From Products to Space

written by Mika Cimolini

 

In practicality-bound architectural practice, where everything in a rather mechanical way is divided into lots, functions, needs, objects, and labour, people were turned into machines for living. Architectural products have lost a great deal of appeal; the question is how to regain it. A closer look at the world of industrial products and the way they are designed to fulfil individual desires could move the development of architectural organisation away from hierarchical processes and function-only oriented thinking. 

 

In architectural practice, spaces are often created by forgetting the fact that the user’s space is actually lived in, not just represented or conceived by the architect as the genius creator. Through daily usage, the space is subjectified, changed by the projection of individual desires. These cannot be expressed through numbers or calculations or lines, but through the restoration of the senses, the sensory and the sensual, the non-visual, as was proposed by Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space.