Space Reader

As the most common simulacrum medium in real life, mirrors enable users to perceive the capacity for ambiguity within the material world. In physical spaces, mirrors possess visual properties of derivation, repetition, and spatial folding. By analyzing a mirror’s spatial positioning, we can use architectural drafting tools to project its simulated image onto two-dimensional drawings. Here, architectural drawing tools serve as connectors, facilitating the coexistence o reality and simulacra.

The illusion remains a visual approximation within the mirror. Can a visual approximation of matter in space be created? Thus, by working with the camera and printed photograph together, we test whether approximation can be achieved within the medium of the photograph through a fixed mechanical organ (fixed by the principles of optical imaging, governed by physical presets).

A Vessel of Presence  

Traditionally, the stage is a vessel—a physical and conceptual space where time, performance, and presence converge. It exists as a temporary realm where actors, scripts, and audiences merge into a shared moment of heightened presence. The stage, in its essence, is an eruption of immediacy, creating a fleeting yet undeniable connection between all its elements.

In our vision, the stage itself becomes a mask—an intermediary that shapes and distorts reality. It misleads the viewer, presenting a false reality defined by what we allow to be seen. While the stage has always been a space for performance, it was never designed for filming in mind. Traditionally, the stage has been tied to its scripts and actors, existing as a temporary server for a specific play or moment. This transience is what makes the stage so dynamic and attractive—each stage is a limited, one-of-a-kind version.

Script

I stepped into the space, where a young man in a black suit greeted me. He told me that the only way in was to push the door. Obedient yet apprehensive, I did as he said, slowly making my way through the black corridors. The space became an enclosed journey, the dim lights ahead resembling beacons along the railway tracks in the dark. I became a train that could not stop, weaving in and out of the black corridors.

Suddenly, I found a door leading into theater. A burst of white light overwhelmed my senses—it was the light I had been searching for but had never expected. I saw doors appearing in the misplaced train windows, one after another. They were pushed open, paused, moved. I was propelled forward, passing through door after door, back into the black corridor. Unable to recognize where I was, I could only rely on instinct, pushing through each door in front of me. And the cycle began. 

Until the last time, I watched the performance once more and stepped into the black corridor again. This time, I tried to pull open the door before me. By chance, I entered a new corridor—white and bright. I could finally watch the performance, as if boarding a train, standing still, gazing at the scenery outside the window. Doors unfolded before me, one by one, yet I could not see the actors, nor could I see myself. I could only see doors continuously shifting, moving faster than I was, making it impossible to witness the performance in its entirety. I thought—they must be pushing the doors open. I guessed—they must be pushing the doors open.

I kept going. In the white corridor, each subsequent door could only be pulled open, and the performance I watched became slower and slower. At last, at the end of the hallway, I saw an old man wearing the same suit. He gestured for me to leave and told me that the only way out was to push the doors. This time, I refused to obey and tried to pull them open. But he was telling the truth. I pushed the door, only to find more doors behind it—one after another, densely packed. All I could do was keep pushing, running forward, rushing out.

I realized that I had become an actor, and this was what I had seen in the white square—time had blurred everything.

I stepped out of the black square, into the forest, into the world. Everything around me seemed unchanged, yet they must have aged too.

The theatre and script experiments are based on the premise that consensus does not arise from agreement between individuals, but from the shared operation of an underlying logic across different social manifestations. In this sense, ideology functions as a common premise through which its mechanisms within constructed reality can be examined. In the earlier experiment You can only push the door, a theatre unfolds between the door and the stage without requiring human actors. Ideology is reduced to a single principle: you can only push the door. Through a linguistic inversion of subject and object, the verb "push" directly intervenes in the door, allowing spatial agency to be configured independently of the human subject. 

A second linguistic theatre test—you can only watch the door—produces a different configuration. Because the act "watch" does not materially interfere with the door, agency shifts back toward the observer. The door becomes a theatrical protagonist whose spatial role is produced through observation rather than intervention.

