The swimming pool. The tennis court. The dance studio. These large performance spaces have origins in Europe, but they have been proliferated by American capitalism to be the new modern and civic spaces for the masses. Now, these athletic spaces are omnipresent in most parts of the world. They are large void rooms, sparsely decorated, that represent a form of total architecture.  Perhaps the roof or the ground is decorated. Or maybe there are glazings on the wall that look out onto an empty suburban field. They are three-dimensional spaces, usually unoccupied, that have a single function: the coordination of particular human movements and athletics.

These athletic spaces all have one thing in common: the notion of autonomous or “pure” space, dictated by scale, markings, and the treatment of the ground surface. In many ways, they are the last “modernist” spaces of the contemporary era, an era in which flexible spaces, urban density, and multipurpose buildings are omnipresent. (The “typical plan” is occupied by interior buildouts and the stuffs of modern life.) The modernist, Miesian dream of pure architectural volumes, without much regard to the occupied, cluttered, and messy “lived space”, lives on in the natatorium, the tennis court, and particularly the dance studio. The Miesian collage for Chicago’s McCormick Place comes to mind.
​

​The contemporary dance studio is an abstract spatial condition, the most “machine-like” and artificial of all the athletic spaces. There is a notion of total interiority, without connection to the exterior world, and a total focus and occupation of the self(body) with the ground(space), especially in relation to a mirror. The dance studio plan is sparse and minimal, requiring only a sound floor surface, adequate lighting, a sound system, and possibly a mirror and a bar. The spatial dimensions are dictated by the number of people utilizing the studio and the dimensions of armspan. This “void space” is a measure of the potentiality of dance and the “performance”, which will fill the void space with program, activity, emotion, and excitement. 

The only program requirements for a dance practice space is to contain the teacher, the students, and the range of movement exercises of a particular class. 

What is the meaning of architecture for a program that has no specific needs and requirements? What if the most important architectural consideration for a dance space is the floor (ground)?

The floor, according to Elements of Architecture, is a customary technology to negotiate gravity and the upright body. Every step is magnetized on the surface, and the floor is the one architectural element that is always touching the body. In all architectural projects, the floor is the starting point or the datum - the origin at which all structures, activities, and events take place. The “floor” is culturally inhabited, a technical response to make the earth’s surface more habitable or useful. All movement, and all architecture, begins as a flat or ground condition; even parametricism cannot change gravity. The ground is always tangible, and always in relation to the body. The floor is space-defining, an autonomous element that makes up architecture (without enclosure). 

In Tai Chi and Yoga, there is a stance in which the body (and arm) is connected to the ground and holding up the sky...

The counterpart of the floor(ground) is the ceiling or roof(sky). In Elements of Architecture, the ceiling and the roof are two different categories - the interior ceiling beginning as an invention of the multi-storey building. Evolving from an underside floor, to a “sealing”, to the modern false or “dropped” ceiling, to the contemporary exposed or “true” ceiling, the ceiling is a metaphor for the sky, a covered structure to define a space. Over time, it has also become thickened, through the introduction of modern processes and mechanical systems - the “dark matter” of architecture.  

If the floor is fundamental to dance, and the roof is essential to architecture, then the space in between is the defined activity space. 

In the contemporary world, it is not the argument between the historic versus the modern that is important, but rather what is place versus non-place. Just as the political distinction has shifted from the ideological left versus right to the more general and polarizing "open versus closed", architecture should embrace the new distinctions and categories that have been brought along by technological change and globalization. Sure, the old texts on aesthetics are still important and "canonical", but the more pressing matters of the age is the more purely "contemporary" sense of dislocation.
 
Today, buildings (and building types) live on the spectrum between the polarizing extremes of the domestic and the logistical (infrastructure). The domestic is the realm of the traditional home, where we see the traditional elements of architectural design (that has lasted so long, such as the kitchen, the living room, the bedroom), and the logistical is the realm of non-place, or the spaces between. As human life shifts more and more to the virtual space, individuals increasingly inhabit INFORMATION spaces, or at least the spaces of flow and transition that are very dislocated from any concrete idea or reality of place. Meanwhile, the domestic space has retreated into a primitive state, where nature and natural materials roam free (albeit with Wi-Fi connection), where there is a perception of “Non-information”, and perhaps the more egalitarian aesthetic of the “information space” recede in the background, and a kind of sumptuous hedonism takes over - a place with food, pillows, balconies, fireplaces, windows, and nice recliners. The current trend of the Japanese MUJI style, which advocates for simplicity and a return to nature, is emblematic of this worship of /emphasis on the domestic, and it stands out so starkly (and so welcoming) in a digital age. Aureli’s illustrative one-point perspective renderings, with its rendition of the platonic frames and geometries and simple finishes, is the academic powerhouse of this new emphasis on the domestic. (as is John Pawson, etc.) Other offices, whose work emphasizes the triumph of technology, scale, and information, in an attempt to capture the contemporary zeitgeist, may be Zaha Hadid Architects or Morphosis, which has predictably turned away from the domestic masses and their non-monumental considerations. 

So, in this separation between data space and domestic space, or a polarization between human space and data space, is there such a thing as a middle ground/third space? And if so, what is the primary driver for this “middle ground” or intermediate aesthetic? 

The domus or the internet...
What about the basilica?

Questions to Consider:

Environment
The Domestic Space and the Data Space both exist independent of environmental locations, in many instances. How can environmental data and environmental perception come together to form this new intermediate understanding?

Interior
If 90% of human activity takes place indoors, what does indoors mean? 

Activity / Active Programs
There are activities you cannot do at home, and things you cannot do in data spaces. What are those things which are so vital to the formation of society’s third spaces? What third spaces have withstood the onslaught of technological progress? 

What are the new and real community spaces? 
Are there community spaces that are more domestic or more data-driven?