“Whatever space and time mean, place and occasion mean more. For space in the image of man is place, and time in the image of man is occasion”

— Aldo van Dyke

What makes spaces memorable?

There’s no precise answer. Nevertheless, there are certain inherent qualities and characteristics of any space which impact the shared human experience. The horror and sorrow experienced by people around the world on seeing the images and hearing the reports of the disastrous fire at Notre Dame in Paris in 2019 speaks to how deep emotional connections can run when considering both ordinary and landmark places.

Let’s start with what is a place. The notion here is that place connotes a physical space occupied for some intended use by people. A place can vary in its intended and de facto uses; however, space is intended for use by an individual, a small group, large groups, and so on.

Whether active or passive, our existence in physical space is a given; when we talk about place, we invoke intentionality or purpose. If intentional, then we assume “active,” and thereby can assert expectations – expectations inevitably concerning other people to be encountered or avoided in the space. In other words, we all have expectations about the place we are in or are going to. In the past tense, expectations are memories.

Places are, in human experience, fundamentally relational – as in always having a relationship to the human experience in the collective sense.  Place is shared, a function of community. “Place”, per se, assumes an underlying trust - the place is, in fact, about serving the perported relational purpose, and this is borne out through the experience of people encountering each other in the place. In the sense that place is by its nature shared, it is necessarily imbued with the community’s values. As such, physical spaces are inherently part of our culture, and inherently imbued with meaning.

When we talk about how “culture is what we make of the world” (credit: Ken Meyers, Mars Hill Audio, © 2013), we can speak to the stuff of the world used by us to make things and speak to the meaning we attribute to the things that we make. Meaning has its roots in the collective experience. Each of us might seek meaning through our individual experiences, but our unique, personal experiences are always related to others’ experiences.

There is a significant body of research which provides evidence that the human brain is wired to understand the intentions behind other humans’ actions (more about this topic to come). So, at a most basic level, our intentions are linked to our shared experiences and, therefore, meaning. When designers consider the nature of space, they ought to consider the nature of behavior, intentions, experience, and meaning as related to the design of the physical spaces created through their work.