If It’s Space, It’s Social

Abstract

Ever since the allegory of the cave, we question ourselves about the frontier that separates the inner and outer universes, the nature and depth of its density, “as thick as a blade” according to Samuel Beckett, who questions the position of the body as the common trait of union and measure of those two worlds. Is it the body/place dichotomy that enables us to form the space of consciousness and does the body stand as the measurement unit that links place and consciousness? As we reflect upon Architecture and Sociology, we look for a shared place, common to these two fields of knowledge, a place that, among others, could be space. Architecture measures, works and interprets space, in a way close to the poetic knowledge of art, whereas Sociology, within the so called social sciences, does the same in scientific manner. The question underlying this reflection raises the issue on how Architects can create urban facts that are not just mere objects. Architecture, slowly and without us realizing it, has been taking over the discourse on city, space and architecture, establishing the principle that, over the reality of urban and architecturally produced artefacts, floats, suspended, the transparent veil of ideas and concepts (that inhabit our inner world), side-lining the importance of the social universe, of the relations of sociability, that lead to the production of such artefacts. If Architecture is an expression of the measurement of space, closer to “doing” than to “knowing”, it holds a privileged position in the establishment of our collective knowledge within the intimacy that, until the 19th century, linked poetic and scientific speech.