Reading McMahon Lecture: The End of Professional Ethics (1972) 022

Let me try to make this matter more vividly comprehensible by relating a story which concerned my own first discovery of acoustic space. A group of us… were discussing the newest book of Siegfried Giedion, The Beginnings of Architecture.… Giedion presented the fact that the Romans were first people to enclose space. The Egyptian pyramids enclosed no space since their interior was dark… The Greeks never enclosed any space… But the Romans, by putting the arch inside a rectangle, were the first to enclose space. An arch itself is not an enclosed space since it is merely formed by tensile pressure and thrust. However, when this arch is put inside a rectangle, as in the sections of a Roman viaduct or in the Arc de Triomphe, you have a genuine enclosed space, namely, a visual space. Visual space is a static enclosure, arranged by vertical planes diagonally related.

Let me tell you a story about my own history of the first discovery of auditory space in order to bring this question to a more vivid understanding. We're a bunch of people... Discuss siegfried Gideon's latest book, The Origins of Architecture... Gideon raises the fact that the Romans were the first to enclose the space. The Egyptian pyramids did not have enclosed spaces because their interiors were dark... The Greeks never enclosed any space... The Romans were certainly the first to enclose the space, and they put the arch into a rectangle. The arch itself is not an enclosed space, as it is simply formed by tensile pressure and thrust. However, when such an arch is placed inside a rectangle – like the parts of a Roman viaduct or triumphal arch – you have a truly enclosed space, a visual space. Visual space is a static enclosed space arranged by vertical planes that have a diagonal relationship.

Press: Vision can't function in space, not space. The pyramids don't have enclosed spaces, wonderful.

In the West, the ancient Romans were the first to enclose spaces. Visual space is a static enclosed space, three dimensions perpendicular to each other.