ABSTRACTS
SUMMER COURSE – IBERIA 2022
July 21 - 27
Harry Mallgrave
Making a Place
Kate Jeffery
Neuroscience of Space, Time and Memory
Fernando Agrasar
Atlantic Architecture: a Sensitive Approach
Rick Joy
Human Experience and Place
Kurt Hunker
Alvar Aalto and the Persistence of Duality
Jeff Malpas Place, Ethics, Architecture
Sarah Williams Goldhagen Can Place Attachment be Designed?
Sergei Gepshtein
Species of Space in Science and Design
Juhani Pallasmaa
From Space to Place - Existential Experience in Architecture
MATOSINHOS / PORTO
Alberto Pérez-Gómez
In Quest of Attuned Architectural Atmospheres: Contributions of Cognitive Theory and Neurophenomenology
David Kirsh
Embodied Cognition
Vittorio Gallese Architecture ‘from within’: The Body, Space and the Brain
Ruth Varela
Sentir el Paisaje, Conocer el Paisaje
Thomas D. Albright
Neuroscience for Architecture
Eduardo Macagno
Spatial Navigation is an Intrinsically Dynamic Experience
Miguel Anxo Fernán Vello Poem, Structure, Architecture
THE WORLD OF SENSES PERCEPTION AND EMOTION
Claudia Kappl-Joy
Light and the World of Senses. Omnipresence and Absence
Juhani Pallasmaa
Alvar Aalto’s Painterly and Atmospheric LightSpatial, Haptic and Emotive Illumination
Edite Rosa
Drawing as an Anticipatory Finding of the Senses
David Kirsh
Enactive Cognition & Experience Design
Mark Alan Hewitt
Architectural Design and the Enacted Mind
Galen Cranz
Body Conscious Design
Giovanna Colombetti
Emotion and Perception: Introduction to Philosophical Perspectives, with a View toward Implications for Architecture
Davide Ruzzon
Tuning Architecture with Humans
Sergei Gepshtein, Harry Mallgrave
The Interface of Cultures
Alberto Pérez-Gómez Coming Back to Architecture
Harry Mallgrave
Arch.
History Professor
IIT, Chicago, USA
Kate Jeffery
Neuroscience Professor University College London, UK
Thursday, July 21 | 11:30
Making a Place
The objective of the talk is twofold: to provide a general overview of our larger theme of the interface of science and design, and to introduce the theme of place. It opens by highlighting some the knowledge gained about ourselves over the past few decades regarding the human genome, our nervous, cognitive, and emotional systems, human perception, and our profound social underpinnings. Yet we as designers — living in a global culture — continue to produce the same (supposedly) aesthetic symbols that Mies van der Rohe sketched out in 1921. What does it take to bring a humanist perspective back to design?
I will first consider a few philosophers of the 19th century — Schopenhauer, Semper, Vischer, Wölfflin, Schmarsow — to highlight how architecture, in its passage to modernism, came to be conceived as variations of form (mass) and space (abstraction). Sigfried Giedion later played pivotal role in driving architecture toward a ‘painterly’ conception with his notion of space-time, inherited from early discussions of cubist art. It became the lens of which practice came to be seen as a visual and conceptualized reading of form.
These hypothetical models, which pressed further toward abstraction with postmodern tenets, became antiquated the moment that mirror systems were discovered in a lab in Parma in the early 1990s. Current models of embodied simulation demonstrate that we engage with the world as fully embodied organisms with mutually embedded systems — biological, ecological, and cultural. Our existence is extended into the world that we in part construct and emotion is the driving force through which we engage it.
Concepts in architecture such as atmosphere and place, which have been highlighted only in recent years, mirror the breakthroughs that have been made in understanding the place-mapping systems of the human nervous system. A sense of place is the ground on which our existence unfolds, and architecture is not the making of aesthetic objects but the poetic means through which we mark our existence.
Thursday, July 21 | 5:00
Neuroscience of Space, Time and Memory
Our memories of our life experiences depend on two fundamental quantities: space, and time. As we move around in the world we move through both space and time together, and the thread of conscious experience that we leave behind us weaves a metaphorical fabric of memory that remains, somewhere in the brain, to be consulted later during recollection. In dementia, this fabric develops progressively larger holes until it disintegrates altogether, after which recollection is no longer possible and the sense of self is lost.
Neuroscientists have now identified in the brain where this weaving of the fabric of memory occurs - a small, deeply buried brain structure called the hippocampus, which evolved long ago and which many scientists think is necessary not just for memory but for integrated conscious experience. The hippocampus contains place cells, which form the basis of an internal map of the external world. When we experience a place, the hippocampus binds together the emotions and the events that co-occurred there, and then arranges for storage of this information elsewhere in the brain and organises its retrieval when recollection happens.
