PERSONAL EXPERIENCE AS A SOURCE OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPACE IN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY ARCHITECTURE: STEINER, GAUDÍ, WRIGHT

Abstract

The article aims to identify how the architect’s personal existential experience (loss, solitude, threat, spiritual tension) is transformed into a philosophy of space and determines the architectural language of the early twentieth century. Methodology. The study employs historical-architectural analysis combined with a philosophical-anthropological approach, a comparative examination of three authorial models, and an interpretation of spatial categories through form, colour, materiality, and detail. The methodological principle is the rejection of direct biographism in favour of analysing the mechanism by which lived experience is transformed into spatial logic. Results. It is substantiated that the architecture of the early twentieth century emerges as a philosophical practice in which space functions as a bearer of worldview meanings. Three distinct trajectories of the “transformation of pain” are identified: in Rudolf Steiner’s work, pain becomes a source of spiritual responsibility and a space for inner development; in Antoni Gaudí’s architecture, pain is transformed into humble service to the sacred order of the world, where organic form and materiality act as a language of faith; in Frank Lloyd Wright’s oeuvre, pain functions as an ethical impulse for creating architecture as a protective home, in which scale, horizontality, and domestic ritual contribute to the restoration of human dignity. Scientific novelty. An interpretative model is proposed in which personal experience is understood not as an explanatory factor of style, but as a generator of a philosophy of space. Three authorial paradigms of the personalization of architecture are systematized – anthropological, sacred-cosmological, and ethical-domestic – and their spatial markers are identified (form/colour/detail; organicity/materiality/ symbol; scale/horizontality/ritual). Practical relevance. The results may be applied in architectural and design theory and practice for the development of humanistic design principles, in educational courses on the history of architecture, and in methodological approaches to the analysis of authorial concepts in which space is interpreted as an instrument for engaging with human experience