Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience

by Yi-Fu Tuan

Book Overview

In this book, geographer Yi-Fu Tuan considers the ways in which people feel and think about space and place. Place is security, he suggests, and space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0816608083
• ISBN13: 9780816608089
• Release Date: January 1977
• Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
• Length: 235 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Great book, great service

I've bought de book Space and Place, by Yi-Fu Tuan. I live in Brazil and the book got here in the best shape, carefully raped, and earlyer tha promissed.

'to increase the burden of awareness'

This is a seminal text which offers insight into how we are awakened as children to the complex world which exists around, how we navigate, read and atribute meaning to the abstract spaces and places within which we exist. It opens a door to the genetic knowledge which is embedded in everything which exists around and how through our senses even the preception of time and space can be warped by experience. "The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity" L. Wittgenstein As a thesis [here I stand] it is a delight, fundamental and engaging. It illuminates a wide and fertile field critical to an understanding how we are rooted to place and space. There are books you read, then there are those which - live with you - you keep them close and consult them often.

The phenomenology of space and place

In "Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience," Tuan provides a descriptive account of the concepts "space" and "place," drawing on the work of phenomenologists, anthropologists, psychologists, geographers, and others. He grounds his analysis in a structuralist framework, using anthropological research to illustrate how our experiences of space and place can "transcend cultural particularities" (Tuan 1977, p. 5). Tuan provides an original and intriguing discussion of a wide range of topics, such as the relationship between space and place, on the one hand, and myths, architecture, time, religion, and cognition, on the other. I would highly recommend this work to anyone interested in human geography, cultural geography, urban geography, urban studies, and to anyone interested in gaining a better understanding of the importance of space and place for our lives.

The Importance of Meaning in Architecture

This book was one of several books I studied to better understand the role of place in architecture and interior design. It helped me understand the importance of working with clients to understand the meanings they infer from the environment around them. In the book, Tuan highlights the importance of meaning and an insider's view. He describes place as humanized space. The contrast of open space with enclosed, comforting areas enhances both. As a person's emotional bond to a space increases, so do familiarity, comfort, and the sense of insideness. Without personal control over space, this emotional bond is slow to develop. To create place, Tuan suggests that memorable architecture should strenghen our memories, enhance the self, and provide layers of meaning to a space.