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of form. In order to gather, whether at meal times, at confer-
ences, a celebration, or a game, we tend to prefer centring
spatial orders; for public presentations, whether film screen-
ing, concert, lecture or sermon, a directional spatial structure
is the rule; a dispersed spatial order is generally found more
suitable for facilitating movement between exhibited objects,
in a department store, a museum, a trade fair, or a flower
garden. Where a comprehensive programme of use, with its
characteristic sequences of movements, permeates an en-
tire building, and is also endowed with gestural expression
through the overall design, it is capable of putting its stamp
on the architecture as a whole. Dagobert Frey (1925/1946)
has said that as the ‘content’ of an architectural ensemble,
the ‘utilitarian aspect’ of use is capable of ‘becoming aestheti-
cally valuable’. The visual appearance of a railway station, a
library or a kitchen is not its primary architectural feature.
Inherent in their processes of use instead is aesthetic value, i.e.
to the extent that we experience them through shaped styles
of movement, accented forms of illumination, orienting view
axes, and appropriate ambience.
In architecture, then, every form of use can be regarded
at least generally as a form of > dwelling, which is then dif-
ferentiated in various directions. A monofunctional design, on
the other hand, must take into account that every putative
functional form continually evokes alternative functions or
provides a stimulus to creative misuse. Form and use engender
one another reciprocally. Buildings that have lost their origi-
nal functions are often suitable for new and unanticipated
utilizations, and are more likely to incite or inspire conver-
sions the less they were originally defined too explicitly by
fixed and legible forms of uses.
The neutral multiuse space, in any event, does not corre-
spond to the complexity of use in architecture. Architectural
> capacity is revealed far more in the interplay between the
two factors of room for manoeuvre and Prägnanz. On the one
hand, spaces having functional capacity offer a selection of