According to Sun Ra "Space is the place".
"The fascination which space seems to hold for philosophy is only equalled by the fascination which the idea of system holds for architects." (Christian Girard, Architecture et Concepts Nomades, p.72)
(cf. Roland Barthes' distinction between l'esprit de syst me and l'esprit syst matique .)
In this document, space is no longer considered unitary, as having a single essence, concept, or function. This is perhaps an indication of an outlook that is suspicious of the repressive ambition of a universal space which suppresses multiplicities, catastrophes, and incommensurabilities. One way to break with strategy is to fragment space. A typological approach to space in architecture, and a sensitivity to metaphor as crucial to theorization, indicate a move away from a singular concept of either space or theory.
The following taxonomy of spaces is a mixture of disciplinary divisions (art history, philosophy, etc.), technological divisions (writing, Cyberspace), territorial divisions (urban space), and subjective divisions (psycho-sexual, personal).
Philosophical Space
What are the philosophical issues that revolve around how we perceive form and space? Is space a subjective or objective enitity? A logical condition? Is space a substance? Or is space a form?
Art Historical Space
In the late nineteenth century, with the rise of a philosophically oriented art history, the philosophical issues of how we perceive space gave way to the psychological problem of how we come to take delight in the characteristics of form and space. The philosophical art historians sought the "basic principles," (Grundbegriffe ) underlying the creation and appreciation of art, and their historical transformations. These could be found in the "schemata" or symbolic forms of space. see perspective, haptic/optic, style See also vision.
Scientific Space
Through science, space became first geometrical and a matter of quantity instead of quality.
While Newtonian mechanics considered space absolute, the mathematicization of space subsequently lead to increasing abstraction, culminating in the discovery of Non-Euclidean geometries. See also Phase Space
Space was also transformed by technology. For example, the nineteenth century characerized railway travel as "the annihilation of space and time."
Social Space
In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre reclaims space as a primarily social problematic.For Lefebvre, the proliferation of this and/or that space, eg. literary space, ideological space, the space of the dream etc. is a general consequence of of the concept of mental space (p.3) through the epistemologico-philosophical thinking of western Logos (in both science and philosophy). Lefebvre unmasks this mode of thought as a powerful ideological tendency, expressing the dominant ideas of the dominaant class, through the concept of abstract space.
Psycho-Sexual Space
The analysis of the mirror stage accounts for the child's aquisition of notions of spatiality and temporality. (see also ego)For the first time, the child is not absorbed by its environment (both occupying no space at all and being all-pervasive) but is now part of space, taking up a place or location in space. The "buccal" space of the neonate, the space that can be contained in or exploited by the child's mouth, is replaced with the first notion of a binarized space, capable of being divided into real and virtual planes. The virtual duplication of the subject's body, the creation of a symmetry measured from the picture plane, is necessary for these more sophisticated, abstract, and derivative notions of spatiality. (see body image.)The mirror stage is a link between space and representation.
see also gender, perception
Textual Space
The textual space of the printed page has come to be seen as arbitrary and self-contained. The arbitrariness is a result of the alphabet, referring to sounds in an arbitrary (and contextual) way, to the concept of the linguistic sign, which after Saussure, was described primarily as an arbitrary link between signifier and signified, and to the culture of the printed book, which has striven towards legibility through typographic simplicity and the exlusion of pictorial attributes to the page itself. How has textual space been tranformed through the development of Cyberspace and hypertext?
narrative form, architectural metaphors