47ple claim as their personal spheres (bubbles), we could then
speak of a foam composed of such individual bubbles. Archi-
tectural complexes with dense agglomerations have a kind of
large-scale > porosity.
The potential of the cell for intensive spatial experience
lies in an almost archaic self-limitation to a place where one
is surrounded only by the essential, thereby excluding every-
thing superfluous and avoiding all distraction (> simplicity).
Enclosed by an envelope that is so to speak tailor-made to
one’s own body, it is possible to surrender to concentration of
the kind required for contemplative, creative, or other intense
activities. Examples are St Jerome’s study and Le Corbusier’s
Cabanon. The cell is also well-adapted to focusing on specific
functions that are generally reserved for the individual, and
exclude everyone else. Envisioned for such purposes along-
side the studiolo for intellectual labour is the sleeping cubicle,
or bathroom or shower module. Bizarre exaggerations, mean-
while, were developed by radical architects during the 1960s,
including space capsules, portable objects residing somewhere
between apparatus and organ, where bodily functions such as
heartbeat and respiration were to have been displaced to the
envelope and connections with the exterior world maintained
via supply tubes or telecommunication devices.
A special instance is found in those cells that isolate even
as they are propelled through space. They are the interiors of
cars, mobile homes, cable cars and lifts, which make it pos-
sible to adopt a position of rest while engaging in motion,
to experience the contrast between change of location and
stationary location within the cell. In this way, a fundamen-
tal problem of staying in the cell becomes clear: curtailment
of the necessary freedom of movement and the constraint ef-
fected by space limitations. If compensation is not offered by
the forward movement of the cell itself, then a balance can
only be maintained by changes between various surround-
ings, which summon one another reciprocally: at some point,
the narrowness of the cell evokes the desire for a wider space