The Architecture of Space - The Space of Architecture

The Architecture of Space – The Space of Architecture is about the human perception of space and the historical development of spatial ideas from the earliest times until the present; a development that has been manifested in a profusion of cultural phenomena from paintings and buildings to geometry and astronomy. This book offers a broad account of the cultural history of space, and of the history of architecture in this light.

It is the point of the book that the cultural process thus has an inherent dynamic that has a driven development forward from a natural base level through levels on increasing complexity.

This evolutionist view of culture and history has long been in miscredit in leading academic circles. In order to clarify the problems it is compared in the book to relevant aspects of the Frenchman Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy, which has played an important role in 1990s for the humanities and the social sciences, and for important movements in architecture and art.

Lars Marcussen (born 1935) graduated as an architect from the School of Architecture of the Royal Danish Academy of Art in 1961 as a pupil of Professor Erik Christian Sørensen. Since 1968 until his retirement in 2005, he has been associated with the school as a researcher and a teacher. Throughout the years Lars Marcussen’s research has concentrated on the issue of development, partly in the context of the developing countries, and partly in the field of the history of architecture and culture as presented in this book.

In 2004 Lars Marcussen received the N.L. Høyen medal for his substantial contribution to the understanding of the universe of architecture.