Modern tropical architecture: medicalisation of space in early twentieth-century Philippines

Extract

In the interwar years European historians and critics of architecture tried to assimilate science into architecture and arts. For example Sigfried Giedion's Space, Time, and Architecture (1941) attempted to bring Einsteinian spacetime into architectural theory, while Nikolaus Pevsner's An Outline of European Architecture (c. 1943) used space as a criterion to differentiate architecture from other art forms. These brought to the idea of ‘space’ a distinctly modern meaning, making it a universal signifier; whereas in the last decade, architectural historians have argued for the historical specificity of space and a deeper examination of the social and spatial practices embedded in the making of space. This study inquires into the atemporal readings of space, using Lefebvre's theory on the production of space by ‘interested subjects’.