This talk will introduce the hippocampus and the other major players in the hippocampal spatial memory system, and speculate on the implications of these findings for architecture.
Fernando Agrasar
Arch. Professor Universidade da Coruña, Spain
Thursday, July 21 | 7:00
Atlantic Architecture: a Sensitive Approach
The characterization of "the Atlantic" as an aesthetic category allows us to understand a series of features that transcend time and styles to establish a link between architecture with culture, climate, history, physical environment and sense of living.
A first approach to this idea would be to understand “the Atlantic" in a dialogue of opposites with "the Mediterranean". There are other aesthetic worlds, beyond this dialectic, that we do not usually contemplate from a globalizing and Eurocentric perspective.
The modern experience, so present in our days, was formulated, in its beginnings, from a strong link with the classical tradition (stylizing it or denying it). On the other hand, as we will see, its abstract nature is one of the main characteristics of "the Mediterranean".
We will propose a series of features to characterize the "Atlantic Architecture", always keeping in mind that it is not a style, but an aesthetic category. For this characterization, we will use pairs of opposite terms, which will help us understand it: What is linked to the land vs what is deposited on the ground • The figurative vs the abstract • Matter vs form • The volume vs the game of planes • The heavy vs the light • The rough vs the smooth • Hybrid and soft colors vs primary and strong colors • The inside vs the outside • The horizon vs the immediate environment.
All these ideas will be exposed with examples, on which their "Atlantic" nature will be recognized, discussing this ascription with the participants.
Rick Joy Architect Tucson, USA
Friday, July 22 | 11:15
Human Experience and Place
Being comprehensively observant and sensitive towards the world around us is highly valuable for making architecture that lives well in its surroundings and that is lived in well. Beyond what is being photographed, architecture is what is being graciously enlivened. It is the stage for personal events, where daily life and momentary dramas unfold in spaces that condition behaviors as much as they are soulfully conditioned by their inhabitants. Architecture is the background for personal life. I believe that this view of architecture is deeply humane and unfashionably grounded in patience and perseverance in observing habits, listening to nuances, sensing atmospheres and reading place. These characteristics do not guarantee great architecture, but livable architecture might not happen without them.
This kind of thinking risks to get stuck in trivial tautological reassurances – failing to reach a new realm of atmospheric exploration each time. Yet, from my practice I know that when there is courage to make a bold architectural work in designing a place for living, a statement that is founded on a realistic interpretation of human lifestyle, a statement that can be conceptually thought about first, then all reflection is synthesized into the making of memorable place.
The lecture will explore these notions of place seeking, place reading and place making through examples of the works of Studio Rick Joy.
Kurt Hunker
Arch. Professor
NewSchool, San Diego, USA
Friday, July 22 | 12:45
Alvar Aalto and the Persistence of Duality
This talk incorporates research into the work of Alvar Aalto conducted since 2015 in two areas: first, Aalto’s uniquely unblemished reputation among 20th century modernist architects, and second, his reliance on a parti based upon a so-called “head/tail” duality.
The first is inspired by the realization that, almost alone among major 20th century architectural figures, Aalto has enjoyed a consistently positive reputation. In significant written works on the architect, no serious criticism exists of the sort that frequently tempers the reader’s view of Le Corbusier, for example, or Frank Lloyd Wright. What this comes down to is the comforting balance one senses. Plans are organic but also orthogonal; material expression is industrial or technological but also natural; one senses classicist tendencies paired with the Romantic; there is the “urban” Aalto and also the man of the countryside, and so on. These dualities are somehow resolved in Aalto’s work and personality, contributing greatly to his image as “The architect we all want to be.”
The second exploration takes a different path. In his 1986 essay American Neo-Urbanist Andres Duany argues for a “Head/Tail Principle” as Aalto’s primary architectural design motif or parti. This seemingly aligns with an idea from the world of neuroscience (or more exactly Neuro-Aesthetics) described by Salk Institute scientist Thomas Albright as a general definition of beauty being comprised of “novelty” and “pattern.” Duany’s “head,” the dominant feature of an Aalto building and typically its most important programmatic element, corresponds well with Albright’s “novelty,” the distinctive thing we notice in places considered beautiful. The “tail” in Duany’s theory parallels Albright’s “pattern”—the subordinate, background elements that provide contrast. Could it be that the appeal in Aalto’s work lies in his motif—which by its very nature creates a form of beauty?
