Space And Place - Yi Fu Tuan


Space and Place is an intriguingly vivid book which emphasises the importance of having an experiential relation with the spaces and places we live in. Yi Fu Tuan explores how people live in space and place and how that influences the way space and place is designed and navigated. We cannot rely on a conceptual framework to understand space and place; we need to experience and embody it.

The book focuses on the relationship between place, space and time. When travelling from A to B, we forget the turns, changes of direction, simplifying the journey into a straight line, of progress in time and space from origin to destination. While it takes time to form an attachment to a place, the quality and intensity of the experience matters more than simply the time spent in a place. Chinese and Turkish courtyard homes look inward to continuity and the past, where as modern Western homes, with plate glass windows, look outward, to the future.

An infant is placed lying on his back or carried by his mother, on whom his world is centred. Children learn about their locality by moving between home and school, recognising places where their journey changes direction. Children and adults learn the pattern of movement and only later, and perhaps never, the geography of the locality through which they travel.

Hunter-gatherers in the tropical forests, with natural complexity around them and unvarying seasons, have little spatial or temporal awareness. By contrast, Eskimo hunter-gatherers have considerable spatial awareness of the bleak landscape in which they live. In fogs and blizzards, the land, the sky and the water, lose differentiation. Landmarks disappear, but the Eskimo finds his way, relying on the feel of the land, snow quality and whether the air is fresh or salt. Pacific islanders are able to navigate across a wide ocean, knowing in which direction there is landfall, relying on wave pattern, bird flight and stellar navigation.

Architectural Space and Awareness - Tuan considers that how 'man-made space can refine human feeling and perception' (102). People are able to sense the differences between public/private, interior/exterior, closed/open and darkness/light. Tuan concludes that the built environment clarifies social roles and relations. 'Architecture is a key to comprehending reality'. 'The build environment has power to ‘define and refine’ sensibility' (107).







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