Attention is not narrowed in algorithms, signifiers, and particles, but directed toward the emergent, the affective, the sensual, the gestural and kinesthetic factors that pattern human perception and experience.

Whereas allegory and metaphor are perfectly valid exercises in architectural design, architects at times need to be reminded that people initially do not experience their habitats in this way. The general ambience of a perceptual field is what people first encounter, in large part through our peripheral vision, as Juhani Pallasmaa has noted. And biological judgments are already being made by such things as the touch of a door handle or handrail, the proportioning of stair risers and treads, the texture of the floor material, the resonance or ambience of the spaces, the hand of fabrics, the smell of materials, and the presence of natural light. These biological responses occur before someone stands back and reflects on the overall experience.

What biology today is making evident, however, is the degree to which our responses to physical, social, and cultural environments are embodied, and how our responses to this condition of embodiment in turn alters our biological organisms. We “feel ourselves into” (to use Robert Vischer's term) our living environments in a multisensory and immediate way through our bodies, and these feelings have biological consequences.

We can design for the “wow” effect, the highly stimulating environment that forces people to come to terms with the intensity and presumed ingenuity of our design, or with greater modesty we can design a place that provides rest and comfort, or perhaps offers the occasion for social rituals or private nourishment. Both approaches have their appropriate occasions, but then again architectural training in the design studio often encourages the seeking out of the greatest “bang for the buck,” as the saying goes. With this in mind, what happens in an urban environment where most buildings are designed to be active, aggressive, or even abrasive to our senses?

… the scientists also found evidence of mirror activity when we observe two inanimate objects touching one another. As the neuroscientists framed the issue: the domain of touch appears not to be limited to the social world. Space around us is full of objects accidentally touching each other, that is, without any animate involvement.

In other words, although we are animals evolved for fitness, we are just as much animals with a deep desire for meaning as part of our attempts to grow and flourish. Architecture is ideally located at the intersection of these two complementary aspects of our lives, insofar as the ways we organize space and buildings address simultaneously our need for physical habitation and our need for meaning.

No creature lives merely under its skin; its subcutaneous organs are means of connection with what lies beyond its bodily frame, and to which, in order to live, it must adjust itself, by accommodation and defense but also by conquest.

We live and become what we are only in and through our engagements with our many environments. All our perceptions, feelings, emotions, thoughts, valuations, and actions are thus consequent on our embodied transactions with our physical surroundings, our interpersonal relations, and our cultural institutions and practices. Our capacity to experience, make, and communicate (share) meaning is not just a result of the makeup of our brains and bodies, but depends equally on the ways our environments are structured.

The meaning of any object, quality, event, or action is what it points to by way of some experience. Meaning is relational, and the meaning of a certain object would be the possible experiences it affords us—either now, in the past, or in the future (as possibilities).

What any object affords is the result of the nature of our bodies and brains—our perceptual apparatus, or neural binding capacities, our affective responses, our motor programs—as they interactively engage patterns and structures of our environments. So, for a human being with fingers, hands, and arms, a ceramic cup affords pick-up-ability, whereas for an ant it might provide climb-up-ability.

The crux of this view is that meaning is not just some abstract, disembodied conceptual content, but rather involves the neural simulation of sensory, motor, and affective processes that we associate with the thing or event that has meaning for us.

Our world is a realm of immediately felt qualities that have meaning for us even before and without language. This is not to deny that language and other forms of symbolic interaction can sometimes dramatically enrich our possibilities for meaning, but linguistic meaning is already itself parasitic on embodied, qualitative meaning.

Most of us do not feel at home in completely closed containers. We want access to light and air, so we want windows and doors that open us to exchanges with our surroundings. We want a certain, perhaps culturally variable, degree of privacy, but we need ways to learn what is going on in the world beyond our door or gate. In other words, we want to be in and of the world when we think that serves our purposes, and we want shelter and privacy at other times.

We are aware of the crucial role of balance in our lives mostly when we lose it, rather than when we unconsciously achieve and maintain it. … The Leaning Tower of Pisa makes some people feel vertiginous and others slightly uneasy. Some experience it as profoundly unbalanced and disturbing. Likewise, Richard Serra's Tilted Arc made many people so uncomfortable that it was removed eight years after its installation in the Federal Plaza in Manhattan.

