The Production of Space (1974, Henri Lefebvre)

Within the spatial practice of modern society, the architect ... has a representation of this

space, one which is bound ... to sheets of paper, plans, elevations, sections, perspective views of

facades ... This conceived space is thought by those who make use of it to be true, despite

the fact that it is geometrical ...

The balance of forces between monuments and buildings has shifted. Buildings are to monuments

as everyday life is to festival, products to works, lived experience to the merely

perceived ... What we are seeing here is a new dialectical process ...

The

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Dialectical Process Spatial Practice ofModern Society

Everyday life

Buildings

Liveexperience

Representation of space

Festival

Monuments

Perceived Conceived space

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I. Representation of Space

One might see it (a house) as the epitome of immovability, with its concrete and its stark,

cold and rigid outlines ... Now, a critical analysis would doubtless destroy the appearance of solidity ... of its concrete slabs and its thin non-load-bearing walls ... In the light of this imaginary

analysis, our house would emerge as permeated from every direction by streams of energy

... by every imaginable route: water, gas, electricity, telephone lines, radio ... Its image would then be

replaced by an image of a complex of mobilities ... much more accurately than any drawing

or photograph, would disclose that this ‘immovable property’ is actually ... an active body ...

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MobilityImmovability

Images are themselves fragments of space. Cutting things up and rearranging them. découpage

and montage ... As for error and illusion, they reside already in the artist’s eye, in the

photographer’s lens, in the draftsman’s pencil and paper ... Wherever there is

illusion, the optical and visual world plays an integral and integrative ... part in it. It fetishizes abstraction and imposes it as the norm. It detaches the pure form from its impure content - from

lived time, everyday time ... After its fashion, the image kills.

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Error & Illusion of Images

Space

Artist’s eye

Photographers’slens

Fetishized abstraction(Montage)

Audience

Draftsman’spencil & paper

II. Perception of Space

The codifying approach of semiology, which seeks to classify representations

... is quite unable to cover all facets of the monumental. Indeed, it does not even come close, for it is

the residual - whatever cannot be classified or codified according to categories devised

subsequent to production ...In face of this fetishized abstraction, ‘users’ spontaneously turn themselves,

their presence, their ‘lived experience’ and their bodies into abstractions ... The

theoretical error is to be content to see a space without conceiving of it ... without

assembling details into a whole ‘reality’ ...

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Theoretical Error

Lived experienceCodifying approach

Without details into a whole reality

Withoutconceiving of it

In nature, time is apprehended within space ... Until nature became localized in

underdevelopment, each place showed its age and, like a tree trunk, bore the mark of the

years it had taken it to grow ... With the advent of modernity time has vanished from social space. It is recorded solely on measuring-instruments, on clocks, that are as isolated and

functionally specialized as this time itself. Lived time loses its form and its social interest ...

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Time Apprehended in Space

Monumental qualities are not solely plastic, not to be apprehended solely through

looking. Monuments are also liable to possess acoustic properties ... Silence itself, in a

place of worship, has its music. In cloister or cathedral, space is measured by the ear:

the sounds, voices and singing reverberate in an interplay analogous to that between the most basic

sounds and tones ... Architectural volumes ensure a correlation between the rhythms ...

and their musical resonance. It is in this way, and at this level, in the non-visible ...

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Visible Non-visible

III. Suggestions / Pointers

Surely it is the supreme illusion to defer to architects, urbanists or planners as being experts or ultimate

authorities in matters relating to space. What the interested parties’ here fail to appreciate is that they

are bending their demands (from below) to suit commands (from above) ... The real task, by contrast, is to uncover and stimulate demands even at

the risk of their wavering in face of the imposition of oppressive and repressive commands. It is, one

suspects, the ideological error par excellence to go instead in search of specialists of ‘lived experience’ ...

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From above From below

CommandsCommands

DemandsDemands

Stimulated DemandsBended Demands

Bending Stimulate

Spaces are strange: homogeneous, rationalized, and constraining ... its very passive

acceptance of them ensures their operational impact. The division of labour, of needs

... all pushed to the point of maximum separation ... A monument or architectural project attains

a complexity fundamentally different from the complexity of a text ... what we are concerned with

here is not texts but texture ... texture is made up of a usually rather large space covered by

networks; monuments constitute the ... anchors of such webs. The actions of social practice are expressible ... they are, precisely, acted - and not read.

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Social Practice

Texture PerceptionActed

Texts RepresentationRead

but not

The user’s space is lived - not represented (or conceived) ... the space of the everyday activities

of users is a concrete, subjective one. As a space of ‘subjects’ rather than of calculations, as

a representational space ... the resulting space would be inhabited by subjects, it

might legitimately be deemed ‘situational’ or ‘relational’ - but these definitions or determinants

would refer to sociological content rather than to any intrinsic properties of space ... The

restoration of the body means ... the restoration of the sensory-sensual - of

speech, of the voice, of smell, of hearing. In short, of the non-visual.

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Restoration of the Body

Caculations Subjects Sensory-sensual(non-visual)