- developed the concept of the ‘moment,’ a fleeting, intensely euphoric sensation which appeared as a point of rupture which revealed the totality of possibilities of daily existence.
- philosophy of lived experience.
- what we are concerned with here is not texts but texture…we already know that a texture is made up of a usually rather large space covered by networks or webs; monuments constitute the strong points, nexuses or anchors of such webs. The actions of social practice are expressible but not explicable through discourse: they are, precisely, acted - and not read.
- In theatrical space, music, choruses, masks, tiering - all such elements converge with language and actors. A spatial action overcomes conflicts, at least momentarily, even though it does not resolve them; it opens a way from everyday concerns to collective joy.
- The balance of forces between monuments and buildings has shifted. Buildings are to monuments as everyday life is to festival, products to works, lived experience to the merely perceived, concrete to stone, and so on.
- Architectural volumes ensure a correlation between the rhythms that they entertain (gaits, ritual gestures, processions, parades, etc.) and their musical resonance. It is in this way, and at this level, in the non-visible, that bodies find one another. Should there be no echo to provide a reflection or acoustic mirror of presence, it falls to an object to supply this mediation between the inert and the living: bells tinkling at the slightest breeze, the play of fountains and running water, perhaps birds and caged animals.
- As for the eye of the architect, it is no more innocent than the lot he is given to build on rot eh blank sheet of paper on which he makes his first sketch. His ‘subjective’ space is freighted with all-too-objective meanings. It is a visual space, a space reduced to blueprints, to mere images - to that ‘world of the image’ which is the enemy of the imagination.
- The user’s space is lived - not represented (or conceived). When compared with the abstract space of the experts (architects, urbanists, planners), the space of the everyday activities of users is a concrete one, which is to say, subjective. As a space of ‘subjects’ rather than of calculations, as a representational space, it has an origin, and that origin is childhood, with its hardships, its achievements and its lacks. Lived space bears the stamp of the conflict between an inevitable, if long and difficult, maturation process and a failure to mature that leaves particular original resources and reserves untouched. It is in this space that the ‘private’ realm asserts itself, albeit more or less vigorously, and always in a conflictual way, against the public one.