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone has argued: In the beginning, we are simply infused with movement—not merely with a propensity to move, but with the real thing.

This same type of perceptual motion experience plays a key role in our experience of buildings. For example, the flowing, playful, and sometimes incongruous angles and lines of various postmodern designs present a very different overall unifying quality than the austere, machine-like regularities and rectilinearities of modernist glass-wall box structures.

by Juhani Pallasmaa

Buildings mediate between the world and our consciousness through internalizing the world and externalizing the mind.

It is not generally acknowledged that our constructed world also domesticates and scales time for human understanding. Yet architecture slows down, halts, reverses, or speeds up experiential time, and we can appropriately speak of slow and fast architectures.

… architecture is “a defense against the terror of time.”

In addition to “domesticating” physical space for human use and grasp, architecture “tames” time for human understanding.

The chiasmatic continuum of outer physical and inner psychic space can, perhaps, be illustrated by the enigmatic image of the Moebius strip, a looping ring that has only one continuous surface.

While rational understanding calls for a critical distance and separation from the subject, poetic “understanding” requires nearness, identification, and empathy.

When discussing the roles of the brain's hemispheres, Iain McGilchrist points out: “The right hemisphere understands the whole not simply as the result of assembling a bunch of fragments, but rather as an entity prior to the existence of the fragments.”

… understanding architecture solely as a visual art form is hopelessly reductive.

Architecture, also, has its roots and mental resonances in our biological historicity. Why do we all sense profound pleasure when sitting by an open fire, if not because fire has offered our predecessors safety, pleasure, and a heightened sense of togetherness for some fifty thousand years?

Great works possess a timeless freshness; they project their enigmas always anew—making us feel each time that we are experiencing the work for the first time.

Our neural system seems to be activated by newness, and we seek novel stimuli, whereas the deepest emotive impact arises from the primal layers of our neural system and memory. We humans are essentially creatures suspended between the past and the future more poignantly than other forms of life—it is the task of art to mediate between these polarities.

What else could beauty be than nature's powerful instrument of selection in the process of evolution?

Works of meaningful architecture intuitively grasp the essence of human nature and behavior, in addition to being sensitive to the hidden biological and mental characteristics of space, form, and materiality. By intuiting this knowledge, sensitive architects are able to create places and atmospheres that make us feel safe, comfortable, invigorated, and dignified without being able to conceptually theorize their skills at all.

Perceptions call for imagination, as percepts are not automatic products of the sensory mechanism; they are essentially interpretations, projections, creations, and products of intentionality and imagination.

What we do depends on what we have perceived, but what we perceive depends on what we do—and our actions include exploration in search of knowledge of the world relevant to our unfolding goals and plans.

What may seem like a seamless unity to our introspection may in fact involve different processes in the brain being coordinated and orchestrated.

Other related issues include work environments and their effect on productivity. We could even look at circadian rhythm and, for example, the lighting of rooms in hospitals or homes for the elderly.

In summary, the hippocampus plays a crucial role in the creation of memory of episodes, yet the cerebral cortex is still able to hold old memories once they have been consolidated even when the hippocampus has been removed. Moreover, skill memory can be developed without a hippocampus, and involves regions like the basal ganglia and cerebellum.

All this makes the hippocampus very interesting for the insights it can offer into both our navigation in time, episodic memory as studied in humans, and our navigation in space, as shown by the place cells which bring us down to the circuit level in the hippocampus.

Different sensory modalities are engaged: in one room there are fragrant flowers in the water to engage the sense of smell; elsewhere a heavy leather curtain may engage a sense of tactility and heaviness in the action of moving the curtain aside.

Note that it is not that one fixes on a detail, adds another detail, adds yet another detail, and finally the whole emerges. Rather, one has this general idea of the whole, and details begin to come into place, and to replace that vague understanding of the whole with a more precise understanding of the parts of the whole, which now constrain how you will fill in other parts of that whole.

Whatever it is that your attention first yields governs the kind of further attention you pay, which in turn ensures you will see more of the same; and so things tend to firm up on the basis of where you started—which was just one of many possible choices. This, then, becomes your take on the world.

When we say we understand something, what we mean is that it resembles something else in our particular model of the world, which we think we already understand.

