Khoi writes in with more on space and film:

For a great example of effective spatial narrative in film, watch (or re-watch) Soderbergh’s underrated Out of Sight. The last act of the film is about a gang of thieves taking over a home; they’re all split up in different parts of the house, but somehow Soderbergh makes you understand exactly where they are in relation to one another. It’s something very few directors can do.

While we’re on the subject of Soderbergh, I’m reminded of this excellent appraisal A.O. Scott wrote about the director back in 2000, as Soderbergh was preparing to release Traffic. Ten years later, the article remains insightful and fresh. Here’s one of Scott’s takeaways from The Limey:

[The] director uses the plainness of the story as an opportunity to linger over telling details and explore its rich subtext. The movie, with its jump cuts and its forays into fantasy (Mr. Stamp’s character imagines the death of his antagonist many times before it happens), becomes an extended meditation on the puzzling relationship between personal and historical time. Specifically, it’s about the 60’s, a much-mythologized decade evoked not by costumed flashbacks but by the flickering shadow of Mr. Stamp, a young, brash, beautiful star of the period, in clips from one of his old movies.

Geoff Manaugh of BLDG BLOG on Bruce Willis’s John McClane in Die Hard and his exploration of Nakatomi Space:

Over the course of the film, McClane blows up whole sections of the building; he stops elevators between floors; and he otherwise explores the internal spaces of Nakatomi Plaza in acts of virtuoso navigation that were neither imagined nor physically planned for by the architects. His is an infrastructure of nearly uninhibited movement within the material structure of the building.

The spatial dynamics of films fascinate me endlessly. A few other great spatial films: The Shining, North by Northwest, and The Limey. There are surely many more. Also of interest: Steven Jacobs’s recent book The Wrong House. (via)

An audio interview [iTunes] with Sherry Turkle, who directs the Initiative on Technology and the Self at MIT about her book Evocative Objects: Things We Think With.

The book, a collection of essays edited by Turkle, includes an essay by Susan Yee about her visit to the Le Corbusier archive in Paris on the day the master architect’s materials were being digitized. Here’s how Turkle describes Yee’s visit in an essay called “Inner Objects” [PDF]:

Yee began her relationship to Le Corbusier through the physicality of his drawings. The master’s original blueprints, sketches, and plans were brought to her in long metal boxes. Le Corbusier’s handwritten notes in the margins of his sketches, the traces of his fingerprints, the smudges, the dirt—Yee was thrilled by all of these. One morning, Yee has all of this in her hands, but by the afternoon, she has only digital materials to work with. Yee experiences a loss of connection to Le Corbusier: “It made the drawings feel anonymous,” she says. More important, Yee says that the digitized archives made her feel anonymous. When working in the physical archive, Yee was on a kind of pilgrimage. She did not pause in her work, so completely was she immersed in the touch and feel of Le Corbusier’s artifacts. But once the material was on the screen, there was a disconnect. Yee found herself switching screens, moving from the Le Corbusier materials to check her email back at MIT. More than a resource, the digitized archive becomes a state of mind.

Case Study House No. 8 (Eames House), Pacific Palisades, CA.
Photographed by Julius Schulman (1910–2009).

Three of Archigram’s wonderful experiments—Walking City, Plug-In City, and Instant City—are well-displayed here (via Design Observer).

Wikipedia:

Girih tiles are a set of five tiles that were used in the creation of tiling patterns for decoration of buildings in Islamic architecture. They are known to have been used since about the year 1200 and their arrangements found significant improvement starting with the Darb-i Imam shrine in Isfahan in Iran built in 1453.

Via Bevel and Boss.

Christopher recommends one of my all-time favorite books, Christopher Alexander’s wonderful A Pattern Language, a book useful in describing not only the patterns used for the architecture of buildings, parks, and cities, but as a model for describing the architecture of interfaces, programs, and much more.