as a medium, tool,and milieu of social practices. Many of theseinstrumentalizations were studied in Lefebvre’sresearch projects from the 1940s onwards. Theyincluded empirical work in rural and urbansociology that paid particular attention to the roleof urban space in the class composition of post-warFrance, as well as studies on the everyday practicesof the inhabitants of individual and collectivehousing.9 From within these engagements Lefebvreformulated a concept of space as socially producedand productive: produced by and made productivein a variety of practices and by various agents thatcooperate, compete and struggle.Three theoretical decisions undergird Lefebvre’sapproach to space. First, a shift from research onspace itself toward the study of the processes of itsproduction at a variety of scales: from the everydayrhythms of métro–boulot–dodo (commuting,working, sleeping) to the global reproduction of50capitalism. Second, the acknowledgement of themultiplicity of social practices that contribute tothese processes, which include material practices oftransformation of space, practices of representingspace, and its experience and appropriation.Third, the focus on the contradictory andpolitical character of the processes of productionof space. These decisions introduce a researchperspective incompatible with attempts at theconceptualization of space as operating througha singular image of thought or as a universalprinciple. This perspective challenges not only thespatial imaginary of the modern movement asLefebvre saw it, but also his own attempt to reducethe fundamental dialectics of space to one generalform governed by one universal contradiction, inthe vein of Marx’s opposition between ‘use value’and ‘exchange value’.10The stress on the multiplicity of practicesimplicated in the production of space makes suchreduction impossible. Does this mean that thereis no one space, but rather a multiplicity of spacesin which we live? Such a vision was conveyed bymuch architectural theory from the late 1940sto the 1970s, and expressed by authors as diverseas Bruno Zevi, Christian Norberg-Schulz andPhilippe Boudon. In his book Architecture asSpace (1948) Zevi lists multiple ‘interpretations’of architecture: political, philosophical (religious,scientific, economic), social, materialist, technical,physio-psychological and formalist. All of themare valid to the extent to which they deal witharchitecture – that is to say, with space, becausearchitecture consists in “the enclosed space inwhich man lives and moves.”11 Norberg-Schulzin Existence, Space, and Architecture (1971) alsodescribed a range of ‘spaces’ in which people live:the ‘pragmatic space’ of physical action; ‘perceptual’space; ‘existential space’; ‘cognitive space’; the‘abstract space’ of pure logical relations; and an‘expressive space’ that included ‘architectural space’described by means of an ‘aesthetic space’.12
Łukasz StanekThe logical consequence of this multiplicationwas to charge specific disciplines with the taskof accounting for these various ‘spaces’, a taskpursued in 1960s debates in France and beyond.In other words, what appears as speculationabout the ontology of space can be translatedinto a pragmatic question about the possibilityof an interdisciplinary cooperation betweenarchitects, urbanists, geographers and sociologistsin education, research and design. And indeed,for much of French research on urban space fromthe late 1950s to the early 1970s – informed bythe work of Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe,Raymond Ledrut, and Lefebvre, the differences intheir understanding of ‘space’ notwithstanding – itwas this possibility for interdisciplinary cooperationthat was at stake.13What is the role of architecture research withinsuch a restructured division of labour? On theone hand, if ‘architectural space’ – argued byNorberg-Schulz to be the specific competenceof architecture – is one among many other‘spaces’, a philosophical discussion about therelationships between these specific ‘spaces’ isinevitable: a discussion that seems to project thedivision of labor into an ontology of spaces, thusviolating Ockham’s rule not to multiply entitiesunnecessarily. In this framework, the hierarchy ofreified ‘spaces’ reflects the power relations betweentheir producers, reducing architecture to “one ofthe numerous socioeconomic products that wereperpetuating a political status quo”– as BernardTschumi argues in his 1975 reading of Frenchurban sociology.14 On the other hand, if this‘architectural space’ is understood as somehowencompassing all others, architecture’s disciplinarycrisis is inevitable: as space is produced by manyagents – architects arguably among the leastinfluential – they will be held responsible forsomething they cannot control.These arguments – exercised in numerous debatesfirst in France and Italy beginning in the 1960s,and later in the United States – suggest thatthe understanding of space as produced by andproductive in heterogeneous social practices isincommensurable with the modernist definition of‘architecture as space’.15 In other words, the ‘spatialturn’ – at least as understood in the writings of Sojaand