Survival depends on paying two kinds of attention at once: one kind is narrowly focused and committed to a single end, while the other is broad, open, sustained and vigilant for whatever might be, without preconception. Simultaneously paying two opposed kinds of attention is very hard to do with one brain. Its bihemispheric structure appears to have been the solution to this problem.

Neurologists conventionally distinguish five different types of attention; three and a half of these are served by the right hemisphere and one and a half by the left. The essential difference is that focused, narrow attention is the prerogative of the left hemisphere and broad, sustained attention is that of the right. People who suffer damage to the right hemisphere develop a pathological narrowing of the window of attention. Since attention changes the world, this means that the two hemispheres underwrite two kinds of being in the world.

The left hemisphere, because it isolates things in a very narrow attentional field, tends to see them out of context. The right hemisphere sees a broader field in which things are connected, so it sees things in context, the way they are actually situated in the world.

To generalize and extract where we need to particularize and see the whole in context changes the experience of space and time.

Certainty requires clarity, and clarity, too, is an illusion.

Explicitness is not always helpful: in fact it can destroy meaning.

The left hemisphere operates according to a mechanistic model—its world is an assemblage of bits and pieces. Le Corbusier conceptualized the house as a “machine for living” using the same model. But ultimately, as Sarah Robinson points out, Corbusier abandoned the machine for an organic model of the world.

One, that of the left hemisphere, is made up of disembodied, abstract, fixed, static, discrete entities that are familiar, and general in nature. They can be put together to form a world we think we understand and can control. But this world is self-enclosed, and lifeless, compared with the world of the right hemisphere, where everything is new, interconnected, incarnate, flowing, evolving, and unique.

The Latin word tendere, the root of the word “attention,” means to reach out a hand. This can be for grasping, the aim of the left hemisphere, or for exploring the world, to understand and connect—the aim of the right.

A bias toward one kind of attention over another has cultural consequences. Although all of our activities involve both hemispheres, in practice we tend to favor one take on the world. … I would suggest that we now live in a world in which the left-hemisphere view has come to dominate. If I am right, you would see something like this coming about: first and foremost, there would be a loss of the bigger picture. Knowledge would be replaced by tokens, and wisdom would be hard to find.

In the left-brain world, bureaucracy would have a field day. Our sense of uniqueness would be lost, quantity would become more important than quality, and our thinking would reflect the “either/or” mentality of the left hemisphere, in its constant battle for (an illusory) clarity.

Intuition can lead you astray, sure, but so can mindless rationalizing. You need to be able both to intuit and to reason. Intuition is not a mere indulgence: it is the precious distillate of experience.

Flow would be broken down to a series of pieces—effectively digitalized. The tacit forms of knowing on which society utterly depends would be abandoned in favor of “a network of small complicated rules,” a phrase de Tocqueville applied when visiting America in the 1830s.

… had an exaggerated sense of its own talents and virtues, while the right hemisphere, although more realistic, tended to underplay them; as a result the left hemisphere was dubbed “the polisher,” and the right “the tarnisher.” 

Herder points to the importance of an unbroken continuity which dismisses as inadequate any mere focus on parts; a never-resting evolution that defies stasis; an insistence on depth, volume, as opposed to the flatness of a single plane of vision; a commitment to the work of art imaged in the urgent recruitment of empathy mediated by the hand, rather than the detached coolness of the eye.

The eye draws attention to itself. It makes us think that our self is behind our eyes, and it obtrudes on the other senses.

… to which sight is particularly congenial to the mode of being of the left hemisphere.

The qualities of the right hemisphere need to be engaged: indirectness and implicitness, not the overwhelmingly explicit and confrontational; the embodied and sensuous, not the purely cerebral and clinical; flow, harmony, and depth, not disruption, discord, and surfaces that repel the mind, if not the eye; and an ability to evolve and change, without change being considered simply a decline from sterile perfection.

When I first heard Pallasmaa say that architecture is the art of “petrified silence,” I immediately recalled Goethe's famous remark that architecture is frozen music. These two things come together because music is about betweenness; it is all about gaps, silences.

You do not get to eternity by turning your back on time, but by going through the region of the temporal. You do not get to infinity by turning your back on the finite, but on the contrary by embracing the finite, going into and passing through it—to emerge on the other side.

