Modernism reduced space to function. Other Spaces open onto other dimensions.
Modern design reads space largely through function — what it does, how efficiently it works, what activities it accommodates. Other Spaces investigates the spatial sensibility that lies beyond that register: spaces that hold symbolic weight, that activate through ritual and practice, that correspond to orders beyond the visible, that draw on archetypal and ancestral form. This work extends into ancient and indigenous ways of space-making, into other technologies, other forms of representation, and other concepts of reality than the ones modernity has treated as universal.
Other Spaces are read through five modes that move past function alone: the phenomenological — how a space is lived and felt in the body; the performative — how a space is activated through ritual and practice; the symbolic — how form and sign carry meaning; the correspondential — how a space mirrors an order beyond itself; and the archetypal — how a space draws on patterns that recur across cultures and time.
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DESIGNING TRANSFORMATION
We need to transform spaces and design spaces for transformation. What if transformation became a design principle?
POLYCOSMOS develops the sensibility and the practical knowledge needed to design spaces that act as thresholds for transformation, working across the five modes above. Drawing on architectural theory, somatic practice, cross-cultural spatial knowledge, and the lived experience of practitioners working at the intersection of space and human wellbeing, this program cultivates a deeper attunement to what spaces do to people — and what becomes possible when that attunement is brought consciously into the act of design.
Transformation is not incidental to a well-designed space — it depends on how threshold conditions are actually built: how atmosphere is held, how material carries subtle charge, how sequence and ritual guide a body through change.
The research and teaching program Other Spaces is for architects and designers who want to develop their practice in a new direction, for healers and changemakers who work in or create spatial environments that can truly affect change.
Healing Spaces
Environments that regenerate and recalibrate through sensory, atmospheric, and phenomenological qualities — rebuilding vitality, stabilizing the nervous system, and cultivating the ground for deeper experience.
Sacred Spaces
Environments that expand awareness and reorganize meaning. Through ceremonial form, aesthetic intention, and experiential depth, these spaces foster insight, emotional presence, and shifts in consciousness.
Liminal Spaces
Environments that function as thresholds into states beyond ordinary experience, opening access to the sacred, the unseen, and the cosmological layers of existence. They enable encounters with other dimensions of reality and situate us within an expanded energetic or spiritual field.
