Explorations on “Chora”

The Ancient Attic Greek word Chora, which is translated as space or place, has been one of the tropes used by philosophers and architects alike during the end of the twentieth century. Chora, for example, has been one of the privileged deconstructivist terms used by Jacques Derrida as well as Elisabeth Grozs. It has also been one of the key terms used by architectural historian Alberto PerezGomez who is well known as an architectural theorist and a promoter of a phenomenological approach to architecture. It is rather intriguing that these different approaches to architecture and architectural meaning both use the notion of Chora which relates to the critical issue of space versus place. Although the notions of space and place have been explored extensively within architectural discourse as one of the keys to architectural meaning, they are not the focus of this research. This study rather is an exploration of the notion of Chora through examining its interpratations by different characters. The aim is to explore possible paths that could open themselves for us to understand architecture and architectural meaning.