Inclusive and Exclusive (C. Moore)

"If architects are to continue to do useful work on this planet, then surely their proper concern must be the creation of place - the ordered imposition of man's self on specific locations across the face of the earth. To make a place is to make a domain that helps people know where they are and, by extension, know who they are.

The most powerful places which our forebears made for themselves, and left for us, exist as a series of contiguous spaces. They organize hierarchy of importance - first dividing what is inside from what is outside, then somehow arranging the inside things in some order. Objects confer importance to location, and location confers importance to objects. [...]

(2610south.blogspot.com)

Our own perceptions, however, like our own lives, are not bound to one particular place. Our order is not made of single inside, neatly separated from another outside, in which we can structure a visible simulation of our world. The world that means the most of us (as everyone from Buckminster Fuller to Marshall McLuhan has pointed out) is no longer very visible anyway.

Many of us have stamping grounds which exist in separate places ending at one airport and picking up again at some other one. No matter where our bodies are at any moment, we can have "instant anywhere" by making immediate electronic contact with people anywhere on the face of the globe. We can even revel in the vicarious pleasure of blasting people off the the face of the earth in order to be able to make contact with them in outer space. 

This is to say that our new places are given form with electronic, rather than visual, glue. This electronic glue, of course, has some limitations. it can be argued, for instance, that although a great deal of preliminary manoeuvring in courtship can occur over the telephone, face-to-face contact is still requited for any real consummation to the activity.

[...] Even at this early point in the new age, we can note that the architecture of the past several decades has not gained control of the physical environment. This architecture can accurately be called the architecture of exclusion. The perfectly natural attempts of the last several decades to find order by excluding disorder, and, by organizing whatever fragment remains into a system is the order which characterizes it [...]. The architects of exclusion have for decades been perfecting their art, and they have built buildings on the plots assigned them. But somehow the commercial strip, which they abhor, has arrogated to itself more vitality, more power of growth, indeed more inevitability of growth, than the whole of their tidy output together.

The manifestation of all this vitality must have some message for us. I doubt that the message is just the the architect who produces at enormous expense a replica of the commercial strip is about to solve the world. But it does seem reasonable, after the long failure by architects of exclusion to come to grips with our civilization, that the chance should now be seized by architects of inclusion. They can make their order with as much of life as they can include, rather than with as little. They welcome redundancy and depend on it, even as the electronic information networks do. They are willing to accept into their own systems of organization those ambiguities and conflicts of which life is made."

Moore, Charles (1976) "Inclusive and Exclusive". In: Moore, Charles; Allen, Gerald (1976) Dimensions. Space, shape & scale in architecture. New York: Architectural Record Books. pp 51-57.