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Hi Alan / Alain I don't seem to have been very successful in steering away from philosophy towards the empiricism of measurement. As you guessed, I am not qualified to expound the philosophy of space, in relativistic, quantum or any other models. As Alain said, I was being rhetorical, bringing in the aether as an absurdity to bounce us back into "How SS can ACTUALLY help to look at the way a building is used." However, I think you agreed that what you ACTUALLY measure are relationships between objects or the physical limits of activity (although I am still a little puzzled by the form of words). In fact the Ordinance Survey often measure the 'Spaces between' physical surfaces for us, in making the maps we work from. I am suggesting that drawing the diagram of convex spaces / axial lines is a process of mapping "spaces for . . ." onto this map of "spaces between . . .." It is a microcosm of the social-space mapping Alan mentioned before, because the axial lines / convex spaces mark the physical limits of co-presence (where co-presence means that people at any two locations can see each other and move to meet each other) ie. they are "spaces for . . ." And this is important in finding "How SS can ACTUALLY help to look at the way a building is used." To mark out systems of co-presence encourages us to look for causal relations between human interaction and higher level social phenomena. Because co-presence includes co-visibility it raises questions related to human vision, such as the cognitive complexity of routes. Because it includes co-accessibility, we should ask about the physical pre-requisites of human movement, such as route density. The danger I see in describing SS in abstract terms of 'space as space' is that it becomes detached from this grounding in reality. It is no longer obvious that the measurements relate to the affordance of the sort of activities which we are designing for. Of course the data becomes more abstract as you process it with mathematical tools of topology and graph theory, but this should be processing information about particular, specified phenomena. Doubtless the axial line gathers up a whole lot of different affordances, of varying importance in different situations. But we can't see them, so we can't relate it to our work. It looks like a mysterious object which has been FOUND in the world, instead of an abstract measurement OF the world. Perhaps it is time to 'unpack' the axial line and have a look at the social / spatial ideas inside it, which can ACTUALLY help to look at the way a building is used. Regards, Tom [log in to unmask]