Lefebvre for Architects (Thinkers for Architects) by Nathaniel Coleman

Author:Nathaniel Coleman [Coleman, Nathaniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317567318
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2014-12-05T08:00:00+00:00

Lefebvre’s distinction between ‘works’ and ‘products’ provides a helpful means for understanding the consequences of the repetitions that make space into product. Works achieve a status akin to works of art in the sense of being unique and ot reproducible. On the other hand, products lend themselves to near infinite reproducibility.

Spatial codes

In Lefebvre’s lexicon, a ‘spatial code’ is a ‘system of space’ that makes spaces legible to those who live within the culture that produced it. Although he is not confident that such a code exists in the present, he believes traces of one are discernible in the spatial practices of the Renaissance. In the event, ‘[i]f indeed spatial codes have existed, each characterizing a particular spatial/social practice, and if these codifications have been produced along with the space corresponding to them, then the job of theory is to elucidate their rise, their role, and their demise’ (17). The value of identifying and deciphering codes, according to Lefebvre, resides in a shift of stress from the ‘formal aspects of codes’ to ‘their dialectical character’. In this way, ‘[c]odes will be seen as part of a practical relationship’ and ‘as part of an interaction between “subjects” and their space and surroundings’. Continuing, Lefebvre describes his project, in relation to codes, as an ‘attempt to trace the coming-into-being and disappearance of codings/decodings’, which aims ‘to highlight contents–i.e. the social (spatial) practices inherent to the forms under consideration’ (18).

Although one might imagine such activities to be the very vocation of architects, in most instances, the dominance of visual and formal preoccupations precludes this. But it need not be thus. In fact, Lefebvre’s attention to the potentially legible aspects of social and spatial practices that form spatial codes holds out the promise of modelling for architects an alternative manner of conceptualising their tasks. Setting the decoding of spatial codes as key to their work need not restrict architects’ inventive capacities, but rather could return them to concrete considerations of the social dimensions of space. It is here that Renaissance spatial practices become particularly important, especially considering that, in Lefebvre’s view, modernity (understood as a product of nineteenth- and twentieth-century developments) has included the destruction of generally legible spatial codes:

If, roughly from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth, a coded language may be said to have existed on the practical basis of a specific relationship between town, country and political territory, a language founded on classical perspective and Euclidean space, why and how did this coded system collapse? Should an attempt be made to reconstruct that language, which was common to the various groups making up the society–to users and inhabitants, to the authorities and to the technicians (architects, urbanists, planners)?

(17, see also 47)

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