ABSTRACT
The walls of the Ronchamp chapel, as well as many other inhabitable walls, are not to be confused with service cores, although they share to a certain extent a similar programme when located in a building. Service cores are mainly defined functionally through the separation of ancillary and secondary areas from the main spaces into a concentrated and efficient core, integrating circulation systems, toilets, M&E and other supplementary services. The walls discussed here, on the contrary, are defined conceptually and spatially, integrating part of the
main programme of a project and usually acquiring a particular meaning in the understanding of the whole building. These physical spaces are considered primordial and during the design stage clearly thought of as means to integrate as many usually space-centred activities as possible and certainly key part of the programme of the building. In what Greg Lynn defines as ‘blebs’, for example, inhabitable conditions emerge through geometrical contrivances in which ‘pockets of space [are] formed when a surface intersects itself, making a captured space’.18 These marginal and relatively small pockets