These experiments suggest that ideology organises reality by distributing agency through verbs and actions. Once the assumption of human-centred agency is suspended, ideological operation depends on which entities are directly affected by action. Agency becomes a grammatical and operational condition before it becomes a social one.

When such operational principles are repeated and stabilised, they begin to form coherent structures. Through repetition and replication, small rules can scale into systems capable of organising perception, behaviour, and coordination. At larger scales, these systems can become totalising, forming tightly connected structures that sustain and reproduce themselves over time. This scaling process provides the basis for approaching the city as a field in which such mechanisms become spatially materialised.

In the preceding theoretical framework, ideology has been identified as a key structure that produces and organises social effects. In order to examine more closely how ideology becomes materialised, utopia emerges as an unavoidable research pathway. The next step therefore requires locating a real-world context in which ideology possesses both a clear political history and a recognisable material language. For this reason, the fieldwork is situated in Nowa Huta,Kraków — a socialist-realist city that stands as a paradigmatic example of the rupture between political idealism and its material realization, a condition often historicized as the “realistic utopia.”

Within the context of Nowa Huta, the architecture and functions of older cultural institutions represented the successful convergence of architectural vocabulary and spatial grammar. The “success” here refers to the establishment of a highly stabilised spatial order envisioned by the planner. Through the positioning of monumental and autonomous institutional buildings, public space became increasingly separated from the ordinary rhythms of everyday life. Home, street, public square, and collective activity were organised into a predetermined relational structure that generated a distinctive spatial grammar specific to Nowa Huta. The vocabulary jointly established through architectural language and functional programming transformed public space into a system organised around institutional destinations. Through isolated and self-contained cultural buildings, movement within the city became increasingly directional and programmatically structured. Squares, pathways, and gathering areas functioned primarily as transitional spaces leading toward ideological and cultural centres rather than remaining open-ended fields of informal collective use. As a result, the possibility for incidental encounters, spontaneous occupation, and user-led spatial reproduction was gradually reduced. Activities surrounding these institutions became increasingly absorbed into the operational logic of the structures themselves rather than emerging through everyday negotiation and appropriation by inhabitants. In this sense, architecture did not merely represent ideology symbolically; it organised the spatial conditions through which behaviour, visibility, and participation could occur. Over time, the repetitive organisation of movement and collective activity may also have contributed to the formation of a recognisable behavioural inertia among the residents of Nowa Huta.

Game

Following the previous discussion, ideology may be understood as a structure of knowledge. Once knowledge becomes structured, it acquires the capacity for play. Here, game refers to an activity occurring within a specific spatiotemporal framework, possessing a defined field of meaning and operating according to fixed rules. Yet to avoid allowing this definition to encompass all forms of activity, following Johan Huizinga in introducing further conditions seems necessary: temporal limitation, contextual limitation, non- seriousness, and a temporary detachment from reality without lasting consequence.

Game depends upon repetition to internalize rules; architecture depends upon repetition to stabilize spatial practice; Archive gains narrative authority through the selection, classification, and preservation of what is allowed to be archived. The structural similarity between these systems is not metaphorical, but rather multiple manifestations of the same mechanism operating across different media: through repeated bodily encounter, spatial systems gradually become habitual, allowing them to sustain themselves beneath the threshold of conscious attention.

In this sense, space becomes an index structure embedded within everyday ways of living. Like games, architecture uses area, light, form, and spatial organisation to trigger specific behavioural responses. The effectiveness of these behavioural and cognitive triggers depends upon the successful recognition and repetition of rules and symbols. Through repeated participation, these operational patterns gradually become familiar, memorable, and collectively recognizable. Over time, such repeated spatial and behavioural patterns begin to accumulate beyond the isolated condition of the game itself. What was initially experienced as participation within a structured system gradually becomes embedded within everyday public life. In this sense, repeated play allows operational structures to persist collectively, transforming them into forms of spatial and social memory that begin to function similarly to an archive.

