Dal "frammezzo" all’in-between. Un archetipo "tra" spazio mistico e spazio architettonico

From "between" to "in-between". An archetype "between" mystic and architectural space - The simple preposition "between" has always fuelled the mystic and ontological imagination. In the book Tree of Life compiled by the cabalist Hayyim Vital, a prototype of this tradition is the idea of divine "contraction", the first act of God that left space for the creation of the worlds. Similar concepts can be found in the ontology of Heidegger, where one of the closest words to "being" is "between", the median line marking the difference between "entity" and "being", between "world" and "thing". For Norberg-Schulz, "between" is also the point where Heidegger and Kahn meet. It will be remembered that the latter saw the origin of all inspiration in the "hreshold between silence and ligh"’. However, even the material poetic of Kahn was informed by this archetype, as can be seen from his buildings and from the many "failed masterpieces" from which a paradigm of architectural space emerges. In the Meeting House of the Salk Institute or in the Hurva Synagogue, the space in-between becomes the primary core of meaning. Another theoretician of the in-between hypothesis is Kurokawa, whose "philosophy of symbiosis" unravels in an essentially intermediate cultural and architectural space.

Lorenzo Giacomini, Dal "frammezzo" all’in-between. Un archetipo "tra" spazio mistico e spazio architettonico in "TERRITORIO" 48/2009, pp 70-76, DOI: 10.3280/TR2009-048012