Scale I: on the Cella and the City

I Between Inside and Outside

Dom van der Laan defines buildings and even the city through experience. Urbanity needs to be interrelated with the human scale of the house. His aim, therefore, is to define architectonic space through the thresholds in human experience. Each person is surrounded by an experience-space that he does not consider homogeneous.

Three spheres are defined:
– Personal work space, towards the intimate, inward movement
– Walking space, for meeting
– Visual field, towards the outside

The work space is the first sphere around us. It is approx; your body length projected outwards. People crossing this threshold enter your personal space.

Drawing: Architectuur, Modellen en Meubels

These three spheres are directly translated in the reality of three articulations of architectonic space. As such, the human habitat resembles an interplay between three demarcations in nature:

cell (work space)
court (walking space) and
domain (visual field).

These three spatial restrictions successively grow in size and enclose one another. The cell is the first intimate demarcation, the absolute inside, which is strongly related to our presence.

This is the foundation for the three orders of size between inside and outside.

Drawing: AS III.8.

Cell, court and domain can be combined in various ways: from the centre or from the periphery. Dom van der Laan calls this a central and peripheral disposition, and he has a preference for the latter. A peripheral disposition leaves the court intact, while in the case of central juxtaposition the court itself is affected or fully built. In the case of peripheral disposition, the court is not divided into cells; it is formed by them. The court becomes a courtyard. The same goes for courts in a domain. If they are completely enclosed by cells, repeating this figure by itself around the terrain makes it into a court. The scheme shown in figure 9 is thus preferred. Cells, courts and domain enclose and shape each other. This way, the cell becomes the yardstick for the court, which in turn becomes the yardstick for the domain.