Representing Spatial Hybridities. A Pragmatic Approach to the Representation of Emergent Figures of Public Space

International audienceAs this paper's title suggests, it will associate a number of terms among which the relations may not immediately be obvious. One of these is the "figure" - roughly, the igure in the sense of figure-ground relations as they are present in architectural discourse as well as in the domain of the psychology of form. A second term, no less important here, is that of hybridity; it refers to emergent spatial environmental conditions that can be defined in terms of easily identifiable existing elements which recombine to produce new territorial figures that seem to resist classification within pre-existing categories. The objective of this article is to examine each of these terms separately in light of certain difficulties we are constantly faced with as we work in the contemporary territory, and then to propose a mode of association between them carrying some consequences for how we think about and practice design in the contemporary territory