Space has always been an obsession for architecture, not least how to conceptualize and to express it in language to non-architects. While there is no doubt that the discipline of architecture is based on the production of space, discord exists on what architectural/urban space is and what qualities are associated to it; on how it can be designed and how it could/should be perceived. Architects are specialists on space, but their knowledge is more tacit in form and hard to communicate by words. While architects’ discourse has been rather circular and self-contained, and the gained knowledge partially obliterated by the many changes of style and interests of architectural discourse, cognitive sciences and in particular cognitive linguistics have brought forward in the last decades a huge number of studies on the spatial nature of our thinking and of language. These findings have only seldomly been discussed by architects and are still encountered with suspicion by the latter, not least because of their tendency to quantify this knowledge and experience. While architects want to speak about quality, the sciences here seem rather to talk about quantitative analyses.

With this conference we aim to discuss with experts from the fields of cognitive sciences how space can be conceptualized and communicated, and how these findings can be integrated into architecture and its teaching. This calls for a bridge between architecture and the cognitive sciences and for the question how this bridge should span between the two shores and on a secular spatial “void”.