Space, or Bramante's Problem

In 1934, a very young Giulio Carlo Argan wrote, for a rather provincial magazine, a fundamental text titled “Il problema del Bramante”, or “Bramante’s Problem”. Argan tried to identify the focus of Bramante’s interests and to define his particular way of making architecture. He concluded that what was systematically explored in Bramante’s work was space: for Argan, Bramante’s architecture was a spectacle of spa- tiality,2 an investigation of space developed beyond tectonic constraints and a rhetoric of space understood as the endlessly multiplied unfold- ing of artificial landscapes. But if the substance of this architecture is space, then what kind of sense did Bramante attribute to his work on space? And, more generally, what does it mean to work on space? What kind of intellectual value does such work have? What kind of "problem" is Bramante’s problem?