chora

Nicholas White was trapped in an elevator in the
McGraw-Hill building in New York City for forty-one hours.
Video of his ordeal accompanying Nick Paumgarten´s essay
on elevators in the New Yorker.

quote:

"We borrow the term *chora* from Plato's *Timaeus* to denote an
essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation constituted
by movements and their ephemeral stases." ... "Although our
theoretical description of the *chora* is itself part of the discourse
of representation that offers it as evidence, the *chora*, as rupture
and articulations (rhythm), precedes evidence, versimilitude,
spatiality and temporality. Our discourse - all discourse - moves with
and against the *chora* in the sense that it simultaneously depends
upon and refuses it. Although the *chora* can be designated and
regulated, it can never be definitely posited: as a result, one can
situate the *chora* and, if necessary, lend it a topology, but one can
never give it axiomatic form."
(Revolution in Poetic Language, Julia Kristeva,
translation Margaret Waller)

Choric space has clearly always been portable, as evident from the
description of the space between horse and chariot described as
‘Chora’ in Homer’s Iliad.
Even in the confinement of a prison cell, the pacing of
the cell by a prisoner in one critically defines the
interior space from its exterior.
The ‘chora’ described by ancient Greeks is a space, often
transient, and not necessarily described by walls.
Like choreography, architecture is significantly concerned with the
movement of people through space.
The Western origins of the space of
'Chora' or Khora in Plato's Timaeus – is as something animate and
moving – not detached and abstract.
It has been noted that architecture is not
only comprised of built matter, but is constituted of experience of space
byhuman ritual and interpretation.
Jonathan Hill, in the introduction to a book about this relation,
describes the user of architecture as an'illegalarchitect'."
- http://puffin.curtin.edu.au/~cowan/nomad/3/"
source