Architecture and Spatial Culture

Built space supports our daily habits and our membership of communities, organizations, institutions, or social formations. Architecture and Spatial Culture argues that architecture matters because it makes the settings of our life intelligible, so that we can sustain or creatively transform them.

As technological and social innovations allow us to overcome spatial constraints to communication, cooperation, and exchange, so the architecture of embodied experience reflects independent cultural choices and human values. The analysis of a wealth of examples, from urban environments to workplaces and museums, shows that built space functions pedagogically, inducing us to specific ways of seeing, understanding, and feeling, and supporting distinct patterns of cooperation and life in common.

Architecture and Spatial Culture is about the principles that underpin the design and inhabitation of space. It also serves as an introduction to Space Syntax, a descriptive theory used to model the human functions of layouts. Thus, it addresses architects, students of architecture and all those working in disciplines that engage the design of the built environment and its social effects.

John Peponis is a professor of architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology whose faculty he joined in 1989. He develops analytical concepts and methods for the description of built space and the measurement of its human affordances and functions. He was a part-time member of the faculty of the National Technical University of Athens, 1992–2005. As a researcher and lecturer at the Bartlett/UCL (1978–1988), he was among the co-creators of Space Syntax. He has collaborated with Kokkinou and Kourkoulas Architects since 1992 as an architectural consultant.