those who followed – is based on an idea ofspace that not only differs from that of the early20th century avant-gardes, but that was developedexplicitly in opposition to their claim about spaceas the specific medium of architecture. The deepentrenchment of this claim in the professional selfconsciousness of architects was recently manifestin a debate initiated by the German journalDer Architekt which was marked by the contrastbetween the ‘architectural’ definition of space andthat developed by social sciences within the spatialturn.16Rather than perpetuating this claim, it is moreproductive to develop a research perspective onarchitecture within the processes of the productionof space as a multifaceted and multivalent productof apprehension, experience and reification thatstraddles physical, ideological and symbolicreality.17 More specifically, this means abandoningthe understanding of ‘architectural space’ as a realmof architectural competence and, instead, movingtowards a study of the multiple engagements ofarchitectural practices at all stages of process:from formulating a demand, to research,programming, conceptualizing, designing andconstruction. Furthermore, the understanding ofspace as materially transformed, represented andexperienced requires an attention to the varietyof actors with whom the architect engages, thusmoving beyond the bipolar, 1960s image of thearchitectural practice overshadowed by its darkother: ‘the market’ or ‘the state’. At the sametime, this perspective facilitates a study of avariety of products of architectural practices: notonly technical documentation, but also researchmethods, modes of knowledge production,conventions of representation, educational tools51
Architecture as Space, Again?and regulatory proposals.18 This includes studyingarchitecture’s “transformational, active, instrumentalfunction”, as Eve Blau states in her 1999 study onthe Red Vienna, and, as Nancy Stieber advocates,it means reinserting “the formal analysis of thevisual into the problematic of social space”,extended towards an attention to the performanceof architectural forms as perceived individually andcollectively, experienced, interpreted, contested andappropriated.19One could object by arguing that the acceptanceof such a research perspective does not necessitatethe acceptance of Lefebvre’s concept of space. Evenif his concept, as I have argued, lies at the originof this perspective, it could be seen as a prostheticdevice to be disposed immediately after servingits cause – much like Wittgenstein’s comparisonof his Tractatus to a ladder to be thrown awayafter it was used to climb. In other words, wouldit not be better to abandon the discourse on ‘space’and restrict architectural discourse to ‘buildings’,‘streets’, ‘squares’, ‘neighborhoods’, ‘parks’ and‘landscapes’? There is nothing wrong with this,provided that they are not understood as reifiedarchitectural typologies but, rather, as constructedin collective processes operating on various scalesand on various facets, including their materiality,representation, use, experience and imagination– that is to say as part of the social production of‘space’ in the sense put forward by the ‘spatial turn’.52
Łukasz StanekNotes1 B arney Warf and Santa Arias, “Introduction:The Reinsertion Of Space Into SocialSciences and Humanities,” in The SpatialTurn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, editedby Barney Warf and Santa Arias (London :Routledge, 2009), 2. The first version of thispaper was presented during the roundtable“Beyond the Spatial Turn: RedefiningSpace in Architectural History” with theparticipation of Stephen Cairns, GreigCrysler, Hilde Heynen, Anat Falbel, JanikeKampevold Larsen, Alona Nitzan-Shiftan,and Carmen Popescu (First internationalmeeting of the European ArchitecturalHistory Network, Guimarães, June 20th ,2010).2 Jörg Döring, Tristan Thielmann eds., SpatialTurn. Das Raumparadigma in den Kulturund Sozialwissenschaften (Berlin: Transcript,2009).3 Panayotis Tournikiotis, The HistoriographyofModernArchitecture(Cambridge:MIT Press, 1999); Ákos turtheorie im 20. Jahrhundert. Einekritische Anthologie (Vienna: Springer,2003); Anthony Vidler, Warped Space : Art,Architecture, and Anxiety in ModernCulture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000);comp.: Heinrich Hübsch, In welchem Stylesollen wir bauen? (Karlsruhe : MüllerscheHofbuchhandlung, 1928).4 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown,Architecture as Signs and Systems: For aMannerist Time (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 2004); Rem Koolhaas,“Navigating the Local: Conversation withSang Lee,” in The Domestic and the Foreignin Architecture, edited by Sang Lee and RuthBaumeister (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers,2007), 344.5 Tournikiotis, Historiography; Moravánszky,Architekturtheorie.6 Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: theReassertion Of Space In Critical Social Theory(London: Verso, 1989).7 Dirk van den Heuvel and Max Risseladaeds., Team 10, 1953--81. In Search of a Utopiaof the Present (Rotterdam: NetherlandsArchitecture Institute, 2005); Colin St.John Wilson, The Other