It is common today to use the spatial layouts of galleries and museums to re-inforce critical orthodoxies about art, for example, by matching historical narratives to spatial sequencing, so that movement through spaces becomes movement through an argument, or assigning canonic works to visually prominent locations, so that the canon becomes a visual as well as intellectual experience. Here it is argued that this ‘didactic’ use of space to express pre-given meanings is only a small part of its potential to add to the display of art objects. Explaining the configurational approach to space and proposing a spatial definition of the aesthetic, we show, through examples, that spatial design exploiting spatial configuration in an aesthetic way, can be used to create new meanings, rather than reproduce orthodoxies, both through the making of spaces to show objects and the making of spaces by objects. Unexpectedly, evidence that such ‘aesthetic’ spaces can alter the way visitors move through displays and so experience works of art, can be found by the careful observation of visitor movement and behaviour.
Bill Hillier is Professor of Architecture and Urban Morphology in the University of London, Chairman of the Bartlett School of Graduate Studies, Director of the Space Syntax Laboratory in University College London and a director of Space Syntax Limited. He was the pioneer of ‘space syntax’ in the nineteen seventies, and authored The Social Logic of Space (Cambridge University Press, 1984, 1990) with Julienne Hanson, Space is the Machine’ (CUP 1996), and over a hundred and fifty publications on space and other aspects of architectural and urban theory. Current research interests are in space syntax as a theory of the city, the relation between cities and urban societies, the syntax of generative buildings, the links between objective spatial laws and spatial cognition, the aesthetics of space, and the space syntax paradigm as a philosophical position.
Moderation: Professor Michael Astroh