Designing Spatial Culture

This new book Designing Spatial Culture investigates a dialogic spatial position formed between the habitation of space and a diversified cultural realm. This decolonized proposition binds and positions human activity and experience framing its histories, currency and future. Whilst the book distinguishes between the conditions of the existing urban/ architecture/ interior canon, it embraces a new agency of space, showcasing the encounters, assemblies and designs that shape human culture and the cultural forms of the built environment. This extended spatial study reveals and clarifies how space creates and supports cultural insight through design, behaviour and community. The investigation is an amalgam of urban design, architectural and interior form and uses a new cultural framework to explain the spatial contexts within the built environment, architecture and the situated interior. An expanded range of disciplinary fields are used (social sciences, geography, urbanology) to help underpin and document the diversity of spatial habitats. The book aims to recentre the spatial encounter by deepening the understanding and meaning(s) of space through a curation of global cultures, spatial hierarchy and ethnographical practice. The culture formed by space and the methods of designing space are reassembled to demonstrate a powerful and interconnected relationship that is evident in all patterns and presentations of spatial agency across the world. The book positions spatial culture as an inherent part of everyday life, but also as a hidden regulator and driver of community where social justice and the advancement of civilisation are celebrated. Using an inclusive perspective, the book collates archival and contemporary spatial contexts which helps to validate a new warranty for society and the earth, actively contributing to the development of new, sustainable and ecological habitats.

The book introduces and documents the experience of space into a new inclusive cultural framework that connects global cultures and design binding geographies, cities, architecture and interior inscapes forming a new definition for space and place. The philosophical narrative for the chapters and the book centre on the diversity of the human experience and the cultural terrain formed by different types of space. The book unpicks the duality of spatial cultures through an examination of the physical and digital aspects of space (cities, buildings and interiors). Further ethereal cultures (atmosphere, character, light, sound etc.) are woven through the investigation strengthening spatial constructivism and help demonstrate how subtle creative cultures flourish. Primarily utilising architectural and interior realms, the book explores the origins of the spatial environment, forming a dialogue that explains the transmission of cultural reference across the globe. It harnesses and rationalises the relationship between people and their environments redefining knowledge for a new era of creative and cultural exchange.

Using authoritative case studies, the book examines many locations and spaces, ranging from new urban landscapes, historical domestic spaces and contemporary architecture. It embraces the most lavish and flamboyant to the most simplistic and minimal, establishing a connected cultural narrative. It seeks out the critical components that help ignite and locate human spatial culture by focusing on the use and organisation of space, allowing the spatial elements and the proximity of experience to orientate new cultural encounters. The book shifts the focus in the spatial realm from an object-based experience (where space is filled with things) to a more complete immersive experience (combining physical and digital). It documents the lived urban environment highlighting the proxemic and tactile experiences moving across trans-scalar constructed terrains which harness the cultural diversity that completes the spatialised experience.