This lecture considers “duality” and its frequency in architecture. Modernist theory is a mash-up of classical and romantic ideas. We talk about analog vs digital; practice as distinct from theory; high design and the vernacular and more. What is it that encourages such thinking? Is it a phenomenon of place? And what might neuroscience tell us about the persistence of duality?
Jeff Malpas Philosophy Professor University of Tasmania, Australia
Sarah Williams Goldhagen
Author, Consultant New York, USA
Saturday, July 23 | 10:30
Place, Ethics, Architecture
All being is a being in place, but human being has a very particular relationship to place. It is in place that human life finds its fundamental origin and ground, and it is in place too that the very world has its origin. Place is thus the threshold for the opening of human life and for the opening of the world. It is in place that the human relation to the world and the human relation to the human (to others and the self) are both worked out. This relation is fundamentally conversational in character. It is a conversation made possible by place, but at the same time, place itself belongs to a conversation of places, and every place has the form of a conversation. If all being is being in place, then ethics resides in our attentiveness and responsive to the place of being, to the place of our own being. This is especially relevant to architecture. Giving proper place to place is the first step in the genuine practice of architecture and of an architectural ethics. Such an ethics resides in the architectural attentiveness and response to the conversation of place to which architecture already belongs.
Saturday, July 23 | 11:15
Can Place Attachment be Designed?
The overarching imperative of the emerging discipline of neuro-architecture (or experiential design, or human centered design, or evidence-based design) is to promote human wellness and flourishing by helping architects develop design strategies consonant with the realities of human perceptual and embodied experience. One necessary component of this mission involves precisely articulating the spectrum of what humans want and need from the built environments they inhabit and use; and a central element - if not the central element - in this spectrum is place attachment.
In psychology, place attachment is a subcategory of attachment theory more generally, which holds that meaningful, deep, and secure attachments (whether to people or to places) are central to the development of stable personal and social identity. For all that architects know and are learning from the sciences about optimizing human experience in built environments, what sheds light on how people attach deeply to a place that might be operationally useful to designers? This paper will explore the possibilities for reaching a broad-based answer to this question, and offer an example of one subset of neuro-architectural design strategies that might effectively cultivate place attachment by instigating both bottom-up and top-down cognitive processing in delicate orchestration. It concludes with a discussion of the possibilities for widespread adoption of place attachment strategies and proposes avenues for further research.
Sergei Gepshtein
Scientist, Professor Salk Institute, San Diego USC,
Los Angeles USA
Saturday, July 23 | 5:00
Species of Space in Science and Design
Everyone seems to know what space is. But the meaning of “space” varies from person to person and from one occasion to another. It varies among the academic disciplines concerned with spatiality, such as physics and physiology in studies of the natural world, or psychology and phenomenology in studies of the mind. The meaning of “space” varies also among the practical professions interested in space, such as city planning and stage design, filmmaking and literary studies. How can we reconcile this polyphony? Is there an underlying root concept of space?
I will attempt answering these questions by investigating how the moving person is sequentially exposed to specific possibilities of experience. Inspired by recent developments in systems neuroscience, cognitive science, and sensory psychophysics, and reminiscent of the concept of affordance, this approach begins with a study of possibilities of experience, rather than actual experience, and it is trained on patterns of perception and active behavior distributed over space and time, rather than on their piecewise characterization. Still, the distributed experience of the environment consists of episodes divided by spatial and temporal boundaries. Properties of these boundaries can be deduced from the known characteristics of human sensory and active capabilities. Intangible and fluid, these boundaries are nevertheless real and systematic. They readily yield to methods of science and they constitute authentic objects of design.
Juhani Pallasmaa
Arch. Professor
Helsinki University, Finland
Saturday, July 23 | 5:45
From Space to Place
- Existential Experience in Architecture
Historians and theorists like Sigfried Giedion as well as modernist architects, understood space as the central notion in architectural thinking. However, experiential space, situation and place are seminal experiences in all arts, as they all mediate our relationships with the world. Space is primarily a theoretical notion of physics, while the experience of space turns away from neutrality into the experiential and existential placeness. Place is rooted in experience and it is mentally more constitutive than space. Architecture is deeply engaged in the lived meanings of space as well as of time; we exist simultaneous in place and time, but this is a fundamentally different reality than the modern space-time concept in physics. We exist in "the flesh of the world”, to use a notion of Merleau-Ponty, and the task of architecture is to relate us with this experiential flesh and dignify this relationship. This task implies a distinct relationality and mediation. ”We come to see not the work of art, but the world according to it”, this thinker suggests, and the argument s applies specifically in the art of architecture. Architecture is a fundamentally relational art.
