Space is a notion rather hard to comprehend when one starts to dig a bit deeper.

At first one can approach space by its measure-ability. We human beings feel a profound need to master space. By applying a measuring unit, for instance a meter or an inch, we can simply measure (a) space. Since we learned to count and with some very basic mathematics, using a x, y and z direction it works very well to locate any point in space. This is all about a very Cartesian way of modeling space.

As an engineering student I felt it was very useful to measure space and its physical counterpart called material (since there where there is no space, there is material), as sand, stone, water, etc. We can start to project to build something in space, which can contain space, or built a physical limit like a fence, in order to isolate a space.

The word space stems from the Latin word spatium. One can imagine the very first use of the word space in language, probably soon linked with an idea of measuring, or is it rather the other way around? First the notion of measuring space and secondly the development of language. What so ever, the human beings must have developed a notion of space before the development of language and measure-ability. There must first have been a notion of a hunting space, of a protective space, like a cave. A hunter has to estimate the distance between himself and his prey, but also be aware of the limit of his hunting area. One can assume that at the root of the very first primitive cultures the notion of space existed already.

The above mentioned opposition space/material has been even superposed to the field of language: in a text we use a “space” between the words of a phrase. One can consider space all the surface of a support which is not filled with material like words and images.

Music can be spacious. I noticed that some slow Indian music, with certain instruments producing slowly changing frequencies, sounds spacious, provoking images of a slowly streaming river landscapes or slowly passing boats blowing their horns while leaving the harbor. By visiting many cathedrals I experienced the long reverberation of sounds in these stone-build huge churches. For that reason composers opted for a slow tempo as soon as they composed music to be (re)produced in big churches. By the conditioning of the brain, by exposure to spaces with a big reverberation, one develops apparently the faculty of finding music more or less spacious.

Out in space, there is no air, so there is no sound, so there is no music, not even spacious music, but there are waves and rays and other forms of energy and there is gravity, due to the presence of material; all also pre-conditions of Architecture like our notion of space.