Most Japanese agricultural villages follow this pattern and most agrarian Shinto rites reflect this basic structure of territorial demarcation. If houses of various traditional societies are studied in the behavioural context of related rites, this same pattern can be used for understanding the genetic structure of the spatial layout and often also vertical organisation of buildings. This led to the generalisation of the pattern as "access place scheme" or 'horizontal polarity scheme' or 'value focussed axis'.
In his Afro-Euro-Asiatic survey of sacred architecture, Dagobert Frey (1949) had come to similar results: architecture, particularly in the domain of the sacred, evidently obeys to age old patterns of polar categories. He called it 'access-monument' principle (Weg-Mal-Motiv).
Hypothetically taken as a general principle of domestic and representative architecture, this pattern reveals itself as a kind of elementary "cell" of any premodern building. If facades are taken as an evolution of the anthropological concept of gate, then, very different buildings are essentially structured in same ways (church, court, school, theatre, house, apartment) and this homologous structure acts in terms of social control.
Modernism rigidly introduced the homogenous space concept of physics. This not only dissolved the in-homogeneity of premodern space, e.g. spatial patterns like the 'value focussed axis'. In ousting the 'irrational' relations of space with values (ontology, the sacred) and environmental conditions (e.g. culture, nature) it also deprived space of its essential premodern capacity for social control. With its 'universal' space concept, modern architecture in fact builds "castles in the air".
The paper shows, that this transition from premodern polar space to homogenous universal space created many problems. It dissolved the semantic qualities of the human dimensions of the cultural environment by lifting semantics on the higher urban level (skyline) and thus deprived inhabitants of a basic system of orientation. The contradiction of the two spatial systems creates conflicts, particularly in the urbanisation of traditional societies. and, finally the loss of social control in modern environments burdens society with tremendous social costs.