More on critical geography of architecture: affective and non-representational affordances of Josep Llinàs’ Jaume Fuster Public Library (Barcelona)

Abstract

Throughout the first decade of the 2000s some geographers generated a new trend focused on the study of architecture that sought to address architectural artefacts outside a representative framework that had limited them to simple signs of other types of processes. According to the dominant representational logic, the buildings were little more than stone guests, static scenes in which to illustrate other types of phenomena; or, mere architectural representations that could be interpreted in an aesthetic and symbolic key as part of broader debates about form and meaning. From an affective duality indicated by the residents of Plaça de Lesseps, which identified in the Biblioteca Jaume Fuster a social ethos that did not endanger the square, this article explores some affordances of the affective and non representational architecture of Josep Llinàs as essential keys of a relational scaffold that the residents recognized as a “social space”.

Keywords: affectivity, architecture, Josep Llinàs, public library, Plaça de Lesseps.