A Language of Measure & Our Perception of Space

As Juhani Pallasmaa writes in The Eyes of the Skin, “the most archaic origin of architectural space is in the cavity of the mouth, through which the infant first experiences the world.”

Our experience of the world is fundamentally shaped by how we perceive space, which is essentially our three-dimensional reality. The methods we use to measure and understand space influence our experiences by shaping and sometimes limiting the primary senses through which we interact with our surroundings. Consequently, people perceive space—and, by extension, the world around them—in diverse ways depending on their primary sensory apparatus, leading them to inhabit significantly different sensory worlds.

Proxemics is the term that Edward T. Hall coined for the study of the ways humans utilize and perceive the space around them. In the opening paragraph of his book The Hidden Dimension, Hall discusses the nature of language and how studying languages different than one’s own is difficult, as language acts as a kind of thought barrier:

“It was necessary for the linguistic scientist to consciously avoid the trap of projecting the hidden rules of his own language onto the language being studied.”

Language itself was then discovered to not just be a way to externalize thought, but was rather a program that was restructuring the way people conceived of the world around them.

“Like the computer, man’s mind will register and structure external reality only in accordance with the program.”

What Hall is interested in, in this vein, are the ways in which different cultures not just speak different languages and thus have different thought constructions, but also how different cultures—as a result of their proxemic differences—develop siloed sensory screens through which they perceive and construct the world. This is interesting to consider, as the perception of space is a perception of separation. As discussed in On Understanding the Void through Dividing by Zero, in order to measure space, one requires a reference point. Infinity itself is not really a number but a spatial concept. Space naturally requires division in order to be perceived. Without division, there would be no magnitude of anything, but infinitely everything. You could think of the literal definition of infinity as “without limits”: we require limitations in order to measure space. For example, “units” is a set of defined measurements that we use to measure other defined things. These units are ultimately reference