A groundbreaking interdisciplinary course and conference, titled Moving Boundaries: Human Sciences and the Future of Architecture, will be held at the Pousada Santa Maria do Bouro in Amares, Portugal in partnership with Casa da Arquitectura, from March 22-30, 2025. The objective of the program is to teach design with a focus on people and their biological and social needs, to learn how to create buildings and cities for human and environmental health and wellbeing. Now in its 5th edition, for the very first time in Northern Portugal, the program brings together more than 60 international speakers and students from twenty different countries: including practicing architects, health professionals, environmental psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, urban designers, and design educators. The Moving Boundaries program is dedicated to the work of Portuguese Architects Álvaro Siza Vieira and Eduardo Souto de Moura, special honorees of this session.
During the intensive eight-day spring course, one of the greatest meetings of world-renowned design and health experts ever held in the Minho region, participants will celebrate the rich cultural heritage of Northern Portugal, including Amares and the cities of Porto, Braga and Guimarães. While they live together in Pousada Amares, they will learn from Portuguese culture and traditions, distinctive vernacular craft, architecture and its people. Faculty and participants, top international experts, will present new research and collaborate in lectures and roundtable discussions to investigate how architecture and urban design impact human health, and how they contribute to creation of restorative and sustainable places. In addition to lectures, there will be workshops, communal meals, morning walks, social activities, day trips and architecture tours. Contributions of all attendees will be included in the post-program publication, “The Moving Boundaries Manifesto: Design for Health and Wellbeing.”
For any questions about this press release or to speak with the organizers of MB, please write to the team at: movingboundaries2025@gmail.com or to the Director, Arq.Tatiana Berger at: tatiana@movingboundaries.org
ABOUT MOVING BOUNDARIES
Our buildings, neighborhoods, and cities directly impact our health and wellbeing. This basic fact is appreciated increasingly across the full range of professions involved in design and maintenance of the built environment. At the same time, we know little of how the relationship of persons and environments works in detail: how exactly our experience and behavior, emotions and engagement in the community are shaped by the built environment.
A number of scientific disciplines have been called to help us fill this gap, including most notably the disciplines allied under the umbrellas of neuroscience and cognitive science. Encounters of scientists and design professionals produce an exciting new frontier of human knowledge, and they lead to new understanding of the roles and responsibilities of the designer.
Moving Boundaries is an interdisciplinary international collaborative seeking to disseminate this new understanding by means of education, research and advocacy. The initiative operates at the interface of the just mentioned scientific disciplines and such design disciplines as architecture, urban planning, landscape architecture, and interior design. Based in San Diego and La Jolla, California, which is the home of the venerable Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA), connected by an active network of collaborations with kindred schools of design around the world, Moving Boundaries is poised to curate a global community of students, professionals, and organizations that share our vision and values.
In its larger aspirations, Moving Boundaries is designed to serve as a platform for collaboration between educators and scientists, practitioners and students of architecture, as well as with institutions of design, research and learning. The initiative is animated by ideas and creations of such notable architects as Richard Neutra, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvaro Siza Vieira, Louis Kahn, Alvar Aalto, Carlo Scarpa, Luis Barragan, Balkrishna Doshi and Juhani Pallasmaa, and also by such innovative thinkers as Maurice Merleau-Ponty in France and John Dewey in the United States. Collective legacy of these individuals demands that design is viewed from an uncompromisingly humanistic perspective, committed to personal flourishing, and centered on the individual’s physical health and psychological wellness.
SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA PORTO GUADALAJARA