Fundamental Concepts of Architecture : The Vocabulary of Spatial Situations

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Throughout much of history, the principal task of architec-

ture was to erect and design body-like objects; only much

later would shaping of spaces assume priority. Even Heinrich

Wölfflin (1886/1999) continued to characterize architecture

as an ‘art of bodily masses’. In architecture, bodies are the

complements of space. This is only indirectly perceptible,

while it is bodies – with their various forms, openings and

arrangements, in the form of walls, wall slabs, supports and

architectural volumes, all the way to the urban block and the

‘corpus of the city’ – that we see and feel with immediacy,

that guide our movements. Architectural planes are also the

> surfaces of – often quite thin – bodies.

The complementary relation between bodies and space is

among the constitutive interdependencies in/of architecture.

Albert Erich Brinckmann could characterize architecture as a

‘spatio-plastic art’ because spatial and plastic forms condition

one another reciprocally, and spatial experience results from

the experience of bodies. As Hans van der Laan has shown,

a space can only appear as a form ‘by borrowing its surface

from a solid body’. The wall of an interior is the surface of a

body, which becomes visible when the wall is perforated, so

that its thickness becomes perceptible. A space that is delim-

ited only by planes seems comparatively un-sculptural and

abstract; it is not perceived as an interior, as a counterpart to a

body, which is why caves lack essential architectural features

(Van der Laan 1983).

Body and space stand in a figure/ground relationship –

both within the building and in the > context of the urban

totality. A body is surrounded and bounded by empty space.

Conversely, a space – such as a room or public square – is

contoured, framed and formed by architectural masses. Its

surface is the exterior of an architectural mass, and at the

same time, the interior of a space. Often, the body-like mass

itself contains space. As a hollow container, it makes an im-

pression of solidity only from the outside, while as a > poché,

it is primarily a balancing mass, and is often interspersed by

Body, architectural