Tradition of ModernArchitecture: The Uncompleted Project (London:Academy, 1995). See also: Manuel de SolàMorales, “Another Modern Tradition: Fromthe Break of 1930 to the Modern UrbanProject,” Lotus 64 (1989), 6-31.8 Moravánszky, Architekturtheorie; Adrian Forty,Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary Of ModernArchitecture (New York: Thames & Hudson,2000).9 Łukasz Stanek, Henri Lefebvre on Space.Architecture, Urban Research and theProduction of Theory (Minneapolis: University of13 F rançoise Bedos et al., Les besoins fonctionnelsde l’homme en vue de leur projection ultérieuresur le plan de la conception architecturale(Paris: Centre de recherche d’architecture,d’urbanisme et de construction, 1970).14 Bernard Tschumi, “The ArchitecturalParadox,” in Bernard Tschumi, Architectureand Disjunction (Cambridge: MIT Press,1996), 32.15 Stanek, Henri Lefebvre on Space.16 Der Architekt, 2/ 2008; for discussion, seeChristina Hilger, Vernetzte Räume Plädoyerfür den Spatial Turn in der Architektur(Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2010), 11ff.17 Comp. Fertile Spaces: The Productivity of UrbanSpace in Northern Europe, ed. by Peter Arnade,Martha C. Howell, and Walter Simons, TheJournal of Interdisciplinary History, Spring2002, Vol. 32, No. 4.18 Łukasz Stanek, “Simulation or Hospitality-Beyond the Crisis of Representation in NowaHuta,” in Visual and Material Performancesin the City, edited by Lars Frers and LarsMeier (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 135-53;Łukasz Stanek, “The Instrumental Use ofRepresentations of Space in the Practicesof Production of Space in a PostcommunistCity,” in De-/signing the Urban. Technogenesisand the Urban Image, edited by Patrick Healyand Gerhard Bruyns (Rotterdam: 010, 2006).19 Eve Blau, The Architecture of Red Vienna,1919-1934 (Cambridge: MIT Press,1999), 14; Nancy Stieber, “Space, time,and architectural history,” in RethinkingArchitectural Historiography, edited by DanaArnold, Elvan Altan Ergut, and Belgin TuranÖzkaya (London: Routledge 2006), 179.Minnesota Press, 2011).10 I bid., chapter 3.11 Bruno Zevi, Architecture As Space: How ToLook At Architecture (New York: HorizonPress, 1974 [1948]), 23.12 C hristian Norberg-Schulz, Existence, Space andArchitecture (London: Studio Vista, 1971).53
as Bruno Zevi, Christian Norberg-Schulz and Philippe Boudon. In his book Architecture as Space (1948) Zevi lists multiple ‘interpretations’ of architecture: political, philosophical (religious, scientific, economic), social, materialist, technical, physio-psychological and formalist. Al
May 02, 2018 · D. Program Evaluation ͟The organization has provided a description of the framework for how each program will be evaluated. The framework should include all the elements below: ͟The evaluation methods are cost-effective for the organization ͟Quantitative and qualitative data is being collected (at Basics tier, data collection must have begun)
Silat is a combative art of self-defense and survival rooted from Matay archipelago. It was traced at thé early of Langkasuka Kingdom (2nd century CE) till thé reign of Melaka (Malaysia) Sultanate era (13th century). Silat has now evolved to become part of social culture and tradition with thé appearance of a fine physical and spiritual .
On an exceptional basis, Member States may request UNESCO to provide thé candidates with access to thé platform so they can complète thé form by themselves. Thèse requests must be addressed to esd rize unesco. or by 15 A ril 2021 UNESCO will provide thé nomineewith accessto thé platform via their émail address.
̶The leading indicator of employee engagement is based on the quality of the relationship between employee and supervisor Empower your managers! ̶Help them understand the impact on the organization ̶Share important changes, plan options, tasks, and deadlines ̶Provide key messages and talking points ̶Prepare them to answer employee questions
Dr. Sunita Bharatwal** Dr. Pawan Garga*** Abstract Customer satisfaction is derived from thè functionalities and values, a product or Service can provide. The current study aims to segregate thè dimensions of ordine Service quality and gather insights on its impact on web shopping. The trends of purchases have
Chính Văn.- Còn đức Thế tôn thì tuệ giác cực kỳ trong sạch 8: hiện hành bất nhị 9, đạt đến vô tướng 10, đứng vào chỗ đứng của các đức Thế tôn 11, thể hiện tính bình đẳng của các Ngài, đến chỗ không còn chướng ngại 12, giáo pháp không thể khuynh đảo, tâm thức không bị cản trở, cái được
Le genou de Lucy. Odile Jacob. 1999. Coppens Y. Pré-textes. L’homme préhistorique en morceaux. Eds Odile Jacob. 2011. Costentin J., Delaveau P. Café, thé, chocolat, les bons effets sur le cerveau et pour le corps. Editions Odile Jacob. 2010. Crawford M., Marsh D. The driving force : food in human evolution and the future.
Le genou de Lucy. Odile Jacob. 1999. Coppens Y. Pré-textes. L’homme préhistorique en morceaux. Eds Odile Jacob. 2011. Costentin J., Delaveau P. Café, thé, chocolat, les bons effets sur le cerveau et pour le corps. Editions Odile Jacob. 2010. 3 Crawford M., Marsh D. The driving force : food in human evolution and the future.