In Fire and Memory, Luis Fernández-Galiano argues that primitive models of spatial organization are based on the handling and relation of energy as a thermal instrument.1 On the one hand, igneous architecture is organized around fire, built around the hearth, protected, arranged into sheltered areas, compartmentalized, and characteristically defined by a volumetric hierarchy. Most emblematically represented by Frank Lloyd Wright’s residential architecture, the different parts of these buildings are organized and expressed in line with their thermal performance, with chimneys playing a central compositional role. On the other hand, there is heliomorphism, where the sun defines spatial organization and structure, such as in the work of Le Corbusier and the Brazilians in the middle of the twentieth century. In heliomorphic architecture, an extra, intermediate space between the interior and exterior often passively regulates temperature by administering light, heat, and air. This is also an indefinite space that is elastic, generous, and becomes a tangible experience of multi-directionality.
In the tropics, these two models can coincide, fuse, be rejected, and redefined in order to provide new types of spaces that are more in tune with the challenges of our time. As a site of architectural production, buildings in the tropics can simultaneously incorporate glass, brise-soleils, latticework, chimneys, eaves, patios, balconies, pergolas, canopies, and zaguans. All of these elements can be used throughout the day, as well as throughout the year. The lack of seasons results in a different idea of the interior that questions where shelter begins and ends, its limits and thresholds. Enclosure might be transparent but exist without glass. Thickness and depth can be created not by adding mass and volume, but by creating transitions.
Although the tropics are generally considered to enjoy year-round spring-like weather, its architecture needs to be designed for uncertain and unexpected climatic conditions and events. In a single day, temperatures can vary by more than 20 degrees Celsius, which not only stresses materials, but also requires non-mechanical, architectural devices to manage. The appropriate architecture for this territory therefore calls for variations in managing and defining boundaries. Within this context, intermediate spaces turn border zones or places of transit into living spaces, which create the experience of perambulating between indoor and outdoor conditions. At the same time, these spaces function as temperature regulators, protecting the interior from variations of heat or cold.
Architecture is like a Trojan horse: it contains hidden capabilities, ones that go beyond questions of form, that determine its way of unfolding, housing, and allowing encounters, exchanges, and relations. Although intermediate spaces are born from the need to regulate climate, they can also have unexpected, social side effects. They can, for instance, serve as semi-public spaces between the street and the interior of a building. This typically non-programmatic, “leftover” space gives the city a different condition by offering pedestrians or residents new places to gather comfortably. This surplus from climatic regulation can be produced as simply as with an eave, a screen, or even a platform.
Intermediate spaces erase the border between private and public, the city and its architecture. Intermediate spaces are inherently generous. By responding to a climatic need, they are capable of delivering expanding space. They create an open architecture.
This approach makes obligatory contact with the city, giving a different meaning to geography and to architecture’s reciprocity with the urban context. By creating a conversation between typology, form, climate, matter, geography, available technology, and local cultures, it also describes architecture’s territory. In other words, it operates on and responds to multiple scales, beyond the site itself.
In an architecture made of intermediate spaces, architecture is not resolved through the articulation of the dichotomy of the interior and exterior. Instead, space is organized through the use of specific elements that can produce ambiguous spaces. Specific ambiguity, then, is the action—the experience—of perceiving, organizing, and occupying space in the tropics.
Specific ambiguity is kinetic, shifting, and liquid, and therefore difficult to record in photographs or graphically. This type of space stimulates movement, or rather is conceived from movement itself, both by the physical effort of who or what occupies it, as well as by the role of the air and the sun. It can also construct a dynamic space to absorb and respond to various social needs and their shifting ways of occupying the exterior. The porosity and elasticity of tropical space creates an idea of space that is based on relations. It coincides with, and reacts to, ways of occupying space that relate to the climate in its many daily variations. It uses pergolas, awnings, courtyards, thresholds, zaguans, and balconies to redescribe the outdoors and inform spatial experience as a narrative, multicolored thread.
Specific ambiguity is marked, defined, powered, and restricted by the tropical climate and geography. It is based on architectural form’s ability to assume and respond to those confluences and contradictions. It adapts and changes with it. In other words, architectural form assembles, constructs, translates, gathers, and distributes the confluence of places and ideas, opportunities and restrictions, changes and traditions, utopia and history, instinct and discourse, matter and space, geography and territory, time and eventualities. Form, in this sense, operates as an instrument of negotiation, and as a strategy supported by models of primitive material organization, such as stereotomy and tectonics. Stereotomy here inserts material continuity into space through the definition of the surface, and tectonics is both regulatory and administrative when existing in a territory where architecture can be freed from the need for thermal insulation.
If architectural elements typically contribute to the composition of the whole, specific ambiguity plays with appearances. Walls are made of pilotis; roofs are without facades; edges are porous; circulation spaces serve as living areas; partitions are dynamic; enclosures are lightweight. This is tropical space: it expands and contracts as necessary. Structure takes priority over partitions. Beams, columns, and roofs are organized primitively and sequentially. Tropical space consists of layers that need to be discovered. The initial experience of being in the presence of tropical architecture occurs at this ambiguous boundary. It is a space that needs to be unveiled, patiently observed, explored. The architecture of tropical ideas is located halfway between states and conditions. It also documents and describes the territory through codes, instruments, and ambivalent spatial alphabets, based on its effects, perforations, frames, and indications.
Luis Fernández-Galiano, Fire and Memory (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2000).
