ABSTRACT
In Japanese, ‘design’ is madori (間取り), ‘grasping space’. The following attempts to do just that, to grasp what ‘space’ means when seen through the prism of another language. The exegesis of the term and its cognates employs a twofold ‘methodology’: it locates them in the context of writings on art and architecture; and uses what might be called ‘an etymological archaeology’, digging beneath the surface of the pictographic content of the Chinese characters (kanji) that ‘represent’ the terms. These two exegetical strategies reveal nuances of meaning missing in the one-for-one equivalences given in dictionaries, and uncover ways of seeing and thinking architectural space that differ fundamentally from those structured by the English language.
