Architecture is the pattern of human mind in space: Claude F. Bragdon and the spatial concept of architecture

‘Space’ has held a central position within the architectural discourse throughout the twentieth century and a number of twenty-first-century publications suggest interest in this notion is not to be diminished any time soon. Seen from our contemporary perspective, the association between architecture and space could therefore seem ordinary and self-evident. However, existing scholarship has dated the adoption of the term ‘space’ in architectural vocabulary—as a fundamental category of architecture—no earlier than the 1890s. This early phase has been strongly associated with the German language and nineteenth-century German aesthetic philosophy, whereas, by contrast, the adoption of the term in architectural discourse in the English language is considered to have followed several decades later. This paper discusses the largely unknown case of the American Claude Fayette Bragdon (1866–1946), an English-speaking architect who adopted the notion of ‘space’ as early as the 1890s: concurrently with his German contemporaries. Through analysis of existing scholarship, archival material and Bragdon's published writings mainly up to the appearance of his book The Beautiful Necessity in 1910, it throws light on the main sources of Bragdon's ‘spatial’ concept of architecture and demonstrates connections to transcendental aesthetics and ground-breaking advances in nineteenth-century mathematics.