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In addition to practical purposes, architectural structures have a significant existential and mental task; they domesticate space for human occupation by turning anonymous, uniform and limitless space into distinct places of human significance, and, equally importantly, they make endless time tolerable by giving duration its human measure. As Karsten Harries, the philosopher, argues: ‘Architecture helps to replace meaningless reality with a theatrically, or rather architecturally, transformed reality, which draws us in and, as we surrender to it, grants us an illusion of meaning. […] We cannot live with chaos. Chaos must be transformed into cosmos’²¹. ‘Architecture is not only about domesticating space. It is also a deep defence against the terror of time’, he states in another context.²²

Altogether, environments and buildings do not only serve practical and utilitarian purposes, they also structure our understanding of the world. ‘The house is an instrument with which to confront the cosmos’, as Gaston Bachelard states.²³ The abstract and undefinable notion of cosmos is always present and represented in our immediate landscape. Every landscape and every building are a condensed world, a microcosmic representation.