Alberto Pérez-Gómez
Arch. History Professor
McGill University, Montreal
Monday, July 25 | 11:30
In Quest of Attuned Architectural Atmospheres: Contributions of Cognitive Theory and Neurophenomenology
In my most recent book “Attunement, Architectural Meaning after the Crisis of Modern Science” I explain the centrality of the concept of atmosphere for architectural meaning and its historical roots. I demonstrate the relevance of our growing concern with attuned places, at odds with the dominant concept of architecture as a geometric, aesthetic object. I show the association of Stimmung, the unique German term implying both atmosphere and mood, with the traditional aims of architectural meaning since Vitruvius, encompassed by terms such as harmony and temperance, explaining how architecture had traditionally sought psychosomatic health, framing lived experience with order and stability congruent with local cultural values. Stimmung became a central concern for artistic expression in view of the adverse cultural conditions of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and was engaged by practices of resistance against the dominant formalistic and technological assumptions of mainstream modern planning and building production. In order to fully grasp the possibilities of Stimmung and its implementation nowadays, creating life-enhancing atmospheres responsive to human action and to place in the fullest sense (as both natural and cultural context), a proper understanding of consciousness and perception beyond Cartesian misunderstandings is crucial. To this aim, insights drawn from neurophenomenology and so-called third-generation cognitive science prove indispensable. My lecture will discuss in detail these insights, drawing from recent works on phenomenology, neurophenomenology and enactive cognitive science.
David Kirsh Cognitive Science
Professor
UC San Diego, USA
Monday, July 25 | 5:00
Embodied Cognition
The theory of embodied cognition assumes that how we experience space and everyday things depends fundamentally on our bodies. The theory also emphasizes that we engage our environments with all our senses – multimodally – and that our cognition is often highly interactive, at times harnessing our body and even nearby things for thinking, simulating and computing.
To explore these ideas empirically, I first describe studies of peripersonal space that show that our internal representation of our body’s boundaries does not always stop at our skin; it is reshaped by what we can reach. Consequently, tools in our hand, or shoes on our feet can deform our body representation. The result is an adaptable body representation that codes reachable space differently than the space farther away. Engaging in joint activities – such as playing sports with others or dressing a child – also changes how we consciously and unconsciously divide space into regions.
I next discuss multimodal engagement and especially the nature of interaction between our different senses. Architecture is fundamentally about shaping our experience as active beings sensing through all our perceptual organs as we engage physically with things and socially with others.
The final principle I discuss focuses on how we use our bodies and nearby things to think with, to simulate possibilities and to work creatively. Our cognition is often interactive and extends to processes outside our brain.
These principles have implications for architectural creativity and for the type of dynamic, adaptive and mixed reality architectures now being designed.
Vittorio Gallese
Psychobiology Professor
Univ. of Parma, Italy
Monday, July 25 | 5:45
Architecture ‘from within’: The Body, Space and the Brain
The primordial quality turning space, objects and behavior into intentional objects is their constitution as the objects of the embodied intentionality our body’s motor potentialities express. Embodied simulation can shed light on human symbolic expression, both from the point of view of its making and of its experience. In so doing, it reveals the intimate intersubjective nature of any creative act. The cultural artifact, the outcome of symbolic expression, becomes the mediator of an intersubjective relationship between creator and beholder.
The experience of architecture, from the contemplation of the decorative elements of a building, to the physical experience of living and working within a specific architectonic space, can be understood in terms of its bodily grounding elements. Looking at a building, a room or a design object also means simulating the movements, actions, emotions, and sensations that those spaces and objects evoke.
The constant weighting of architectonic and peri-personal space is mainly processed by multi-modal motor neurons mapping visual space on potential actions or motor schemata. Through movement the available elements in space can be connected, objects can be carved out of their background and perceived as such. Through movement, meaning can be formed and articulated.
We must abandon the outdated concept of solipsistic and “oculocentric” vision. Vision is a complex experience, intrinsically synesthetic, that is, made of attributes that largely exceed the mere transposition in visual coordinates of what we experience any time we lay our eyes on something. The body is not only the instrument of cultural artefacts production, but also the fundamental instrument of their reception.
Ruth Varela Architect
Santiago de Compostela, Spain
Monday, July 26 | 11:15
Sentir el Paisaje, Conocer el Paisaje
Si nos detenemos a estudiar algunas de las culturas que poseen un fuerte vínculo con la naturaleza, enseguida nos damos cuenta de que existe una lógica simbólica que estructura su cosmovisión, dotándola de significados profundos. El cielo, los animales, las plantas, las flores, todo está perfectamente ordenado en un sistema de conocimiento que utiliza como soporte y como modelo el mundo natural y como tablilla de memoria todo el espacio que la vista y/o la imaginación permiten alcanzar o soñar.
