Space is a widely used concept in our everyday life and especially the architectural discourse is full of it. The word, therefore, has been mostly related to a specific inhabited place. However, the abstract concept of space has been theorized and developed by many different disciplines of our society during the ages, such as philosophy, mathematics and natural sciences. Nevertheless, space is and remains a complex and problematic, but fascinating phenomenon. Knowledge about it can be made discursive and explicit. For sure, there are many methodologies, languages and machines to define, measure, map, customize and construct space. However, it has never let itself be simply delimited, ordered, categorized, analyzed, set in archives or even fully understood.

“Thinking means venturing beyond”. (Ernst Bloch, Principle of Hope)

For some people space may be just a continuum, an extent, measured or unmeasured, of linear space, a distance, length, or stretch. Some simply consider space and time as a rigid frame, in which nature and events take place without having any influence on that frame at all. To others it might be simply everything surrounding us, multi-dimensional, universal, wide and open areas, as of land, sky, or water, simultaneously a particular area or cavity of the body. In digital electronics, it might be a tiny bit or pixel, capable of creating micro archives, options on virtualities, utopias, global networks and cyberspaces. Again, others swear to space as a culmination of multitudinous images adhering to our body and tattooing our memory. Space is whatever we want space to be, while we embody whatever space wants us to expose, simply because we are not just in space, but space is also in us.

Space in general carries, holds, affectionate, covers and presents us in particular as much as we carry, hold, reflect and present a particular space wherein positions and value judgments like close-far, inner-outer, micro-macro, past-present-future, soft-rigid, true-false, good-bad, real-unreal, are changing and weighing constantly. Thus, human life seems to be an ambiguous space trip struggling with distances, signification, receptivity and durability. Nevertheless, there exist however, at least an inside and outside space where the frontiers, hinterlands and centers are its predominant positions, close and open its possible conditions within past, present and future as its hybrid parameters that enforces considerations of quality and morality.

"The meaning of the world is the separation of wish and fact". (Kurt Gödel)

Driven by its nature, human creatures discover, usurp, invent, picture and construct all kind of spaces that automatically becomes his atmospheric territory - his omnitopia - wherein the human wish and fact get in conflict. Such an anthropomorphosis of space is limited, since it cannot go beyond the perceptional and technological capacities of humankind; however, as those capacities develop, space is constantly extending its limits and with it, like everything else, our picture of the world, the universe and ourselves. Our constant spatial discovery and justification initiates seriousness, criticism, and skepticism. The enormous production of human cognitions of space; the accruing depths of images and theories have an unimpeachable effect on society and the individual.

This text is Copyright © 2008 by SPACE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY (S.I.A.), All Rights Reserved.

The basic drive of the human species is to make any space available for human life where life is possible and to make all worlds inhabitable as yet uninhabitable. The frontline of this behaviorism of human inhabitation and domestication form our cities, physically actualized and unified through definite materials, such as concrete, tarmac, bricks, steel, glass and treated woods to name just a few. Urban centers represent the highest forms of human social organization – the communities, which have grown rapidly in both size and power. Their increasing force of attraction activates assiduous people practical and suitable goods and precious capital. In any case, since the earliest origins, cities have been the epicenters of education, commerce, communication, religious as well as financial and political power, but the most an agglomeration of infrastructure and residential premises.

"Spheres are the spaces where people actually live. I would like to show that human beings have, till today, been misunderstood, because the space where they exist has always been taken for granted, without ever being made conscious and explicit. And this lieu or space I call a sphere in order to indicate that we are never in fact naked in totality, in a physical or biological environment of some kind, but that we are ourselves space-creating beings, and that we cannot exist otherwise than in these self-animated spaces." (Peter Sloterdijk)

Cities are the important hubs that facilitate, maintain and encourage interactions between persons in different parts of the world. The existence of cities is highly dependent upon its infrastructure and the differences between the persons who inhabit and utilize them. With their concentration of talent, mixture of people, well-elaborated networks, educational systems, and economic surplus, cities have provided an excellent fertile ground for the evolution of human culture: (among others) the arts, scientific research, and technical innovation. Urbanity, thus, becomes the test field of human quality and morality, where past, present and future are fixed and materialized, together, reflecting and compressing the urban settings and conditions of all times, while capturing our bodily existence temporarily into an absolute now-and-here.

“Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. ...The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive”. (Dune, by Frank Herbert)

However, cities as well retain the human evolutionary process: human activities such as traveling, working, eating, sleeping, shopping, sporting and - last but not least – the act of dwelling and its delirious repetition have been standardized and cocooned by the concreteness, thus fragmentation of our cities, making the city a rather fractional broken and intermittent phenomenon than a homogeneous and complete one.

Life, living a human life with all its facets, thus means to invent and inhabit space by domesticating, recompiling and fragmenting it into a numerous specific places in order to dwell, (a)bide, absorb and execute.
After all, is there space for changing our construction on the city? Can we be more experimental on ourselves?

This text is Copyright © 2008 by SPACE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY (S.I.A.), All Rights Reserved.

 

Spearheaded by its mainstream image production, the future thought is being claimed, captured and exploited by nowadays core human industries and engagements, such as the filming industry, the amusement industry, trend scouting, fortune telling, esotericism and the stock market.
Due to its forces, humanity in general faces a crisis of its future image production. The contemporary image of anthropomorphic future states thus is not future compatible anymore. Nonetheless, the resources of future thinking are neither exhausted nor are its energies entirely consumed.

“The force that drives the image of the future is only in part rational and intellectual; a much larger part is emotional, aesthetic, and spiritual. The appeal of the image lies in its picture of a radically different world in an other time”. (The Image of the Future, Fred Polak, 1973)

If we take a closer look for example at the filming industry, that is to be pointed out as the most powerful contemporary image production machinery, the future of present society is strongly influenced and mislead by its immense image production. The future of spatial and societal matters have been undermined and saturated by mere but explicit technological extrapolations ever since the filming industry attained mainstream appeal. As a result, the human fantasy has been reduced and downgraded to certain technological modifications. Ever since the raising popularity of the science fiction genre in literature from the beginning of the twenties century, the public mass seems to know what our near and far future will look alike. The mainstream future image production, thus, has an unprecedented and irreversible impact upon public experience and is narrowed down to a mere persiflage of science fiction writing.

“If you want to know your past, look at your present conditions. If you want to know your future, look into your present actions”. (Buddhist saying)

Due to human wanderlust and inevitable and inexorable curiosity in projecting himself into the future, significance of the future image has not become entirely impotent yet. The resources of future thinking are neither exhausted nor are its energies entirely consumed. Future thinking needs to be secured from its captive and exploitive forces (here: engagements become obligations) rather than being abdicated. Thus, this research wants to contribute to the renaissance of human future thought in order to enlarge and provoke visions of the not-yet-being.

“The purpose of forecasting is to identify patterns in natural systems and human behavior and to discover relationships among variables and systems so we can estimate the timing, nature, and magnitude of changes in future conditions". (Institute for Water Resources 1996:146).

For sure, it lies in human nature to narrate, construct, visualize and project possibilities and future potentials of his/her way of living. But what are the constitutive criteria for looking into possible variations of future human being? In general Human being means confrontation and making choices. Looking into the future thus is inherent to being human. However, how to define space? How to understand space in order to designate, direct and envision our thoughts on the future?

This text is Copyright © 2008 by SPACE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY (S.I.A.), All Rights Reserved.