liberatingspace

If sculp­ture can be de­fined as the dis­ci­pline con­cerned pri­mar­ily with the lib­er­a­tion of form, then ar­chi­tec­ture must be thought of as the dis­ci­pline con­cerned pri­mar­ily with the lib­er­a­tion of space.

In a process some­what the re­verse of Michelangelo’s idea of cut­ting away the su­per­flu­ous mar­ble to lib­er­ate the mass of the statue which, in his mind, was con­tained there, the col­lec­tive mind of the cit­i­zens of Todi must have con­ceived the space vol­umes of the two squares as ab­stract en­ti­ties, and then brought them into be­ing by the con­struc­tion of in­di­vid­ual build­ings over many years, which grad­u­ally de­fined their edges.

Edmund N. Bacon, Design of Cities

Architecture is seen to be the op­po­site of sculp­ture, or maybe its in­verse, and know­ing one il­lu­mi­nates the other in the same way that Gaudi’s in­verted mod­els re­veal con­struc­tion as sim­ply the in­verse of grav­ity.

Space is the most fun­da­men­tal ar­chi­tec­tural con­cept, and ar­chi­tec­ture is usu­ally re­garded pri­mar­ily as the con­struc­tion of hu­manly mean­ing­ful spaces and the art of ar­tic­u­lat­ing ex­pres­sive space.

Robert McCarter & Juhani Pallasmaa, Understanding Architecture

By cre­at­ing form we shape space. By mak­ing space we de­fine form.

the dig­i­tal anal­ogy

In prod­uct de­sign, or soft­ware de­sign, con­sider the work not as the process of adding func­tion­al­ity, but in­stead as a process of re­mov­ing fric­tion. Like Michaelangelo, our job is to carve away every­thing in be­tween our users and their goals, min­i­miz­ing the dis­tance be­tween in­tent and ex­e­cu­tion wher­ever pos­si­ble. This is good news, as it’s of­ten much eas­ier to rec­og­nize poor fit than it is to ar­tic­u­late good fit, and so UX be­comes a prac­tice of elim­i­nat­ing bad ex­pe­ri­ences as much as it is about cre­at­ing de­light­ful ones.