1.

3 The Significance of Space 11

The importance of space has been observed by many architectural historians

(Zevi 1957; Giedion 1941), but while there is an extensive record of the assessment
and critique of form, excluding space, it wasn’t until 1984 that it was suggested that
the reverse situation was not only possible, but advantageous. In the Social logic of
space, Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson argue that, ‘[h]owever much we may prefer
to discuss architecture in terms of visual styles, its most far-reaching practical
effects are not at the level of appearances at all, but at the level of space’ (1984: ix).
Space is the fundamental medium through which architects accommodate and
structure society and serve the basic needs of communities. Most importantly, the
focus on space, rather than form, shifts the emphasis away from issues of style or
tectonics and towards social phenomena and cognitive or experiential properties.
But how to describe this focus on the properties of architectural space?
Paul Crossley and Georgia Clarke (2000) suggest that one of the oldest analogies
which has been used to describe and thereby understand architecture is language.
For example, in the Renaissance it was thought that a concise ‘grammar’ of
architecture could be found in the Classical orders. Despite the fact that the lin-
guistic conceit is arguably at its strongest as a form of productive parallelism with
only limited application, its appeal has endured. For this reason, in the late 1970s
and early 1980s, when computational methods began to be developed by architects
for generating architectural form, they become known as ‘shape grammars’ (Stiny
and Gips 1972; Stiny and Mitchell 1978; Steadman 1983). If, then, form provides
the grammatical basis for the language of architecture, by extension, space must
furnish its syntactical basis. Thus, Hillier’s and Hanson’s theory, along with its
associated set of computational techniques for understanding the relationship
between space and social patterns, became known as Space Syntax.

1.4 The Social, Cognitive and Experiential

This section begins to explain how the social, cognitive and experiential properties
of space can be conceptualised in architectural terms. All of these concepts are
developed in later chapters, but in this section some general principles are intro-
duced. Throughout this section it is also worth remembering that social structures
tend to be spatial, time is often associated with cognition and experience with
movement. Thus, a partial mapping is possible between the three main themes of
this book (social, cognitive and experiential), and three major themes of the
Modernist tradition (space, time and movement).

1.4.1 Social Properties

Social factors are those that relate to the organisation of a collective or group (Firth
1971). A society is effectively a group of people who share a pattern of relation-
ships, attitudes or behaviours (Merton 1957). Such patterns are normally referred to