229practically through its attachment to a distinctive texture of
characteristic historical, landscape and architectural features,
one that is also reflected in the spaces of a locality. Marc
Augé (2009) distinguishes such ‘places’, characterized by this
type of identity, from the interchangeable ‘spaces’ of the con-
sumer world, examples being airport terminals and supermar-
kets, which he therefore refers to as ‘non-places’. According to
Michel de Certeau (2011), however, ‘spaces’ can be grasped as
forms of concrete handling of individual ‘places’.
The unmistakable character of a place is noticeable im-
mediately on an intuitive basis as its ‘spirit’. Its genius loci – a
term which originally referred to a Roman tutelary spirit of
a specific place or house – can also mean its particular lo-
cal identifying features, the formation of the landscape, its
shaping by the topography, bodies of water, vegetation, local
customary building forms and materials, and a specific rela-
tionship between development and infrastructure, along with
typical local climate and regional weather conditions and a
characteristic type of natural light. Even odours and sounds
mark out a place, enabling it to be identified. Places, moreover,
embody cultural memory. A place that has been occupied over
an extended period of > time is an accumulation of history, of
stories, of local myths and cultures, of historical and cultural
events, but also of everyday life. The sum of experiences of
the place, finally, are bundled together into its > atmosphere,
which is often palpable in the customs, forms of life, and men-
tality of the inhabitants. The term genius loci gives expression
to the constitution and character of the place, which can be
analysed into individual effective components only at the cost
of losing its identity as a whole.
Architecture is capable of condensing and bringing to
expression the natural and artificial characteristics of a place,
allowing them to become experienced in sensory terms. In
buildings, it ‘gathers together’ the idiosyncrasies of a place,
as Martin Heidegger said, his illustration being a celebrated
description of a bridge: ‘It brings stream and bank and land