The perceived schism between spatial concepts and spatial experience has long been a subject of study not only by architects, but also philosophers, geographers, visual artists and cultural historians.

In this seminar, we focused upon ways through which architecture converts abstract cultural notions about the world into spatial orderings, with an emphasis on diagrams, floor plans and maps. Through a series of lectures, readings and creative drawing exercises, we examined how maps become territories, and explore architecture’s role in negotiating contradictions between the concepts that we use to define the physical world and the way we experience it through our senses. Throughout the semester, we studied the narrative and symbolic aspects of spatial relations and questioned the terms and techniques with which architectural space embodies different views, values, and cultural mythologies. We also focused on the relationship between the representational logic according to which space relations are determined and translated into physical form, and experimented with the overlay of different types of conceptual and visual logic.