Place (Architecture)

In this chapter, I draw on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy to explore environmental embodiment—the various lived ways, sensorily and motility-wise, that the body in its pre-reflective perceptual presence engages and synchronizes with the world at hand, especially its architectural and environmental aspects. First, I consider Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of perception, giving particular attention to his claim that perception involves a lived dynamic between perceptual body and world such that aspects of the world—for example, the heavy hardness of a granite block or the cool smoothness of a chrome railing—are known because they immediately evoke in the lived body their experienced qualities.

Second, I consider the architectural and environmental significance of what Merleau-Ponty calls body-subject—pre-reflective corporeal awareness expressed through action and typically in sync with and enmeshed in the physical world in which the action unfolds. I focus on the taken-for-granted sensibility of body-subject to manifest in extended ways over time and space. I ask how routine actions and behaviors of individuals coming together regularly in an environment can transform that environment into a place with a unique dynamic and character—a lived situation I term place ballet. For both perception and body-subject, I consider how qualities of the physical and designable world—for example, materiality, form, and spatiality—contribute to the lived body’s engagement with and actions in the world.

Note: This chapter was written in 2014 for a proposed edited collection on Merleau-Ponty and architecture. Unfortunately, the editors did not find a publisher(though I was never officially informed of this fact). The chapter has been rewritten, revised, and updated; see the above entry: "Merleau-Ponty, Environmental Embodiment, and Place" (2022)
"

This article examines the conception of the everyday city as presented in the work of architect Christopher Alexander and architectural theorist Bill Hillier: Both thinkers suggest that, in the past, lively urban places arose unself-consciousty through the routine daily behaviors of many individual users coming together in supportive space and place. In different ways. both thinkers ask whether, today, a similar manner of vital urban district can be made to happen self-conscioustv through explicit understanding transformed into design and policy principles. The aim for both Alexander and Hillier is place-based urban communities marked by lively streets, serendipitous public encounters, and informal sociability. The article begins by examining commonalities and differences in Alexander and Hillier's conceptions of environmental wholeness and urban place. Next. the article considers implications for urban design and, last, indicates the considerable value that the two thinkers' ideas offer environmental philosophy, particularly for understanding environmental wholes.

استدلال این است که تجربه مکان در استخراج ارزش و درستی محیط در معماری مهم است. مکانی که کاربران در آن قرار می‌گیرند، به آن‌ها تجربه‌ای از آن مکان می‌دهد که توسط ویژگی‌های کالبدی محیط و تجارب فرد شکل می‌گیرد. لذا می‌توان اظهار کرد دو عامل مهم در تجربه مکان موثر است: ویژگی‌های کالبدی محیط و ادراکات فرد تجربه کننده. در این تحقیق رویکردها بیشتر بر پا‌یه‌ی تجربه است و تلاش شده است تا روابط بین ویژگی‌های فضایی در یک نرم افزار ارزیابی و تجربه‌ی فضایی کاربران مطالعه شود. به منظور مطالعه سیستماتیک، شرح کلی فضا و خواص رفتاری مربوط به فضا و روابط متقابل آن‌ها مورد نیاز بوده است. در این پژوهش که بر روی پارک شفق محله یوسف‏آباد انجام‌گرفته،  از روش تحقیق مبتنی بر مورد پژوهی بر اساس داده‌های بدست آمده از نرم افزار آیزوویست (isovist) و همچنین مطالعات میدانی در قالب پرسشنامه استفاده شده است. برای تحلیل نتایج نیز یافته های حاصل از برنامه آیزوویست با داده های بدست آمده از پرسشنامه مبنی بر تجربه مکانی افرادی که برای اولین بار در این فضا قرار می‌گیرند، مورد مقایسه قرار گرفت. به نطر می رسد تجربه مکان و عامل هدایت‌کننده و رفتار کاربران با اندازه‌های به دست آمده از تجزیه و تحلیل آیزوویست ارتباط چشمگیری دارند. نتایج به طور کلی نشان می‌دهد که داده‌های حاصل از نرم افزار  آیزوویست می تواند مرجع امیدوارکننده‌ای برای پیش‌بینی تجربه مکان در معماری باشد.

