It seems a given, a truism, that architecture is about space. Ali Madanipour indicates otherwise. In his Design of Urban Space, he notes that the word rarely appears in architecture texts books, and observes that “the term is relatively new, in the context of the long history of architecture, and that it has become a controversial concept in recent decades” (7).

Some theorists, to be sure, see space as the essence of architecture. According to Bruno Zevi, “The facades and walls of a house, church or palace, no matter how beautiful they may be, are only the container, the box formed by the walls; the content is the internal space.” In Madanipour's summary, Zevi thinks that “streets, squares, parks, playgrounds and gardens are all ‘voids' that have been limited or defined to create an enclosed space.” Zevi writes, “Since every architectural volume, every structure of walls, constitutes a boundary, a pause in the continuity of space, it is clear that every building functions in the creation of two kinds of space: its internal space, completely defined by the building itself, and its external or urban space, defined by that building and the others around it” (7-8). He claims that architecture's essence “does not lie in the material limitation placed on spatial freedom, but in the way space is organized into meaningful form through this process of limitation” (8).

Modernist theory assumed that space was an undifferentiated extension that had to be “molded” and shaped by architectural objects. Postmodern theorists came to see this as another expression of Enlightenment hubris. Madanipour quotes one writer who rejected as “naively realistic” the modernist view that space is “a uniformly extended ‘material' that can be ‘modelled' in different ways.” The modernist view of empty, malleable space wasn't innocent. It has come to be seen as “a main feature of the modernist city with its tendency to blow apart the perceptible urban space. It had become a habit of thought in the modern city to conceive buildings as ‘simple-shaped volumes, floating in a sea of ill-formed space'” (9).

One of the critics of the dominance of space in architectural thought is Roger Scruton—no postmodern he. Scruton argues that giving such prominence to space is reductive, and that our experience of architecture often has little to do with space as such. In Madanipour's summary, Scruton “criticizes the concept of architectural space on the grounds that it fails to give an account of all that is interesting in buildings. In St Paul's, for example, we can speak about the ‘spatial' grandeur, but there are also ‘deliberate and impressive effects of light and shade, of ornament, texture and moulding.' Scruton believes that the experience of architecture and its ‘spatial' effects depends on significant details and argues that the reduction of the effects to space is a misrepresentation of the entire nature of our experience. He goes as far as suggesting that the concept of space ‘can be eliminated from most critical writings which make use of it without any real detriment to their meaning'” (9).