Hernán Marchant Universidad de Chile Cecilia Mouat Universidad Finis Terrae, Chile 121
Current architecture, more and more abstract and devoid of the experiences that
are fundamental and central to the human dwelling space, urgently needs the rescue
of these values.
The Unspeakable Space
The space - time concept was considered to be an element of work, consciously or
not, by many great architects of the first half of the last century. However, in Western
culture it has not been given the importance and the place that this idea occupies
in the spatial conception of Japanese architecture. Proof of this is that it exists in
the common Japanese language, which is untranslatable into any western language,
the word “MA” that relates the indissolubility of space and time. To give a definition
that comes closer to a concept of this complexity, and of which, in some Japanese
dictionaries you can find up to eight definitions of the term, we will refer to the one
that Augustin Berque delivers, from the dictionary of ancient language Iwanami Kogo
jiten. The definition is the following one: "...fundamentally, the ma is the interval
that exists necessarily (tôzen) between two things that follow each other (renzoku);
giving the idea of a pause. These two ideas of need and succession, that is to say,
of union and of movement, introduce, beyond a doubt, the notion of sense. The ma
is, as a matter of fact, an intermediate space loaded with sense”^7.
Le Corbusier writes the article “L'espace indicible”, published in April, 1946 in
L'Architecture d'Aujourdhui. “Without the slightest pretension, I make a statement
regarding the "exaggeration" of space with which artists of my generation have
tackled around 1910 in such creative prodigious impulses of cubism. They have
spoken, with more or less intuition and clairvoyance, little matters, of the fourth
dimension.”^8
The interesting thing about the conception that Le Corbusier gives to the “ fourth
dimension “, can be related to the ambiguity and suggestion contained in the defi-
nitions of the word ma. He says: "Then a depth without limits is opened, it erases
the walls, banishes the contingent presences, works the miracle of the unspeakable
space. I ignore the miracle of faith, but I often live through that of the unspeakable
space, the crowning of plastic emotion.”^9
The influence of the cinema on architecture
Just as during the 19th century novelists like Dickens, Flaubert, Víctor Hugo or Balzac,
were in charge of portraying through their stories the overpopulated cities of that
time; the cinema was responsible for showing and providing images of the cities of
the 20th century. Then, widespread television took charge of showing spectators those
places that otherwise they would never have had the opportunity to know. Referents
broadened and allowed a transformation of the way of seeing and of understanding
reality. Most of the connections that have been established between cinema and
architecture refer to the forms of architecture that appear in the cinema, and the
recurrent analysis is focused only on these formal aspects. However, the similarities