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Non-Place. AI image   Introduction When Marc Augé introduced the concept of the non-place in the early 1990s, he described a new type of space produced by contemporary modernity: airports, highways, supermarkets, hotel chains. These were environments designed for circulation rather than dwelling, for movement rather than memory. They did not cultivate identity or shared narratives; they coordinated flows. What is often overlooked is how such spaces function at all. Non-places are not empty. They are saturated with instructions, symbols, labels, arrows, logos, pictograms, warnings, and interfaces. They are readable environments. Without this dense layer of visual coding, they would dissolve into confusion. That layer is graphic design. The non-place is therefore not only a spatial phenomenon but also a semiotic one. Graphic design is what allows these spaces to operate. The Non-Place as a Semiotic Environment Augé defines the anthropological place as a space that produces ...

The Ishtar Gate. AI image Introduction Museums seem immune to suspicion. Unlike airports or shopping malls, they announce themselves as spaces of culture, memory, and preservation. They promise history, meaning, depth, and yet, once you stop thinking about what a museum claims to be and pay attention to how it is actually experienced, a question quietly emerges: what kind of space is this, really? People enter, follow a path, pause briefly, and move on. They share a space without forming a group. They remain silent together. They are present, but only temporarily. In these basic features, the venue begins to resemble what the anthropologist Marc Augé famously called a non-place : spaces of transit such as airports, highways, and hotel chains, environments designed for circulation rather than dwelling. The comparison is tempting. But it doesn’t quite hold. A Space Built for Movement Walk through most museums and you’ll feel it immediately: the gentle pressure to keep moving....

Note: This text was originally written in Spanish and is presented here in English translation. Abstract This article proposes a comparative reading of Walter Benjamin and Marc Augé based on an underexplored structural affinity: the relation between the loss of aura and the proliferation of the non-place. Moving beyond a merely thematic analogy, it argues that both concepts articulate profound transformations of modern experience linked to the dissolution of the spatial anchoring that historically sustained meaning. In Benjamin, technical reproducibility emancipates the artwork from its “here and now,” weakening its ritual inscription and singularity. In Augé, supermodernity generates spaces of transit that suspend identity, relation, and memory. From this perspective, the non-place may be understood as the spatial correlate of the logic of reproducibility: not a profanation of the sacred, but the loss of its structuring function. The article examines the scope and limits of this c...