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roving and straying can also extend in elevation heights as
well.
In the second instance, roaming is a kind of pleasurable
strolling. On an undivided and unmarked surface, movement
is neither guided along tracks nor blocked by obstacles. With-
out goal or prescribed direction, one follows only one’s own
impulses. The structural preconditions for this mode of move-
ment are provided by empty open spaces and unobstructed
planes, the expansiveness of large plazas or landscapes, large
> halls or rooms, or > flowing spaces without obstructions
and with readily changing foci. Spaces for roaming as > fields
of indeterminate possibilities include hypostyle halls with
loosely distributed columns whose non-hierarchical homoge-
neity avoid indicating any particular direction for movement.
Roaming movement follows the roaming gaze; horizontal-
ity is dominant in such situations, stimulating us to range
widely throughout the space. A special role is played by the
> floor, upon which our steps follow only the lines of an in-
dividual choreography, as on a playing field or dance hall,
where one’s own movements are enacted in an unconstrained
state of mental animation. Erwin Straus (1960) has referred
to the type of space for which the aimless movement of the
dance is characteristic as ‘presentist’, meaning that it is wholly
detached from the framework of historic action and from
time, is devoted entirely to the moment. It is not movement
through space, but instead within space, and encompasses ro-
tation and backward movements that would normally seem
absurd. As the ‘lived expression of the movement of life’
(Hasse 2005), it is self-sufficient.
Literature: Debord 1958; Straus 1960Pars pro toto, the roof stands for the > dwelling. To have ‘a
roof over one’s head’ is the minimum condition for establish-
ing an abode. The character of this particular form achieves its
purest expression in the separate roof, which takes the formRoof