From Spatial Feeling to Functionalist Design

In the fall of 1953 a 55-year-old professor of architecture, named Steen Eiler Rasmussen, arrived as a visitor to MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, where he gave a series of public lectures under the title “Experiencing Architecture.” ¹ Drawing large crowds of architecture students intrigued by his vividly sensory, especially tactile, accounts of historical and modern architecture, these lectures formed the basic outline for his well-known book of 1959, Experiencing Architecture, first published in Danish in 1957 as Om at Opleve Arkitektur. While Experiencing Architecture has become an international classic in architectural pedagogy, few have considered its role in reorienting the architectural historiography of baroque “space.” In fact, the book constructed an entire set of experiences around the baroque, both narrowly and broadly understood, that profoundly countered the dominant, largely de-materialized and spatial account of the baroque within modernist architectural discourse. Experiencing Architecture, in fact, drew on much of the same baroque pedigree as Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture (1941), including Heinrich Wölfflin’s historical hermeneutics and Albert Erich Brinckmann’s empathetic accounts of “plasticity” and “space” (Plastik und Raum, 1922). It invoked these categories, however, not to construct a teleology from an imagined baroque synthesis to a modernist “space-time,” but rather to relativize and de-mystify these categories, both within seventeenth-century European architecture and within an open-ended set of modernist “experiences.” The buildings and piazzas of Roman baroque “space,” in all their tactile and theatrical materiality, become for Rasmussen the subtle foil for the alternative aesthetic experience of such cities as Delft. By de-mystifying the perceptual psychology of “spatial feeling” that had surrounded the Roman baroque and by contrasting Rome with the very different cities of the northern baroque, Rasmussen’s work opened up a pragmatic and empirical understanding of seventeenth-century European architecture that aimed, simultaneously, to de-mystify architectural modernism.