Toward a Semantic Notion of Space

Abstract

1) Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Geistige und Koerperliche A rbeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970). Despite the claim of traditional functionalism, rarely is form entirely derivable from function. Both conscious and subconscious ideas about space play important roles in designers' conceptions of products, including their intended forms, functions, and meanings in the physical environment. Unable to directly penetrate this subconsciousness, we start with ordinary language the language by which people describe what they are designing, buying, using, and discarding, as well as what sense such objects make in their lives. From there we proceed to a way of designing semantically intelligible products. Although Alfred Sohn-Rethel was not concerned with either design or language, his distinction between physical and mental abstractions1 is important. Both abstractions describe processes of conceptualization but have fundamentally different consequences. Physical (material or real) abstractions begin with observerindependent physical qualities and proceed to accounts of increasingly general commonalities, none of which refer to those who accomplish the abstracting. In contrast, mental abstractions begin with perceptions and proceed to increasingly deeper levels of understanding. We agree with Sohn-Rethel's distinction and, as applied to space, associate the physical with a geometric model and the mental with a semantic model, which we wish to develop. Evidence for both models is found in language.