Figuring Planetary Space: Abandoning Man’s Measure

2026

Figuring Planetary Space explores the critical role of spatial thought in the formation of historical world views, and how Planetary imaginaries unsettle centuries-long spatial conventions that persist, notably those impacting the picturing of ‘locality’ and ‘site.’ This historical and theoretical research traces the origins of Euromodernity to architectural thought in Vitruvian proportions as the symbolic index of Greco-Roman Man’s self-referentiality, culminating in the co-emergence of the invention of Renaissance perspectival space with the birth of philosophical Humanism. Framed as a pan-disciplinary meta-brief, the consequences of this self-referential invention of space (evidenced in projective linear perspective) is mapped to the burgeoning model of Man that coincides with the European colonization of the Americas. Extending the philosopher Sylvia Wynter’s account of the model of ‘Man’ as architect of our present geopolitical condition to the mediation of this self-image, the research highlights how inventions and representations of space become a technology of cognition in relating to and seeing the world in a certain way.

The discovery of the Biosphere (1926) is outlined in spatial terms as irruptive of Euromodern space, summoning a paradigmatic shift from mechanical to ecological thought, for which Man’s frames of reference are an obstacle. The research serves as a description of the stakes conditioning Planetary practice today, compelling a suspension of familiar spatial norms attuned to Man’s measure, with application in a variety of spatial pedagogies grappling with urgent questions of inhabitability beyond sustainability discourses.

Patricia Reed, Figuring Planetary Space: Abandoning Man's Measure, Agent of Change Publication for the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, 2026. Link