Space: The undefinable space of architecture

Erdem ngr
1.Introduction
Its a possible assumption that today at the most of the architectural
schools the concept of space is built as an anachronistic and quasihomogeneous 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. Its also thoughtprovoking 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 19701990). 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
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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.
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 Kants 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),
Hegels 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 Bttichers 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 Btticher'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
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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 Sempers 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.
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 Sempers 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 Schpfung
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
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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 Spaetrmische 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 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, Frankls 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 Frankls 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
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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 Giedions
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 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
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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 Framptons Critical Regionalism
(1983) and Schultzs 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 Nalbantolu
(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 threedimensional 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) Heideggers 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 ones being in the world. In
short, there is no space independently of ones being in it. Forty states
that Heideggers notion of space contradicts almost all the notions about
space developed by the architects between 1890 and 1930. The effects
of Heideggers ideas were not noticeable until the early 1960s in
architecture and the interpretations of his ideas offered in Christian
Norberg-Schulzs books and Gaston Bachelards 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 way. According to Dovey (1999), in
Bachelards 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,
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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 Aug moves in a different way and portrays the increasingly
fleeting and fragmented nature of supermodernity as a disappearance
of place (Dovey, 1999). Augs 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
(Aug, 1995). The hypothesis here is that supermodernity produces nonplaces. 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
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Rem Koolhaas, who introduces the concept of junkspace, for the

architectural expression of non-places.
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 (dekan 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
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sophisticated space, which is perceived (through social relations of daily

life), conceived (with thought) and lived (through bodily experience), into
an abstraction. Lefebvres 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. Lefebvres abstract space bears close
resemblance to Marxs 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,
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 dont 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).
Lefebvres 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 dont
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 Lefebvres
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 Lefebvres 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
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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 Lefebvres 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 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 Bourdieus concept of the
habitus as an embodied world. Hight, Hensel and Menges (2009), on the
other hand, claim that Lefebvres 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.
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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 reexamined 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 ngr under Assoc.Prof.Dr. Nurbin Pakers
supervision in 2011.
Figure 1 Enter of the concept of space into architecture according to
Forty

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