Introduction
 

Architecture is a mode of critical spatial inquiry and practice

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The study of space in its various guises and conceptions is central to the education of an architect. Spatial form, spatial relationships, the passage between the interior and exterior environments, and choreographed movement in time and space are fundamental aspects of interior space and central to the architectural experience. The philosopher Gaston Bachelard coined the term “intimate immensity” to describe the paradoxical and simultaneous qualities of intimate and vast space in his seminal rumination on memory and domesticity, The Poetics of Space. For Bachelard, the term refers to the “imagining consciousness” or what might be described as contemplative space, as in a state of reverie, a memory, or a poetic image instead of a physical condition (Bachelard, 184). However, for this project, the intent is to reconsider the seemingly contradictory term in light of embodied space and experience.
 

The architect and writer Robert McCarter is prescient in this regard. In his “Introduction” to The Space Within, he makes a distinctly Bachelardian observation: “The interior experience of rooms that are composed of a nesting of spaces is at once intimate and immense, connecting up to the cosmos at the same moment as it grounds us in the tactile touch” (McCarter, 9). He goes on to say that this results “From architects being deeply involved in the design of interior spaces that possess the quality of both immensity, connecting us to earth and sky... and intimacy, surrounding us with the appropriately scaled surfaces and details that we engage at first hand, and which impart to immense spaces an intimate,
embodied scale” (McCarter, 10). This is the focus of the second design project—an investigation of interiority as an intrinsic aspect of architectural space, as well as an introduction to several conceptions of architectural space such as temenos, megarons, enfilades, Loos’ Raumplan (plan of volumes), and Le Corbusier’s plan libre (free plan).