De esta manera, si queremos conocer algún elemento del paisaje debemos sentir ese elemento del paisaje; sentiremos las montañas para conocerlas, sentiremos la lluvia, el vuelo de las mariposas. Y de forma progresiva, agudizada nuestra percepción y trabajadas las asociaciones entre las imágenes y los conceptos, empezaremos a conocer las montañas, la lluvia, las mariposas. Esto explica la razón por la que en algunas culturas, como en la de los pueblos nahuas de Mesoamérica, existe una única palabra, mati, con la que se designan al mismo tiempo los verbos conocer y sentir. Así es como los indígenas nahuas expresaban que el sentimiento era consustancial al conocimiento.
En esta conferencia partiremos de algunos elementos del paisaje para adentrarnos en el conocimiento de una flor, la flor de Santiago, the Jacobean Lily, la atzcalxochitl de los aztecas; una flor exótica, solitaria y majestuosa de extraordinaria belleza pero también, y sobre todo, un elemento de comunicación simbólica gracias a su color rojo y a su inusual forma de cruz.
Thomas D. Albright
Neuroscience Professor Salk Institute, San
Diego, USA
Wednesday, July 27 | 10:45
Neuroscience for Architecture
The Hindus of the Indus River Valley established a philosophy for the practice of building design, captured in the treatise known as Vastu Veda about five thousand years ago. Members of this society understood that architecture could "bring about an extraordinary response … an enhancement and enrichment of the users’ consciousness", and they developed design strategies to achieve this goal. The goal of designing buildings to benefit the mind of the occupant – not merely as a means to satisfy corporal needs – has remained a prominent thread throughout the history of architecture.
Neuroscience offers a state-of-the-art approach to the same questions put forth by the early Hindus. Neuroscience includes a collection of traditional and contemporary academic disciplines that seek to identify causal relationships between brain and behaviour. In the context of architecture, neuroscience is simply a rational empirical approach to understanding the structure and causes of human experience.
But what can architects do with this new knowledge of brain function? In very broad terms, basic neuroscience discovery can be a source of design inventions to improve human information processing in the built environment. Viewed in this way, architecture is an applied science of human biology.
Applied sciences aim to solve societal problems through a process of discovery, invention and validation. There is, of course, no end of societal problems for which an understanding of the brain may be beneficial. Human societies naturally seek to improve their quality of education, promote health and speed recovery from disease overcome navigational obstacles, enhance creativity, and promote civility, empathy, compassion and trust in human relationships. Architecture is surely one of the most effective practical tools we have for introducing neuroscience discoveries to meet these goals.
Eduardo Macagno
Neuroscience
Professor
UC San Diego, USA
Wednesday, July 27 | 5:00
Spatial Navigation is an Intrinsically Dynamic Experience
Human spatial navigation is a pervasive behavior involving real environments as well as those imagined or recalled in our minds. It is therefore no wonder that it has been the subject of numerous studies in a variety of disciplines, as well as the object of multiple theories and interpretations. To those who design and build the environments where we spend the greater part of our lives, evidence-based identification of features that optimize our dynamic experiences while navigating the built environment has become of paramount interest. Examples of such features include readily recognizable and accessible affordances, allowance for different cognitive and physical capabilities, and readily identified signage with easy-to-follow instructions. Since the environments we inhabit and navigate influence our physical and mental well-being, how can we assess the quality of the responses to particular designs? The dynamic experience of spatial navigation may be dissected in different ways; here we will focus on three aspects, which I call Search, Recognize, Respond Our goal is to identify and describe opportunities during navigation when empirical data useful in assaying the quality of a subject’s responses may be most readily collected. We will consider the role of eye movements as a physiological window into these phenomena.
Miguel Anxo
Fernán Vello
Poet
Lugo, Spain
Wednesday, July 27 | 7:00
Poem, Structure, Architecture
My intervention will try to establish or reveal patterns of correspondence between the forms (structure) of the poem and the structure or architectural configuration. The poem is an objectual construction, subjected to a set of "forces" of a structured language, and it is also texture, qualities, composition of linguistic materials. On the other hand, in the poem there is also an "interior" and an "exterior", and a conceptual space, "inhabitable" by the reader.
