349of purely practical purposefulness or specialized technical
requirements. Instead, architectural function also involves
mental and emotional dimensions.
Apart from highly specialized functions, purpose in a
broader sense rests mainly on generalized, repeatable pat-
terns of action. Angelika Jäkel (2013) refers to the themati-
cally closed units that emerge through them, including being
seated, getting up, and entering, as ‘figures of action’, and
orders them by spatial shapes in relation to specific gestures.
A specific form of entryway, for example, corresponds to a
certain mode of entrance, a staircase design or seating ar-
rangement to a specific mode of ascending or sitting down.
The components of such figures of action, in turn, are sepa-
rate stages of movement and grasping actions, for example
that of opening a door or window, or of emptying or filling
a cabinet. Architectural forms and details respond to these
elements of movement through manifest design features and
through operability and ease of use. A functional design
invites use, rendering it pleasant and efficient. This is however
not always true for ‘functionalist’ design, which may even
hinder use, and may indeed express a specific interest in form
through an outwardly functional appearance.
That most figures of action are distinguished principally
through characteristic > figures or structures of movement is
also true – as Paul Zucker has pointed out – for more com-
plex forms of architectural use: the objective of architectural
design is not the space of the church, but the ceremony; not
the salesroom, but the marketing of commodities, the stream
of purchasers. ‘It is always a question of a temporal process,
of the succession of individual spatial components. To regu-
late the conjunction between these components, the spatial
fixation of their temporal rhythm, is the real task of the archi-
tect, the object of his powers of design.’ (1925, 87)
More comprehensive spatial uses also consist of a few
continuously recurrent and universal patterns of action that
correspond to features of spatial design and characteristics