Until 1993 there were conducted first excavations in what promised to be the site of one of the most important buildings of Petra, the stunning capital of the Nabataean kingdom. Its construction, whose initiation century BC, several changes, reconstructions and landslides along its more than five hundred years of operation. But despite this still unknown for certain functions for which it was designed and that, regardless of the construction elements, materials have been located just still less inscriptions that shed some light on a mystery that will try here exhibit various theories that enable closer to resolution.

By studying metaphor, this monograph reveals the conflict between what (1.0)George Dodds refers to as the "good" and "bad" mimesis (copy)  or the difference between imitation and origination.  The former results in 1eclecticism while the latter in vernacularism.  Should, could, or need one or the other be more or less required is left for a reader's evaluation and his or her's circumstances.  But this kind of tautology exists at the basis of the "becoming" of Arabia's metaphor.  The metaphor is an agent for change and its' understanding and perspective-view of these complementarities can be enlightening.  The metaphor in this context is the commonality between eclecticism and vernacularism.  This monograph describes the current contradictions and complexities of this phenomena. There are both paraphrases and quotations from scholars and authors such as Edmund Husserl, Jarava Lal Mehta, Martin Heidegger, S. Gulzar Haider, Paul Weiss, Ismail Serageldin, Samir El Sadek, Keith Critchlow, Mohammed Arkoun, Christian Norberg Schulz, Jamel Akbar, Muhammad Arkoun, A.H. Hourani, S.M. Stern, Ira M. Lapidus, George Dodds, Hjelmalev and Dorfman.  All contribute to explicate the basis of the metaphor of Arabia.’

This article describes three cases of placemaking workshops conducted by the author in three different countries: Ukraine, Tunisia, and Poland, and against different cultural and political backgrounds. In each case, the application of placemaking methods encouraged public participation, showed the potential to facilitate the decision-making process, and helped resolve potential or existing conflicts while building confidence in democratic procedures and institutions. This research highlights the importance of the PPS method which helped to build a team of stakeholders sharing similar views, ones convinced that a positive change is possible and are ready to cooperate. Such attitudes are especially valuable in places where local democracy and participatory urban management is undeveloped.

Using the relational concepts of scale, substance and style, we develop a sociological perspective on the built environment that takes into account but extends beyond specific political conditions. We investigate three examples of grand civic architecture that have successively occupied a central site in Berlin. The Palast der Republik built by the authorities of the German Democratic Republic replaced the Prussian City Palace only to be demolished three decades later, giving way to a replica of the imperial palace that is currently under construction. We show how this drama of destruction, construction and reconstruction spanning different temporal and political contexts substantiates a cultural sociological framework with wider applicability. Investigating the importance of the site, we show how these recurrences indicate that a will to grand architectural representation and ritual destruction is not reducible to any one specific political ideology. This, in turn, indicates that a deeper imperative of symbolic politics is at work. The life and death of great Berlin palaces show how materiality and meaning are interwoven to entrench political legitimacy.

This paper considers the nature of the speculative architectural project, its distinction from building,  its relationship to a particular aspect of mimetic inquiry, and the implications of  the rise of technique -- in particular, its influence on the mimetic capacity of a speculative architectural project. Architectural speculation is considered through the relationship of "making" and "place," evidenced in the admittedly unlikely conjunction of Gothic Scholasticism, surrealist theater, and the Cinquecento conceptual model of disegno. This paper explicates their interrelationship through reconstructing a program that invites participation in the collective mimesis of a speculative architectural project.

Using a weekly outdoor marketplace in Varberg, Sweden, as a real-world example, this article explores the phenomenological notion of place ballet--the interaction of individuals' habitual actions and routines in space, which becomes place. Varberg is a coastal town of about 20,000 located about fifty miles south of Gothenburg.  Varberg's outdoor maket has stood in the same place in the center of town for some 400 years and operates throughout the year on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Drawing on photographic, interview, and participant-observational materials, the authors identify two underlying patterns in Varberg's place ballet--regularity and unexpectedness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJfpa9vv9pg

This presentation considers how the phenomenological work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) contributes to an understanding of architecture and place experience via his emphasis on the lived body. The focus is on architect Thomas Thiis-Evensen's " architectural archetypes " and architectural theorist Bill Hillier's " space syntax. " The presentation highlights three claims: First, that Thiis-Evensen provides a language for locating unself-conscious, visceral aspects of buildings & architectural meaning (Merleau-Ponty's perception and phenomenal field); second, that Hilllier illustrates how the spatiality of place—i.e., pathway configuration— supports or inhibits particular actions & routines of lived bodies as they come together or remain apart spatially (Merleau-Ponty's body-subject and intercorporeality); and, third, that both Thiis-Evensen & Hillier illustrate ways via architecture and place whereby pre-reflective bodily awareness and actions play an important role in the lifeworld (Merleau-Ponty's emphasis on the lived body as intentional but pre-reflective agent).

