Man-environment paradigm

Man-environment paradigm lies in two mutually exclusive epistoemological positions – that of the organism looking out into the envrionment, and that of the envrionment bearing in on the dividiual. It moves us from a problem definition in which a building is an object whose spatial form is a form of social ordering, into one in which the physical envronment has no social content and society has no spatial content, the former being reduced to mere inert material, the latter to merre abstraction.

Sources

Hillier, B. and Leaman, A. (1973) The Man-environment Paradigm and its Paradoxes. Architectural Design, Vol. 43, p 507-511. pp508.

Hillier, B. & Hanson, J. (1984), The Social Logic of Space, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. pp.8-9