Space and Place

p9As Susanne Langer put it: "The world of physics is essentially the real world construed by mathematical abstractions, and the world of sense is the real world construed by theabstractions which the sense organs immediately furnish."p10To see and to think are closely related processes. In English, "I see" means "I understand." Seeing, it has long been recognized, is not the simple recording of light stimuli; it is a selective and creative process in which environmental stimuli are organized into flowing structures that provide signs meaningful to the purposive organism.p17Place is a type of object. Places and objects define space, giving it a geometric personality. Neither the newborn infant nor the man who gains sight after a lifetime of blindness can immediately recognize a geometric shape such as a triangle. The triangle is at first "space," a blurred image. Recognizing the triangle requires the prior identification of corners—that is, places. A neighborhood is at first a confusion of images to the new resident; it is blurred space "out there." Learning to know the neighborhood requires the identification of significant localities, such as street corners and architectural landmarks, within the neighborhood space