Why do we feel engaged with
some places and not with
others? How can architecture
foster an engagement between
people and public places?
Spurred by questions like these, this book
focuses on contemporary Indian cultural
institutions, or artplaces, as a special kind of
public place. Offering a critique of contemporary
architectural and institutional approaches
to ‘place-making’, this volume proposes an
alternative approach to thinking about
architecture centered on our experience of
inhabiting spaces. Such a habitational
approach is crucial if architecture (and, by
extension, urban design) is to help nurture a
larger engagement between people and their
social environment.

An illustrated, essential guide to engaging children and youth in the process of urban design From a history of children’s rights to case studies discussing international initiatives that aim to create child-friendly cities, Placemaking with Children and Youth offers comprehensive guidance in how to engage children and youth in the planning and design of local environments. It explains the importance of children’s active participation in their societies and presents ways to bring all generations together to plan cities with a high quality of life for people of all ages. Not only does it delineate best practices in establishing programs and partnerships, it also provides principles for working ethically with children, youth, and families, paying particular attention to the inclusion of marginalized populations. Drawing on case studies from around the world—in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, Puerto Rico, the Netherlands, South Africa, and the United States—Placemaking with Chil...

This paper will offer a deeper understanding of coalitions and micropublics in creative placemaking by offering an alternative arts-based placemaking practice (as defined by the National Endowment for the Arts, Markusen and Gadwa 2010) of social practice placemaking (SPPM). This paper is concerned with the co-option of arts into placemaking as a practice of limited public engagement and agency and offers SPPM as a practice that challenges the binary and linear notion of authorship and audience (Kwon 2004, Whybrow 2011) found in creative placemaking.

SPPM creates a situated micropublic constituency of an ‘urban creative’ (Klanten and Hübner 2010) assemblage of artists, community members and urban professionals working in equanimity that engenders deeper feelings of place attachment in the collaborative group, which in turn affects notions of civic participation and individual and community identification.
It will present research findings of global SPPM fieldwork case studies with specific focus on Big Car, Indianapolis. Findings from this case study address issues who may form a placemaking coalition; how these coalitions may operate; ethical concerns of creative and social practice placemaking; these practices as a means of cultural expression; and their relative impact on minority socio-cultural groups.

A growing recognition of the vital role that built space plays in social reproduction has created a need for analytical methods and interpretive frameworks with which to investigate this relationship in archaeological datasets.  I address this by developing an integrative approach that emphasizes the role of the built environment as the context for interactions through which social structures are created, transformed and reproduced.  This approach uses access analysis to examine how buildings structure patterns of movement and encounter that allow social actors to engage in or avoid particular forms of interaction.  With its focus on the topological properties of built space, however, access analysis does not take adequate account of a building’s symbolic aspects, especially architectural characteristics and furnishings that social actors mobilize in the creation of meaningful contexts for interaction.  I therefore integrate access analysis with an examination of how built environments encode meanings and nonverbally communicate them to inhabitants and visitors, potentially influencing their actions and interactions.  The integrative approach allows determination of probable contexts for various types of social interactions during which social identities could be displayed, negotiated and reified.  I conclude by demonstrating the potential of this approach with an analysis of the monumental Ashlar Building from the Late Bronze Age (c. 1650-1100 BC) site of Enkomi, Cyprus.

