Lecture date: 1995-10-31
Appropriated on behalf of multiple, different identities, whether of individual subjects, peoples, or buildings, the idea of space in the modern period has been marked by instability and an elusive negativity. Attempts by architects and thinkers to arrest the fluidity of space and to domesticate it for the body and society in place have been thwarted by the anxiety attached to space and its tendency to invade even the most defended of places. Space and boundary, space and limit, and more importantly for architecture, space and monumentality, have been opposed to each other from the beginning.
Anthony Vidler, Dean of The Cooper Union and formerly Professor and Chair of Art History at UCLA, outlines some competing histories of space while examining the anxieties of space evident in aesthetic theories from W
