Every space is a sunrise: on architecture as beginning

Architecture is often presented as something that is finished. A moment in which lines converge, materials fall silent, and a design definitively reveals itself to the world. As if a building reaches its meaning when the last stone has been laid. For me, it is precisely there that the building is reborn and begins another life, one of many. Perhaps a nod to Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality?

In the beginning, space is merely a whisper in the minds of the clients. A secret that needs time to mature and develop: just like a child in the womb for nine months. The secret is reborn and comes alive again when a designer first gives it form. The first sketches and pen drawings are proof of life. The space is kept alive by continuously working on it and reliving it. This is a deeply intimate process shared by only a handful of people: the client, the designer, and the builders. The idea of the space is like a rising sun that does not yet know which world it will see that day.

There is a moment, just before use, when a space asks for nothing. No function, no direction, no story. Only light entering and exploring surfaces. A quiet presence that does not yet know what it will carry, burdened only by the imagination of the designer. This is the first physical life, which begins and ends when the space (or building) is first perceived by someone outside the inner circle. In that moment lies the essence of architecture. Not as form, but as possibility.

A building only becomes real when someone enters it. When a door is opened, a chair is moved, a conversation begins. Small actions, almost invisible, yet fundamental. They activate the space. They make it alive. The space is reborn like a phoenix.

What was designed from a secret, an idea, a story as structure, is experienced as a situation. In my view, the architecture of a space is born again each time the situation is activated or activates itself. The passivity of architectural activity is a question that calls for further reflection.

Perhaps this is why we do not design spaces in the strict sense of the word. We design conditions/ frameworks within which something can happen without being fully determined. Each user continues writing what was begun. Every movement adds a layer. What seemed fixed yesterday is experienced differently today. In that sense, no space is ever truly finished. Architecture is not a heap of stones fixed in matter, passively undergoing life without being alive itself.

It exists in a constant state of becoming. Again and again. Perhaps we should understand architecture less as an object that exists, and more as a beginning that keeps repeating itself. A first morning, every day anew—like a sunrise that never knows what the day will bring. Space is a sunrise.

~ Ar. Kimberly Wouters

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The inspiration for this story lies within an article about theater:

DE BEUL, M., De magie van het begin: kijk naar theater zoals Hannah Arendt, OPENDOEK magazine 2024 nr. 1, (6 april 2026), https://www.foliomagazines.be/artikels/de-magie-van-het-begin-kijk-naar-theater-zoals-hannah-arendt.