By c. 3000 BCE, in the late Neolithic, there had been a significant change in the way people materialized their cosmology across Scotland with the introduction of free-standing stones that continued to be erected almost until the end of the Bronze Age (Burl, 1993, 2000). Significantly, a series of astronomical patternings have been empirically verified for many Bronze Age monuments that were erected in the latter Bronze Age (Higginbottom et al., 2000, 2001, 2015). Further, two series of complex landscape patternings associated with the monuments and their orientations have been identified (Higginbottom et al., 2015; Higginbottom and Clay, in press). However, when and where these patterns were first associated with standing-stone structures was unknown. Through innovative statistics and software we show that visible astronomical-landscape variables found at BronzeAge sites on the
inner isles and mainland of western Scotland were actually first established in stone nearly two millennia earlier, likely with the erection of two of the earliest dated British 'great circles': Callanish on the Isle of Lewis and Stenness on the Isle of Orkney. In particular,we introduce our new statistical test that enables the quantitative determination of astronomical connections of stone circles. It is seen that whilst different standing-stone monuments were created over time (Burl, 1993, 2000; Higginbottom et al., 2015) with a mixture of landscape variables (Higginbottom et al., 2015), we nevertheless see that highly relevant landscape markers and other aspects remained unchanged through these years. This suggests that there is some continuity of this cosmological system through time, despite the various radical material and social changes that occurred from the late Neolithic to the Late Bronze Age (Lynch, 2000; Mullin, 2001; Owoc, 2001).
https://www.altmetric.com/details/10434023#score
Co-author: Roger Clay

© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

For copy of early draft paper see pre-print server:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.1338v2.pdf
LINK to pre-print article under file drop down menu in full document view (click on heading of this article if still on my main academia.edu page).

This early draft has half the explanatory text of the methodology of our JAS Reports paper. It is a condensed piece in a form similar to a Nature paper with supplementary text containing some explanations; please feel free to contact for more information.

This article is now online at the website of the journal THE SIDE VIEW:

https://thesideview.co/journal/finding-the-center/

In this article, I highlight American architect Christopher Alexander’s concept of “center,” which offers one way to identify the crux of his work, whether thinking or designing. Most broadly, a center is any spatial concentration or organized focus of more intense pattern or activity—for example, an intricate carpet pattern, an elegant entryway, a handsome arcade, a gracious building, or an animated plaza full of users finding pleasure in the place. Whatever its specific nature and scale, a center is a region of concentrated physical and experiential order that provides for an intense spatial and lived relatedness among things, people, situations, and events. A center is “an organized zone of space … which, because of its internal coherence, and because of its relation to context … forms a local zone of relative centeredness with respect to the other parts of space." A pivotal question for Alexander is how an understanding of centers might help architects to conceive of and actualize vigorous places and environments that sustain thriving human life.

Una de las principales finalidades de la arquitectura radica en la búsqueda de un LUGAR donde el ser humano
pueda habitar.
Lugar como centro y trasfondo donde discurre la vida, donde ser. Así, surge el cuestionamiento acerca de la
significación y la importancia de la noción de lugar y su relación con la arquitectura, que se presenta a través
de un diálogo entre diversos autores de diferentes disciplinas como la filosofía, la antropología, la literatura y la
arquitectura.
Lugares que se podrían definir como envolvencias donde confluye lo que envuelve y lo envuelto, donde el ser
humano es el centro, abiertos a recibir, cuyos límites permanecen en equilibrio en una relación profunda con
su genius loci, caracterizados por una singular identidad que los hacen únicos e inexplicablemente maravillosos.
Lugar y arquitectura que se anudan en distintos conceptos, siendo capaces de cobijar la coexistencia del
tiempo asentado en espacio, adquiriendo una permanencia que consigue otorgar reposo a lo pasajero, donde el
ser humano tiene la posibilidad de habitar el presente dotándolo de una identidad que lo convierten en único y
especial, rozando la totalidad, cuya resonancia traspasa los límites físicos impregnado el cuerpo y el alma, la
percepción y la memoria.

Each person has a different perception of the reality surrounding them. The same group of objects, the same spaces are judged according to different reference systems, they are connected differently, they have different meanings. Each person re-creates their own world, by collating different bits of objective reality into a personal space - or a place. Thus, before discussing the qualities of private versus public space, there is a fundamental aspect worth discussing, and this is the concept of space itself. Space - which is considered to be a homogenous and unorganised entity, as it will be shown - has the ability to become a place - a meaningful, organised and well defined entity. Therefore, a large variety of theories has been issued, in order to explain this shift in quality, which defines the process of turning a space into a place.
Following the same chain of thoughts, this paper proposes an analysis which will try to match three different interpretations of the abovementioned process - Yi-Fu Tuan’s interpretation of space as movement and place as repose, Edward Soja’s Thirdspace theory, and Doreen Massey’s understanding of space as a process - to a matching number of spatial - artistic or architectural - experiments. The aim of this exercise is to discuss how these three particular theories can be applied or translated into actual projects and how can the projects themselves alter or recalibrate the perception of the space-place relationship itself - be it a public or private one. After all, each theory should find its echo in a practical endeavour.

