Marc Augé, the French anthropologist who died last week at 87, used the tools of a discipline designed to study what it saw as primitive cultures to examine the contemporary globalized world. Though Augé did not write for an audience of architects, his ideas, in particular the concept he developed of the “non-place,” proved important for scholars and theorists of architecture seeking to understand the novel spatialities of modernity.

In his influential 1992 book Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, Augé contrasted non-places—transitory spaces like airport lounges, train stations, and malls—against what he termed “anthropological places,” or places with history and symbolic meaning that establish their occupants’ position within the social and cultural world. “The space of non-place,” he wrote, “creates neither singular identity nor relations, only solitude and similitude.”