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With the release of his work The Hidden Dimension in 1966, the American anthropologist Edward T. Hall put forth his first definition of anthropological space. He established the foundations of proxemics, the study of human appropriation of space according to cultural parameters. Hall, a close friend of Buckminster Fuller, argued that human perceptions of space stem from communication and cultural settings. Hall’s theory rests on a sequence of measurements that describe everything from human intimate space, to the social space of individual interactions, and finally broad public space. While Hall’s proxemics define a finite system of geographical measurements that integrate a fifth dimension-culture-its main contribution rests on its successful translation of physical dimensions into terms of social and cultural parameters. Hall’s fifth dimension had a great influence on architectural research in the postwar period, yet one can argue today that this model remains limited, considering the tremendous expansion of information connectivity and delocalized nodes of production. Hall’s “hidden dimension” is now replaced by an even more puzzling system that is defined in this article as an “n-dimensional” environment. In this topological environment, information represents the ultimate currency of an unbounded, scale-less, and intensive platform of human activity. It is not merely a parametric and associative space of information, similar to Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion world, 2 but foremost an intensified proximal environment of self-generated structures of information.