It will try to explain the existence of a "combinatorial sympathy" (structural) between the poem and architecture. From the classic poem to the modern poem, in its multiple versions, there are formal lines that approximate the architectural language. In the poem we contemplate a “root” and a sculptural growth, a position in space, and one can speak with the utmost naturalness of an “architecture of the poem”.
From the poem of my authorship entitled "Arquitectos" (this object of reading and expository analysis), an act of "unraveling" of the "deep architectural" will be carried out, the poetic plane of architecture and the act of cognition that all creative (constructive) space represents.
Santiago de Compostela, Spain to Matosinhos/Porto, Portugal
Claudia Kappl-Joy
Lighting Designer
Tucson, USA
Helsinki University, Finland
Friday, July 29 | 4:00
Light and the World of Senses
Omnipresence and Absence
As a medium, light is both a constant and multitude - constructive and destructive, manifest, and ephemeral, concrete and illusive; it is confusing and fascinating in its irreconcilable presences, touching our life’s.
Most often we think and discuss light in its visual occurrence and illumination; so, to say, light as presence. Thru research we keep learning more about its non-visual impact on the human and the environment. Due to raising awareness about the physical and biological condition/ing, we also gain new understanding about its impact on the psyche, the conscious and subconscious, for the individual and the collective.
Light moves us – physically and emotionally. It can be destructive, and disruptive or poetic and magical. Often considered the guardian of the dark, the lighting designer connects with the architect’s concept and the end-user’s need or preference, while focusing on the qualitative and feasible. A lighting designer practices at the intersection of science and art, architecture, and design. Alert intrigued and cautious about new and evolving technology and curious about the human condition, a lighting designer walks the line between the pragmatic and poetic, between the technical, physical, and psychological. Designing with Light and for Atmosphere, it is the former that asks for informed review, repeated study and testing, evaluation and understanding of the aspects of interaction to avert the bad, and it is the latter that brings joy, grounds us in intuition and the subconscious, which in turn evokes emotion and intrigues lasting memories.
Discussing select examples throughout time, space, and varied genres, and establishing a ‘Common History of Light and Consciousness,’ which resonate in our individual and collective minds, might convey some of the above. This talk is an attempt to raise awareness, to go beyond the quickly observed and consumed, for a more critical, and inclusive view; for a more carefully considered interaction with light, space, and its people.
Saturday, July 30 | 11:15
Alvar Aalto’s Painterly and Atmospheric Light - Spatial, Haptic and Emotive Illumination
Early on, Alvar Aalto was seen as the dissident among the leading modernists. His architecture echoes history and time, and his forms, materials and details project emotive and tactile experiences. Instead of intellectualized generality, he sought differentiation, specificity and intimacy. As modernist architects in general were interested in the quantity of light, Aalto aimed at a qualitative and atmospheric light. Both in his architectural illumination and designs for fixtures of artificial lighting, he created realms of nesting spaces of light within each other, and lights that caress surfaces and turn them into haptic experiences, as opposed to pure visuality. Aalto also understood that we need differences of illumination level, and even twilight and darkness. The Council Chamber of his Säynätsalo Town Hall has a surprisingly low level of illumination, but it supports the privacy and individuality of the Council members. As a total contrast, the interior of the Three Crosses Church is bathed in a omnipresent and elevating light without direction; space, form and light are totally fused.
In many of his buildings, Aalto created illuminations that evoke the experiences of being in the spotted and constantly changing light of the forest. He used natural phenomena, the rhythmically varying spaces of forests and even the northern lights as metaphoric generators of architectural spaces.
Juhani Pallasmaa Arch. Professor
Edite Rosa Architect
Uniersity of Lusófona Porto, Portugal
Saturday, July 30 | 4:00
Drawing as an Anticipatory Finding of the Senses
The lecture inquires how architectural design form can be a mediator between matter and emotion in an anticipatory encounter of the senses. For this aim the process of developing the idea and the design for the construction of architect Siza´s Church of Marco de Canavezes is exposed through the drawings produced.
The drawings unveil a dialectic that runs from the creation of atmospheres until their fixation, in the construction of a body matter of a world of senses. An expanded dialectic between drawing as conception (project) and drawing as production (matter). Both, in the understanding of the user´s and of the craftsman constructor perception, of the designed and constructed environment.
Drawing as a working tool but above all as an instrument of thought, is thus, understood simultaneously and dialectically as the construction of the idea and as a means of communication and representation of architecture. Drawing as a specific, technical language, but also as a universal, common language.
The hand drawing is understood as an extension of the body through thinking for the design projection of experiences.These drawings of imagined/conceived spaces allow us to evaluate and perceive the human and civilisational values of an epoch.
