Preface

“We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us,” said Sir Winston Churchill in his speech to the meeting in the House of Lords, October 28, 1943, requesting that the House of Commons bombed out in May 1941 be rebuilt exactly as before. Churchill believed that the configuration of space and even its scarcity in the House of Commons played a greater role in effectual parliament activity. In his view, “giving each member a desk to sit at and a lid to bang” would be unreasonable, since “the House would be mostly empty most of the time; whereas, at critical votes and moments, it would fill beyond capacity, with members spilling out into the aisles, giving a suitable sense of crowd and urgency,” [Churchill]. The old Houseof Commons was rebuilt in 1950 in its original form, remaining insufficient to seat all its members. The way you take this story depends on how you value your dwelling space – our appreciation of space is sensuous rather than intellectual and, therefore, relys on the individual culture and personality. It often remains as a persistent birthmark of the land use practice we learned from the earliest days of childhood. In contrast to the individual valuation of space, we all share its immediate apprehension, “our embodied experience” (Kellert 1994), in view of Churchill’s intuition that the influence of the built environment on humans deserves much credit. Indeed, the space we experience depends on our bodies – it is what makes the case for near and a far, a left and a right (Merleau-Ponty 1962). On the small scale of actual human hands-on activity, the world we see is identified as the objective external world from which we can directly grasp properties of the objects of perception. A collection of empirically discovered principles concerning the familiar space in our immediate neighborhood is known as Euclidean geometry formulated in an ideal axiomatic form by Euclid circa 300 BC. However, it was demonstrated by Hatfield (2003) that on a large scale our visual space differs from physical space and exhibits contractions in all three dimensions with increasing distance from the observer. Furthermore, the experienced features of this contraction (including the apparent convergence of lines in visual experience that are produced from physically parallel stimuli in ordinary viewing conditions)