Fundamental Concepts of Architecture : The Vocabulary of Spatial Situations

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as poché may in turn contain interior spaces which remain in

the background in relation to the main rooms as subsidiary

chambers, ancillary rooms, cabinets etc. On the scale of the

town as a whole, entire buildings or even blocks of buildings

can be conceived as inhabited poché.

Literature: Hoesli 1997; Rowe/Koetter 1978

> axis

At times, the space-delimiting, structural masses of the build-

ing are so perforated and filled with hollow spaces that the

whole makes a yielding, porous impression. In general, a ma-

terial is referred to as porous when its mass is continuously

perforated by a multiplicity of small air chambers. By analogy,

porosity can be identified as an architectural trait on vari-

ous scales, i.e. when a building or its individual parts are not

solid, smooth or impenetrable in appearance, but densely in-

terspersed with numerous small hollow spaces or by grooves

or fissures.

Such porosity presents no decisive resistance to the ten-

dency of our personal sphere to expand or to force its way

outward, but instead responds with openness and perme-

ability. It does not restrict our spatial field of play with hard

boundaries, but gives us the feeling of following the infiltrat-

ing gaze, of penetrating physically into various forms and

> depths.

In essence, > space-containing walls offer this kind of lee-

way for expansion by cushioning spatial limitations by means

of > resonating and > intermediate spaces. On the scale of

the town as well, a development with small-scale segmenta-

tion and a high level of permeability can be characterized as

porous. As a rule, however, porosity pertains to the smaller

scale. Although the chambers created by the niches, alcoves

and cabinets are relatively large ‘pores’, in dense arrange-

Pole

Porosity