The drawings themselves are also an instrument of perception as a content and form of the intuited. Immaterial contents as emotion and reason, symbolic and cultural, uses and customs, memories and ambience (local and temporal) guessed in the existent environments, converted into material forms of space, paths, light, materials and construction that narrate designed atmospheres.
Cognitive Science Professor
UC San Diego, USA
Saturday, July 30 | 4:45
Enactive Cognition and Experience Design
Although enactive cognition is closely aligned with embodied cognition, it has its own research agenda that emphasizes the active role that people play in shaping their own experience. I will review these arguments and show:
• how the path each person takes through the world depends on their tasks and goals,
• how enaction implies we create meaning in a multisensory way, and
• how our memory is affected by whether we are passive or active in determining the sequence of our encounters, and how we attend to each encounter and integrate it with previous experience.
Experience design, I will argue, is about shaping the possibilities of active experience. Two designs may be equally effective from a functional or task performance perspective but differ in their aesthetics. They provide agents with different opportunities to ‘smell the roses’ without diminishing how well they do on their tasks. The term ‘atmosphere’ is sometimes invoked to characterize the broader set of multimodal features in an environment that may affect a person’s experience. These additional qualities enable agents to interact with aesthetic properties that have little to do with the purely functional properties, implying that architectural designs invariably go beyond efficiency.
David Kirsh
Mark Alan Hewitt
FAIA
Arch. Historian
New Hampshire, USA
Sunday, July 31 | 10:00
Architectural Design and the Enacted Mind
This presentation outlines one of the key arguments in my book, “Draw In Order to See: a cognitive history of architectural design” (ORO Editions, 2020): that design is an artisanal process informed by the human brain’s connection with both the body and the environment. Most of the Moving Boundaries group will agree with that premise.
The talk will begin with a short introduction to the book’s main themes, including a schema for describing how human builders have approached the problem of making shelters and buildings through the ages: CRAFTING, DEPICTING, and ASSEMBLING.
It will then move to an analysis of how architects see their own conceptual processes today, in relation to theories of design thinking by academics and cognitive science pioneers: Herbert Simon, Morris Asimov, Peter Rowe, William Mitchell and Bryan Lawson. The argument critiques the ratiocinated, problem-solving models promulgated by computer scientists, and introduces the ideas of Merlin Donald, the evolutionary psychologist who first looked at mimetic cognition as a prelude to the fully developed modern brain, with its bifurcated and symbolic reasoning capacities. Finally the lecture will explore a theory of design as a series of action perception loops, or exogram loops, that describes the process that designers have used since the Renaissance, when drawings and models became integrated into the task of making buildings. The session will end with questions and discussion.
Arch. Professor, Designer, Consultant
University of California, Berkeley
Sunday, July 31 | 11:15
Body Conscious Design
Body Conscious Design is a theory, co-design method, and practice that enables educators, designers, and users to evaluate, design, and transform objects, buildings, and places to serve our physical bodies and increase well-being physically and socially.
Contemporary Western culture and design standardize bodies, restrain them in movement, posture, and sensation, and cause physical pain and deformities. Industrial designs of our clothing, shoes, homes, work places, transportation vessels, and public spaces assume that we are interchangeable parts that can fit into whatever is provided. Shoes are too tight; chairs create back problems; schools, offices, places of entertainment and transportation limit our movements; and even our homes can be restrictive. Instead, Body Conscious Design acknowledges bodies as an important source of design variation and inspiration. We start with the biomechanics of the body, include the senses (sight, sound, scent, and touch), and consider social norms and mores — often aiming to change them through the designs themselves, and education about them.
This lecture guides you, the audience, in three experiential exercises used in classroom teaching to increase body awareness and shows how this translates into design, using as examples shoes, chairs, and both indoor and outdoor rooms that support the body in at least 5 different postures or, better yet, encourage sequences of movement. When the intimate connection between body and consciousness is enlivened, design expands and improves.
Galen Cranz
Giovanna Colombetti Philosophy Professor University of Exeter, UK
Monday, August 1 | 09:45
Emotion and Perception: Introduction to Philosophical Perspectives, with a View toward Implications for Architecture
The nature of emotion and its relation to perception is a highly debated topic in philosophy and many other disciplines. This is not surprising, as we use the terms “emotion” and “perception” in different ways in ordinary language, and across languages. Accordingly, we have different (and not always compatible) understandings of what emotion and perception are, and how they relate to other aspects of the mind. This lecture will briefly introduce participants to a variety of theoretical perspectives on these concepts, with a special focus on emotion theories and on different views of how emotion relates to perception. It will also consider the relevance of these theories for our experience of architecture. For example, is our perception of architecture emotional, or not (and what could this mean)? Do we need emotion to appreciate architecture? Are bodily feelings involved in the experience or architecture? Is the experience of the atmosphere of a place an emotion? And so on. Among the theories of emotion we will consider are feeling theories, cognitive theories, and perceptual theories. I will pay special attention to the role of the body, drawing connections between embodied theories of emotion and the field of 4E cognition (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended cognition). As this lecture comes toward the end of the summer school, it will also aim to integrate some reflections that will have emerged during the previous days, including encounters with the work of Álvaro Siza Vieira.
