Whats in a Room?

Architecture exists in time. A building becomes architecture only when we move through it or about it. In contemporary architectural spaces it is procession through spaces that most concern architects. And that procession is most usually expressed in an enduring architectural element: the room. The room is a human creation., the forming of which is a primal human activity. Giedeon writes: “Man takes cognizance of the emptiness which girds around him and gives it a psychic form and expression… (space is) the portrayal of man’s inner relation to his environment: man’s psychic record of the realities which confront him, which lie about him and become transformed. Bruno Zevi describes buildings as hollow sculpture: Architecture… does not consist in the sum of the width, length and height of the structural elements which enclose space but in the void itself, the closed space in which man lives and moves.” In the modern era ideas were refined: the experience of going from room to room – how a doorway frames the appearance of a hallway ahead in a symmetrical enfilade; the subtle change of ceiling heights; the experience of rising through space are all expressed and represented with equal importance.