NOTE: The ideas and examples in this article are now much more fully developed in David Seamon, LIFE TAKES PLACE: PHENOMENOLOGY, LIFEWORLDS, AND PLACEMAKING (London: Routledge, 2018). The most important shift is the author's realizing that genius loci is part of a broader phenomenon that he identifies as "common presence"--"the material and lived 'togetherness' of a place impelled by both its physical and experiential qualities" (Seamon 2018, p. 87). I would ask readers of thIs article to complement their understanding by studying LIFE TAKES PLACE.

ABSTRACT OF ORIGINAL ARTICLE: As recent phenomenological studies have demonstrated (Casey 1997, 2009; Malpas 1999, 2006; Mugerauer 2008; Stefanovic 2000), the phenomenon of place is a multivalent structure sophisticated and complex in its existential constitution. In this chapter, I offer one phenomenological vantage point from which to examine this lived complexity. I contend that, as an integral structure of human life, place can be understood in terms of three dimensions: first, the geographical ensemble—i.e., the material environment, including both its natural and human-made dimensions; second, people-in-place, including individual and group actions, intentions, and meanings; and, third, spirit of place, or genius loci.

Drawing on the conceptual approach of “systematics” developed by the British philosopher J. G. Bennett, I argue that these three dimensions can engage in six different ways, each of which relates to one particular lived mode whereby place contributes to human life. These six modes are: (1) place interaction; (2) place identity; (3) place creation; (4) place intensification; (5) place realization; and (6) place release.

I argue that place identity is important for understanding the nature of place but is complemented by other modes of relationship that together help clarify the complexity and richness of place and place experience.

This document is the syllabus for a graduate seminar I am offering this fall in the Department of Architecture at Kansas State University. The tripartite "Deep Beauty" construct, which is defined in the paper, outlines a new paradigm for sustainable design that recognizes that only those buildings and landscapes which are truly beautiful and connect us functionally and meaningfully to the living world  are truly sustainable. The textbooks and readings listed in the syllabus constitute an essential bibliography for an approach to design that must become universally applied if we are to survive and transcend the crisis of sustainability. It is both a call to action and a roadmap for change.

In this chapter, I consider place, place experience, and place attachment as they might be understood phenomenologically from three perspectives: first, holistically; second, dialectically; and, third, generatively. I argue that each of these three perspectives points to a spectrum of complementary experiences, situations, actions, and meanings that remain faithful to the lived comprehensiveness of place and place experience. I suggest that each of these three perspectives offers a range of useful ways for thinking about and understanding place attachment.

REFERENCE:: David Seamon, Merleau-Ponty, Lived Body and Place: Toward a Phenomenology of Human Situatedness, a chapter in T. Hünefeldt and A. Schlitte (eds.), Situatedness and Place (pp. 41-66). Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2018.

ABSTRACT: In this chapter, I draw on French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty's understanding of perception and corporeal sensibility to consider the significance of human situatedness as expressed via place and place experience. To illustrate how Merleau-Ponty's conceptual understanding might be applied to real-world place experiences, I draw on two sources of experiential evidence, the first of which is a passage from Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez's magical-realist novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967/1970). The second source is a set of first-person observations describing events and situations that I happened to take note of during weekday walks between my home and university office over the course of several months. My aim is to use these two narrative accounts as a means to illustrate, via vignettes of everyday human experience, Merleau-Ponty's central concepts of perception, body-subject, and lived embodiment. I contend that these accounts substantiate Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological claims and point to additional significant elements of human situatedness and place experience.

A Portuguese translation of this chapter by Andre Pinto is available here at academia.edu at:

https://www.academia.edu/42134992/Merleau-Ponty_Lived_Body_and_Place_Toward_a_Phenomenology_of_Human_Situatedness_-_Tradu%C3%A7%C3%A3o_em_Portugu%C3%AAs_do_Artigo_de_David_Seamon_2018_

This thesis is about creative strategies for staging places as performances. To remain viable in the rapidly changing technological and social context, architecture needs to extend its engagement with research, reappraise its fundamental goals and develop creative strategies adequate to new challenges.

