ABSTRACT
Volumetric space is difficult to deal with. Our attention is too often drawn to the horizontal and vertical features that define a space more than the three- and four-dimensional volumes that are the spaces themselves. Yet, the spaces in which we exist are the fundamental medium with which designers construct and through which they give character to people’s personal, social, and cultural environments. In those environments the visual and topographic stability of ground planes, the opacity and scale of vertical planes, and the degree or sense of enclosure of overhead planes as objects are what hold our attention and guide our movement through the landscape spaces they define. Volume, as four-dimensional space, is what isn’t there and yet it is as important to the success of a design as the defining objects, if not more important. What we make useful in landscapes, architectural structures, and their interiors is volumetric space or, being even more definitive, experiential volumetric space. Movement toward, around, into, and through volumetric spaces introduces not only the aspect of time (the fourth dimension) but also our existence as we live life from moment to moment and step to step. Our movement through a landscape narrative is like reading a story one word at a time.
