222
home, so to speak, enters us.’ (2005, 93) Alongside the home
or apartment, this I-space can extend to arbitrary portions
of a building, or even its surroundings; I expand myself, for
example, into the attic, or experience a new house erected by
a neighbour as pressing in on me. The boundary between the
‘I-space’ and the ‘around-space’, then, is highly variable.
In a broader sense, one’s personal living space encom-
passes those spaces which are of special significance in rela-
tion to personal life, for example one’s workplace, the route
leading towards it, and frequented locales in contracts to
rarely visited areas of the city: ‘A personal city emerges as a
totality within which centres with which the individual has
strong connections, spaces that are filled with personal expe-
rience, are distinguished from relatively indifferent ones.’
(Dürckheim 2005, 97)
The social dimension of personal space has been char-
acterized by cultural anthropology as a ‘personal reaction
bubble’. Proxemics investigates that which the individual per-
ceives as his or her personal space in relation to others during
social contact, and when its infringement is experienced as
disturbing (Hall 1966). Its extension shifts according to one’s
interlocutor and the occasion, and is culturally determined.
We distinguish between four different staggered spatial zones,
which are configured concentrically around the individual,
with increasingly greater extension; our intimate, personal,
social and public spaces. These observations illuminate the
rules according to which people establish themselves and co-
exist with others in space, and explain why the density and
spatial distribution of workplaces or restaurant tables, for ex-
ample, are experienced as appropriate or invasive.
For each of the diverse types and dimensions of personal
space, the design of architectural space may correspond to it
more or less via > expansiveness and constriction, > direction-
ality and > gesture.
Literature: Dürckheim 2005; Gosztonyi 1976; Hall 1966