Davide Ruzzon
Arch. Professor NAAD, Venice, Italy
Monday, August 1 | 10:45
Tuning Architecture with Humans
Human bodily kinematics evolved to resonate with spaces and masses in the environment. There are many dimensions to this attunement between humans and architecture. Among them are the responses to natural light, the variable preference for curvilinear over orthogonal forms, reaction to materials such as wood and stone, and to the height and shape of a ceiling, and also wayfinding that uses the brain’s spatial navigation system. Architecture binds all these perceptual dimensions into a multisensory and dynamic experience when we are in or around buildings. We could call such architectural experiences “atmospheric”.
Why are we speaking about attunement? People are not tourists: each person moving around a city develops activities, improves himself or herself, makes plans, works on tasks, and seeks to gain results from his actions—not only material but emotional. Emotions are in many ways the bodily memories of previous experiences. Our daily encounters with buildings, and the cityscape, should support both our emotional desires and our daily activities. People already know what they are seeking. The memory of such emotional essences is the driver — not the formal superficial memory imprinted in architectural simulacra we have endured during postmodern age. Tuning architecture with humans means understanding the expectations, the emotional atmospheres people seek in their daily activities, and making institutions that embody our deepest longing for beauty.
This is the material that we teach in the international program “Neuroscience Applied to Architectural Design” (NAAD) at the Universita Iuav Venezia. The school that was home to such architects as Carlo Scarpa is one of the leading design schools in Europe. NAAD is the only program of its kind now operating. It has been associated with the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture since its inception.
Sergei Gepshtein Scientist, Professor
Salk Institute, San Diego USC, Los Angeles, USA
Harry Mallgrave
Arch. History Professor IIT, Chicago, USA
The Interface of Cultures
Tuesday, August 2 | 10:30
An architectural historian and a neuroscientist engage in a wide-ranging dialogue about the problem of cultures meeting at the interface of architecture and the natural sciences of the human being. The conversation revolves around the question of how such disciplines as systems neuroscience, cognitive science, and sensory psychophysics can breathe new life into creative endeavors of students and practitioners of design. The authors explore how designers could become more fully aware of biological complexity of the human being and how design education could be reformed for that purpose.
Alberto Pérez-Gómez
Arch. History Professor McGill University, Montreal
Tuesday, August 2 | 4:00
Coming Back to Architecture
We live in confusing times, doubly so for architecture. There is plenty of design and construction going on around the world, and research takes place in many areas, particularly on technical subjects, resilience, sustainability, neuroscience, but few seem to understand what is the core of the discipline. I want to say a few words around this important question, a crucial one I believe, and one that, perhaps surprisingly for some, has been around for over 200 years. Napoleon famously stated that in building modern France he had no need for architects, he would rather work with engineers, efficient builders that did not waste money. This signaled a deep change taking place in Western cultural sensibility, today inherited by technological global civilization. We cannot simply take for granted that we know what architecture is, that it is basically the buildings produced for consumption by a group of so-called service professionals, with a license from varied jurisdictions, who legitimize their products by signing and stamping a set of drawings with a registered patent. Culturally, architecture has lost its center, a loss that saw its inception with the transformations that brought European cultures into modernity. These changes manifested in architectural thinking during the late 17th century and crystallized in the early 19th century.
My position is that despite the grave ecological and political problems that characterize today our physical environment, despite the conceit of architectural professionals wishing to participate in our global consumer society, architecture has indeed something specific to contribute to the common good, something totally other than fashionable formally novel buildings, so-called intelligent environments, or sustainable edifices that are nothing more than “optimized” stopgap solutions to the very problems created by technology. I am convinced that the only way to attain some clarity about what is central to our discipline, and potentially to our practices, is to cast a more careful, contextualized retrospective view into the history of architecture, while trusting our perceptions about contemporary architectural creations that truly move us. In this lecture I will draw from history, philosophy and recent neurophenomenology to outline what I consider to be the essence of our discipline.