Customer Reviews

Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience

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This book was one of several books I studied to better understand the role of place in architecture and interior design. It helped me understand the importance of working with clients to understand the meanings they infer from the environment around them. In the book, Tuan highlights the importance of meaning and an insider's view. He describes place as humanized space. The contrast of open space with enclosed, comforting areas enhances both. As a person's emotional bond to a space increases, so do familiarity, comfort, and the sense of insideness. Without personal control over space, this emotional bond is slow to develop. To create place, Tuan suggests that memorable architecture should strenghen our memories, enhance the self, and provide layers of meaning to a space.

This is a seminal text which offers insight into how we are awakened as children to the complex world which exists around, how we navigate, read and atribute meaning to the abstract spaces and places within which we exist. It opens a door to the genetic knowledge which is embedded in everything which exists around and how through our senses even the preception of time and space can be warped by experience.

"The aspects of things that are
most important for us are hidden
because of their simplicity and
familiarity"
L. Wittgenstein


As a thesis [here I stand] it is a delight, fundamental and engaging. It illuminates a wide and fertile field critical to an understanding how we are rooted to place and space.

There are books you read, then there are those which - live with you - you keep them close and consult them often.

In "Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience," Tuan provides a descriptive account of the concepts "space" and "place," drawing on the work of phenomenologists, anthropologists, psychologists, geographers, and others. He grounds his analysis in a structuralist framework, using anthropological research to illustrate how our experiences of space and place can "transcend cultural particularities" (Tuan 1977, p. 5). Tuan provides an original and intriguing discussion of a wide range of topics, such as the relationship between space and place, on the one hand, and myths, architecture, time, religion, and cognition, on the other. I would highly recommend this work to anyone interested in human geography, cultural geography, urban geography, urban studies, and to anyone interested in gaining a better understanding of the importance of space and place for our lives.

at the risk of sounding needlessly abusive, this book is a stylistic nightmare. paragraphs shift focus from sentence to sentence, and the sentences themselves are ungodly abominations of meandering text and pretentious phrase-creation. looking at any one page, you might easily be fooled into thinking that the format makes sense.
this would be a huge mistake on your part.
the word "elaboration" has no meaning to our mutual friend mr. tuan, who appears to believe that his vague descriptions of abstract concepts need no further explanation, and so moves on to slaughter the next concept at a pace that can only be described as frantic.
frenetic would work too, i suppose.
i like frantic better, though.