Distance

Distance is the point at which different lengths and directions overlap—the place where an event occurs. Distance is the point at which different lengths and directions overlap—the place where an event occurs. Here, lengths refer to measurable intervals between bodies, objects, and spatial systems, while directions describe the orientation of actions and relations across space and time. Events, therefore, do not necessarily require human actors; they emerge whenever relations between entities are reconfigured. This means that when length and direction are fixed, the position of the subject that produces distance becomes passive, and the event therefore shifts. Displacement itself is a form of drifting within a fixed framework. In other words, if we design distance rather than the subject, we create a structure and an opportunity for drifting; in doing so, we alter the time, place, quantity, duration, and even the nature of the event itself. Following this logic, we are no longer blind but intentional. Architecture becomes a measuring instrument. Fixed architecture measures the coordinates of people in the world, while fixed distance measures the coordinates of events. Therefore, the future of architecture is no longer about helping us anchor our coordinate system; it becomes a measure of how far we are from an event that is being planned.

Archive

Archive, in this sense, functions as an active agent in the transfer of discourse. Through the spatial arrangement of archives in a physical sense, the archive introduces repetition, transformation, and exclusion into space itself, allowing a fixed archival center to become a fluid passage. To discuss why turning archives into a passage rather than a container is necessary, one must begin by deconstructing the spatiality of archives themselves.

The spatiality of the archive possesses three dimensions.

First, archives possess physical spatiality. Through repeated practices of collection, classification, and preservation, archives accumulate material volume that gradually determines the organisation and form of storage space itself. Shelving systems, corridors, access routes, and viewing positions therefore emerge through the spatial requirements of archival order, generating direct relations between behaviour and spatial form.

Second, archives possess temporality. Because archives contain traces distributed across time, storage spaces become four-dimensional structures organized through temporal axes. Through the archive, physical space acquires an oblique temporal generative force, transforming space itself into a container of time. If the first dimension provides viewers with a physical coordinate of standing, then this oblique temporal dimension becomes the true field in which viewers coexist with space itself.

Third, archives store disappeared events, absent individuals, and irretrievable pasts. Standing before an archive, the viewer confronts not a narrative capable of complete understanding or possession, but a system continuously pointing toward its own absence. The stricter and more rigorous archival classifications become, the more visible the absence of what cannot be classified. Through text, categorization, media, and inscription, archives condition possible narratives. These narratives establish communities through labels and through shared relations to historical fact. Yet such communities emerge not because individuals possess the same past, but because archives, through their incompleteness and orientation toward absence, produce what Maurice Blanchot would describe as community: a community formed through the shared confrontation with a past that can never be fully reached.

Architecture, however, carries the necessity of presence within reality. Through entrances, paths, doors, windows, sightlines, durations of stay, accessibility, and spatial hierarchy, architecture organizes and classifies subjects while rearranging behavior, perception, and time. This mechanism inevitably intensifies awareness of space itself while regulating human behavior and attention.

A similar spatial logic can be observed along the Avenue of Roses in Nowa Huta. Monumental squares, continuous socialist-realist façades, and repetitive oversized arches gradually weaken the pedestrian’s immediate sense of directional intentionality. Within this repetitive spatial rhythm, movement becomes increasingly absorbed into the continuity of the environment itself. The surrounding uninterrupted street façades make the avenue function less as a conventional road for circulation and more as an architectural spatial corridor.

END

As Jacques Derrida argues, the archive can never fully complete itself. This is not merely an epistemological problem, but a condition for the production of relations themselves. Those elements that cannot be archived, named, or fully reached generate what Blanchot describes as community — not because we share the same archive, but because we stand together at the edge of the missing, confronting a past that can never be completely possessed. Architecture’s role here is to make this edge spatially perceptible. Any archive, while attempting to fold reality, continuously produces omissions, displacements, and new interpretations. Architecture functions similarly: inhabited space never remains within its designed condition,but is constantly rewritten through use, memory, movement, and time.