01. part of a ritual
02. no man’s land
Public Buildings Department
UACEG | Sofia, Bulgaria | 2022
NON-
SPACES
A report leaded by: assoc. prof. M Arch Panayot Savov, PhD
Submitted to the University of Architecture, Civil engineering and Geodesy in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Architecture
The topic of the project- Museum of Emotions – had the tendency to take different directions of development - from a research brought to deeper levels of exploration,to an intervention in an environment. This is the result from a research in a more concentrated field of study. My response to the assignment took the direction of a research. It aims to explore spaces where we humans "do not live", "do not exist". I named them. Non-spaces and defined their possible genesis and behavior. They, in their turn, refer to the human transitional states - between wakefulness and sleep; between conscious and unconscious. Two locations, which possess these characteristics, were investigated by me - the subject of this text. The derived characteristics of this transition took a volumetric form, whose analysis began with experiments with its singularity and continued with a formation of structures. The process began with the definition of the word "Non-space". Man inhabits through the creation of habitable spaces and those in which he moves. But in the process of creation, these unintended "accidental" errors occur that are not meant to to appear.
It is that part of the space that cannot be called a place – these are all non-places. Identity; historical, geographical and political affiliation; associativity; intention in the process of creation – all of these qualities are characteristics of the word ‘place’. All of them are absent in non-spaces. They are unencumbered by the idea of being. They simply are. The reference to the thesis of ‘organs without bodies’ appeared as a possible reading due to their functioning independently, without being part of a whole organism. When a space manages to establish your presence, and you - to establish yourself as present in it, then it exists in its most material form. This thesis seeks to reach a definition of non-space as no/somewhere where you yourself manage to disappear – to be physically present. Your presence in the system is irrelevant, it neutralizes you. In my research, I looked at two cases of non-space. In the first case,these are places which are part of a ritual/path - a liminal period that is transitional between two states. The second case searches for characteristics of places, defined as "no man's land".
01. part of a ritual
The concept of liminality was introduced by Arnold van Gennep. He describes a three-stage structure that all rites of passage share - préliminaire 'preliminary' (separation; leaving the familiar), liminaire 'liminality' (transition – a time of testing, learning and growth), and postliminaire 'post-liminality' (return – incorporation and reintegration).
The person undergoing the passage is first separated from their social status that they previously possessed,then installed into the liminal period of transition, and finally given a new status once re-introduce...
(Les Rites de Passage, Arnold Van Gennep)
The transitional period is the moment when you are neither here, nor there - you do not possess your pre-ritual status, and you have not yet begun the transition to the new one. When you are in it,the world begins to escape from physical laws and to step into the world of fantasy. I found an interpretation of this case study in two works - The Chronicles of Narnia, C. S. Lewis and Spirited away, Hayao Miyazaki. Each of them presents a rite of passage - the life growth of the characters. This transition is defined by its time-consuming and spatial nature. A peculiarity that can be observed in both readings, however, are the spaces of separation and return - they are not physically determined to contain this transition. This fact provides a clue to define the spaces of the portals as fanciful, which concentrate time and space. Another common point between these two works is the possibility of eternal inhabitation of this fantasy world - the "threshold" that defines the characters. At this very moment, they do not belong in either world, and are given the opportunity to remain in hesitation and to renounce their existence. This transition world does not physically exist, which also neutralizes the characters as existing.
I found an analogue of the following observations also in Sofia - the greenhouse of the Sofia Botanical Garden. It presents a series of pass filters, which at a certain moment, manifest their deceptive labyrinthine structure, allowing the transformation of the transitional period into an eternal one. The entrance to this infinity is extremely finite and definite – referring to the wardrobe in Narnia. The fractal repetition of the spaces (hall within the hall) conveys the idea of a time-stretched moment that ceases to exist in the real world.
02. no man’s land
This appellation is found in different origin and genesis places:
-an area of unowned, unclaimed, or uninhabited land (land that everyone wants or no one wants)
-an unoccupied area between opposing armies
-an area not suitable or used for occupation or habitation
- strips of land between different regimes of power
Their main feature is the border between two states/territories. The events that happen on these lands follow some of the following examples – sites for execution, waste dumps. The last statement seeks to prove the thesis that in no man's land, no one's laws applies. Everything done in it, as if it did not happen, and everything placed in it, as if it does not exist. The behavior generation of these lands may have occurred in two main ways – a combination of the behavior of the two territories on which it borders, or it may have created its entirely own behavior, an antipode of the other two environments. An observed analogue in Sofia on this topic is part of the Bells park. The reason behind the choice was the absence of such a strong emotional external input (eg: not carrying the weight that the ground between the trenches of two opposing armies would bear). This allowed a wide range of intuitive observations and a generation of possible theories.
Even with its location, the place loses the opportunity to be noticed. The road has a goal - the Bells complex, and the place is the bearer of the appellation "roadside". The forest – the opponent of the road – creates a boundary between the two, which is straight, but not at this point. There, the border gets extended, which is neither a road, nor a forest - it bears liminality. Two fragmentations of each individuality enter it. If we accept as true the statement that the forest carries the quality of chaos and the road order, then their fragments retain their material expression, but acquire the quality of their opponent. A well-arranged structure was created from the building blocks of the forest (a dense strip of bushes), and from the building blocks of the road was formed a chaos - decay (a strip of scattered stones).The reformatting process is time-consuming and spatial, but here it is concentrated in a very short moment. This fact directs our attention again to the spatial expression of portal in Spirited away and The Chronicles of Narnia. On the contrary, here the borderline possesses the quality of concentrating. Processes in the boundary remain unnoticed by man, since it only acts as a symbol for presence in the physical world. However, a "mistake" occurred, and some of the transitional processes were transferred into the human observable spectrum and became open to be explored.
By entering the space, the two models (of the forest and the road) get mummified and they stop their course of movement at a certain point in the process. The same happens, for example, with an egg when it breaks in the process of boiling - part of it leaves the shell, but the moment it comes into contact with the external environment (hot water), it hardens.
Non-spaces are the unintended result of intentional actions, they are the indefinite between, yet in the definite. Upon observation and analysis, they provide an answer for a number of events that remain hidden from the physical world. The observations, presented in the text, are the result of a number of conversations, held during the semester. They have become the fuel for synthesizing spatial patterns of search and discovery.