Orientation, Identification, Representation - Space and Perception in Architecture

Perception is essential to being in the world ? through perception we are in the world. Perception is our way to understand reality and to acquire knowledge of it and be in interaction with the environment. Experiencing architecture is based on perception: the spatial orientation, identification and representation which together make possible our environmental experience. Architecture is not only seeing, but also experiencing. Environmental endoscopy makes it possible to study the environmental orientation, the spatial elements of the environment, but the identification and the representation which are included essentially in the overall perception of the environment presuppose the actual experience of the environment. This presentation discusses all these three levels of the spatial experience. In architecture, space can be discussed in many different ways: we can talk about, for example, architectural space that includes inside and outside space, we can discuss urban space that includes the physical structure of the whole built environment or we can talk about what has been called existential space, that includes the relationship between man and his physical environment. In this presentation space is considered in its wide, experience based meaning: space as the environment of perception, the interaction between man and space, or as a kind of cognitive space theory. Most essential in this discussion is the experience of place, the feeling of place, and its origins, since place is the most unique experience of space, it is manis deepest experience of the environment