However, utilisation of research in design disciplines is still immature and the methodologies of this utilisation remain a matter of controversy and active debate. In particular, the potential of cross-pollination between designing and research requires further clarification. This thesis addresses this need by developing a methodological approach that combines participant observation and investigative designing. Utilising these methodologies, this thesis considers several case-studies, including interactive installations and virtual environments.

Engagement with case-studies through participant observation and investigative designing in this thesis motivates a discussion that reinstates place as the focus of architectural practice. Existing discourse and practice in architecture often assume retrograde, romantic, essentialist and exclusionary understandings of places, for example as singular, bounded and static. By contrast, this thesis highlights an open and flexible vision of places as performances. Considering the possible roles of architectural designing in place-making, it suggests that architects cannot produce ready places but can engender placemaking performances and influence their growth with provocative, open and collaborative creative-design strategies.

Having established the case for distributed, polyphonic, campaigning creativity in place-making, this thesis considers whether design computing can support its performative needs. Commonly, researchers and practitioners in architecture express concerns that design computing can hinder human creativity. By contrast, this thesis demonstrates that design computing can support distributed creativity by staging multiplicious, open, flexible, idea- and insight-generating participatory exchanges. In the process, this thesis considers interactive cinematography and procedural designing as place-making actions. This re-conceptualization demonstrates that design computing can usefully support creative place-making and sometimes be indispensable for its success.

This thesis contributes to knowing by 1) utilising and presenting an unorthodox methodological approach to architectural research; 2) presenting an approach to understanding and making of places novel to the field of architecture; and 3) re-conceptualizing innovative design-computing as an important creative resource for placemaking.

Map-making has been developed as an empirical
activity, which claims objectivity, to form and fix the
knowledge of a place. Yet, the act of mapping appears
today as an alternative to map-making in order to
rethink about the relationship between people and
place. Mapping refers less to a stable representation
than a performance, in which the maker, place, and
the product redefine, reposition and reproduce each
other in the process. In contemporary architecture,
mapping may allow developing a sensitive and critical
understanding of place, which is continuously created
through the existence, experiences, and design
activities of people. In this text, my aim is to point
out that mapping offers possibilities for understanding
the city and for critical participation in the existing
production processes in the city.

In this chapter, I encapsulate the complex, shifting relationship between phenomenology and architecture by speaking of an architectural phenomenology, which I tentatively define as the descriptive and interpretive explication of architectural experiences, situations, and meanings as constituted by qualities and features of both the built environment and human life (Otero-Pailos 2012; Seamon 2017). In demonstrating that architectural phenomenology has significant research and design value today, I first describe the phenomenological approach more fully, highlighting two key phenomenological concepts relevant for architectural understanding—lifeworld and natural attitude. Second, I overview the complicated thread of events whereby architects and architectural theorists became interested in phenomenology. Third, I discuss two phenomenological topics that have come to have value for architecture and briefly discuss their significance for architectural thinking: (1) environmental embodiment; and (2) architectural atmospheres. Last, I identify some key criticisms of architectural phenomenology and suggest what value it might have for the future of architecture, particularly in regard to the imminent arrival of virtual reality, virtual places, and virtual buildings.

