Dissolution of the architectural program: Interspatiality

This research is discussing the concept of interspatiality in architecture within scope of the relationship between the building program and the social space. Spatial discourse; mostly examined through philosophical and sociological disciplines in the literature, is an important key concept for architecture due to architecture's reason of being. In today's populated cities, with dense and rapid metropolitan life, we perceive a constant flux of change over the built environment. Far away from the basic sheltering functions, architecture became an economical, quantitative discipline; produced and consumed in massive amounts. Intersections and confrontations of different spatiality's in the dense city both arise threshold discussions as well as creating new relationship bonds between architecture and other mediums in this sense. In this context, this research started for decoding the social space which creating an interspatial environment in and between architectures. As a matter of fact that the social space is the fundamental life vein of the buildings, embracing the building program only as a quantitative input, derived from the economical perspectives is a misevaluation. Beyond the discussions about genres, styles or form and image of the architecture; the built space as a social space, rising questions and motivating about a literature search of the social space, heterogeneity, heterotopias and nonplaces. Taking Foucault's ideas into consideration about relational values of space, Interspatiality arise as a programmatic, relational discourse instead of a figurative discourse. Analyzed through the research within architectural programming, interfaces between building-city, building- user, building- program are questioned. During the research, a dissolution state of the architectural program and constitution of new space – program relationships examined. Lefebvre's ideas about the social space, mainly defined the theoretical perspective of this research. As Lefebvre said that the social production routines and needs are shaping the built space, architects, used to create standards, typologies and dimensional rules to generate efficient programs are questioned in recent researches. Architects tend to measure those production routines and searching ways to adapt the change of the social space. A disregarding attitude of the social space results as nonplaces with strict societal rules. While Lefebvre is incarcerating the architect on the conceived space, creating social spaces may lie on the dissolution and re-thinking the architectural program, derived from the social space. This research examines, the cases that architect is dissolve the programmatic standards; for creating interspatiality. During the research, constitution and dissolution of the architectural program and interspatiality examined in terms of the boundary elements, building framework and threshold spaces. The formation process of the architectural program examined through historical and non-architectural spatial configurations to the attempts of quantizing the architectural program. Besides the quantization efforts of the Modernist era, several examples from the key figures, discussed as an emerged architectural approaches of creating fluid spaces. Interstitial spaces as radical programmatically discourses in the representational space also examined through Reyner Banham's works and other representational unbuilt architectures of Archigram Group and Cedric Price. Within the dissolution of the architectural program, two main approaches for creating interspatial environments emerged during the research. Lobotomic Interspatiality and Action based Interspatiality. A Lobotomical approach used by the architects to discriminate the inside of the building and the outside of the building in terms of use. Diagram tool and its ability to analyze data to generate the form are mainly characterizing this approach. As a representational tool to reveal the connections between parts of the architectural program, diagram seen as a state of flux, an interspatial environment that a building will be crystalized in this flux as a result. Diagram as a representative tool, enables the architect, melting the building program, building form, site related inputs in one single medium. This approach tends to create interspatiality between the interior realm and the exterior realm. While this method may be useful in terms of creating new forms and new building- user relationships, it is accused to give a redundant priority to the figure and may resulted with dysfunctionality on the long term. The overdesign probability of this method creates this dysfunctionality issue due to lack of functional variations. On the other hand; action based approach, concentrate its tectonics within the production of social spaces. Social space as an infrastructure, polyvalence in terms of use and programmatic juxtaposition theories emerged within the actional approach. During the research, social space as an infrastructure and polyvalence, examined through Aldo Van Eyck and Herman Hertzberger's cases, who are suggested a new type of functionality in the Modernist Era. Polyvalence is generating an interspatiality between the architectural program and the space usage. Polyvalent cases are flexible, adaptable and multi purposed in terms of use, but concrete in the figure. This approach encourages users to be more reactive and create their social environments. An unfinished infrastructure, provided by the architects, helping users to constitute or modify their own space usage. Building cases given in this chapter are still in service with several modifications, but without losing the general character of their architecture. This attribute is a result of an action based approach, giving users a social flexibility. With this approach, created spaces tend to amalgamate with each other and creating interspatial environments with the help of providing different usages of an architectural element and defining threshold area functions. A stair for example both used as a circulation element, as well as a gathering point, working place, listening place etc. Besides the different usage of an architectural element, creating threshold areas and defining threshold area functions is the second characteristic of this approach. Connecting closed areas with open areas with threshold functions creates an interspatial area; both used as a transitional point as well as a different social connections emerging during the usage. While those transitional points used properly, it is hard to define their quantitative properties with a traditional programmatic approach. Programmatic juxtaposition analyzed as a newer discourse of action based interspatiality, examined through Bernard Tschumi's cases during the research. Fragmenting the architectural program and shuffling the fragments with spaces, creates an interspatiality of different possibilities. There are no strictly defined functions, instead supporting elements placed for the events constituted by social space. Programmatic juxtaposition creates action based interspatiality as the occurrence of the action is unpredictable. Similar to Polyvalence, space as a supporting object, may appear and encourage scenery In our age of globalization and digitalization, whilst the lobotomical approach creating debates over the image, the action based approach seems to appear as a fundamental approach of creating the social space. The ease of data collection from the users with the help of computers opened a working field for architects Consequently, the appearance of the heterogeneous interspatiality may lie on the dissolution and re-thinking the architectural program.