Αγγελόπουλος Παναγιώτης | Ερευνητική εργασία - Ακαδ. έτος: 2017-2018 - Αρχιτεκτονική Σχολή Πανεπιστημίου Πατρών____________________
Ο Gordon Matta-Clark εισάγει -με τα ζητήματα λειτουργικότητας που
προκύπτουν μέσα από το έργο του- μία προβληματική-πολεμική
για το φονξιοναλισμό και τις επιπτώσεις του στη μεταπολεμική
πόλη.
Ο φονξιοναλισμός, που υιοθετήθηκε σε διεθνή κλίμακα, με
τις δογματικές του επιβολές και τη λειτουργική του πόλη που
κατέτασσε τη καθημερινότητα του ανθρώπου σε κατηγορίες,
δημιούργησε ένα αφιλόξενο περιβάλλον για την κατοίκηση και τη
ζωή του ανθρώπου. Κατέστρεψε τον τόπο του με την αφέλειά του.
Η αποτυχία του φονξιοναλιστικού μοντερνισμού να διατηρήσει το
εκ προθέσεως κοινωνικό του πρόταγμα και ανθρώπινο πρόσωπο,
οδήγησε σε ουτοπικές-φανταστικές αναζητήσεις με αυτοσκοπό
την εξολοκλήρου κριτική του μοντερνισμού και της κοινωνίας που
τον υιοθέτησε, μιας και η αρχιτεκτονική πρακτική φαινόταν να μην
δύναται να υλοποιήσει -στην υπάρχουσα κοινωνία- οποιοδήποτε
κοινωνικό του όραμα.
Μέσα στο πλαίσιο της κριτικής και του επαναπροσδιορισμού,
κι εφόσον τα ζητήματα που προέκυψαν είναι υπαρκτά, με πιο
νηφάλια αντιμετώπιση άλλοι αρχιτέκτονες επιδόθηκαν στην
αναζήτηση ενδεχομένων ικανών να υπερβούν τον αφελή
φονξιοναλισμό.
Οι -διάφορες- νέες προσεγγίσεις οδήγησαν σε νέες τάσεις και
ρεύματα, μετά το μοντέρνο.
Η άνοδος των τοποφιλικών θεωρήσεων και η διάθεση
επανεξανθωπισμού της αρχιτεκτονικής, όμως, βρίσκει την πλήρη
έκφρασή του σε μία τάση, -πέρα των διαθέσεων υπερβάσεων, μα
προς την δημιουργία τόπων- αυτήν του «Κριτικού τοπικισμού».
Ο κριτικός τοπικισμός, ως ένα σύνολο αρχών-προσεγγίσεων
απέναντι στα ζητήματα περί του τόπου παρουσιάζεται ως το κριτικό
εκείνο παράδειγμα απέναντι στις καταστροφικές συνέπειες του
αφελή φονξιοναλισμού. Σε αυτό, το ενδεχόμενο του τοπικού, στο
οποίο ενέχεται ο «άνθρωπος» και η «κατοίκησή του», το οικουμενικό
συγκεκριμενοποιείται και το πραγματικό λαμβάνεται υπόψιν.
Σε αντίθεση, στην περιγραφή της πραγματικής πόλης από τον Rem
Koolhaas, τη «Γενική Πόλη», η αποδοχή του πραγματικού είναι η
αφετηρία και δε συγκεκριμενοποιείται τίποτα. Το γενικό επικρατεί
ως το μόνο ενδεχόμενο.
Με βάση τα παραπάνω, επιχειρείται να παρουσιαστεί το κρίσιμο
ενδεχόμενο της δημιουργία τόπων.

The elaborate Major sakkos of Metropolitan Photios of Russia (1408-31) is one of the finest surviving examples of medieval liturgical vestments.  In this paper, the shape, architectonics, and decoration of this canopy-like object is compared to the church and to the holy tent known from Mosaic traditions, thereby raising questions of materiality and conceptual framing of the sacred.  By analyzing ritual performance within a Byzantine-rite church and practices of defining sacred space with specific materials, this paper suggests the transferability of the architectonics of textile and masonry canopies into sakkos.  When Metropolitan Photios wore this conspicuously superb “garment of glory and beauty,” he reenacted the “living icon of Christ,” Jesus as the High Priest, and His mystical re-birth in the sanctuary.  Within this “spatial living icon,” the sakkos framed the ritual and spiritual transformation of the human body as well as the dynamics within the performative spaces of God’s manifestations.

The paper discusses Derrida's concept of hospitality which perfectly describes the experience of loosing the sense of feeling at home and reveals the disintegrating entrance of the Otherness into a coherent home space. Jacques Derrida's theory makes it possible to deconstruct the familiar home space, which, however, does not constitute in any case its destruction. Revealing a complex and ambiguous nature of the challenge of hospitality, he perceives the sense of feeling at home as one of the necessary conditions of a stable subject. This is the subject that most fears the Otherness which could disrupt, unsettle their permanent structure and a sense of certainty. Therefore, the Author follows closely the fear of strangeness and the nostalgic longing for the sense of feeling at home as depicted by David Lynch and Michael Haneke in their films. Then he passes on to the field of contemporary art which not only reveals the fact that something has happened to the house we have known so far, but it also allows for creative deconstruction of the feeling at home. The artistic works selected by the Author break the binary oppositions: one’s own/someone else’s, familiar/strange (Jessica Sue Layton), close/distant (Shizuka Yokomizo) and finally the most important one: interior/exterior (Marja Pirilä, Eve Dent).