The Latin word focus means the hearth. What is so marvelous about the hearth is that, when we sit around it, we cease to focus on one another, because we are all focusing, together, on the fire. That allows indirect attention to one's companions, an open, undemanding, friendly rather than inquisitorial, attention: whereas sitting in a fireless room in an armchair eye-to-eye, we feel at once on guard. That warmth, and the indirect gaze that is implicit, are important.

You cannot get beyond experience—and in experience we are all, literally, the “experts,” for that is what the word means. Remember that your understanding comes through your body. You experience the world intuitively through your senses more than you can ever know the world intellectually. Memory, the traces that experience leaves in us like a magnetic imprint, is stored in the gut, muscles, and bone as well as the brain. By all means learn about neuroscience—but the best lesson to learn from it is that only one half of your brain, the half that sees and understands the least, would ever think that great architecture can be reduced to the brain.

I speculate that neuronal circuits in our brain are wired with the natural ability to recognize the golden ratio while we are still embryos—just as we seem to be programmed before birth with a common image of a house that children throughout the world consistently draw when they are five years old.

Thus the architectural construct of a golden mean is processed in the human brain in much the same way, and in more or less the same area of the brain, as the neuroscience construct of a double helix is processed. They both require a brain that can imagine elements in three dimensions without seeing them, and forming images that can be learned, remembered, and taught to novices. The rules for proportion or DNA are discovered rather than consciously constructed and then applied.

A clear example of how knowledge from neuroscience can, and should, change the design decisions made by architects is in the design of special places in most hospitals called NICUs—the intensive care units that specialize in the treatment of ill or premature newborn infants. … The NICU environment provides challenges as well as benefits. The protected microenvironment includes continual bright lights, a high noise level, reduced physical contact, and painful procedures that unduly stress the infants. From the early years, it was reported that children who were cared for in NICUs grew up with a higher proportion of disabilities, including cerebral palsy and learning difficulties, than normal children.

For example, light is a source of energy and is capable of producing injury under a variety of circumstances. The risk of damage from light is related to the wavelength, the intensity, the duration, characteristics of the eye, and the maturation of the eye and the eyelids, etc. While the eyes can tolerate brief periods of intense light, the infant's eyes also need periods of very reduced light for retinal regeneration. There are examples of NICUs that were designed with windows to provide a view for the nurses and doctors, as well as visiting family. While they were well-intentioned, such design decisions were made without knowing that the premature infant's eyelid cannot protect its visual system from natural light, which is 10,000 times brighter than electric lighting.

Much the same is true of noises. Infants exposed to constant high levels of background noise from cooling equipment, air-handling units, and communications systems (e.g. “Dr. Kildare is wanted on the third floor” is broadcast over loudspeakers in the nursery) have been shown to have major long-term negative effects. Under noisy conditions the bandwidth for the reception of sound in the ear actually increases or widens so that the infant, as a child and as an adult, will be less able to discriminate between frequencies.

A form of attentiveness characterized by a receptivity to whatever floats into the mind is known as open awareness. Experiments suggest this kind of attention is the source of our most creative thoughts. Open awareness frees the brain to make chance associations that lead to fresh insights.

We tend to mistakenly think of attention as a switch that is either on or off. But instead, attention comes in many varieties. If we are too attentive, we tend to suffer from tunnel vision—the mind narrows. On the other hand, if we are not attentive enough, we lose control of our thoughts—we become scatterbrains.

A body is the entire material or physical structure of an individual organism; it is also an entity composed of numerous members—of people, things, concepts, or processes—a student body, a body of work, a body of evidence, the body politic. Body is used to describe the main or central part of something—the body of a temple, for instance. It can also describe a mass as distinct from other masses—a body of water or a celestial body.

What all the meanings do share is the sense that the body is a boundary that delimits qualities, persons, ideas, substances, objects or processes.

Breakthroughs in quantum physics have made it possible to develop instruments so sensitive that they can detect the biomagnetic field of the human heart from 15 feet away. So, whenever we share the company of others, we find ourselves in the midst of overlapping, interpenetrating bioelectric and magnetic fields that originate within each of our bodies.

In the classical world, electrons behave as particles and in the quantum world they behave as waves. Neither world, classical nor quantum, can be understood by drawing hard lines: energy fields extend indefinitely, matter can be reduced infinitely.

… not only that human cognition evolved for sophisticated communication between individuals, but that cognition is also socially distributed.

Language, for instance, can be considered as the collective, decentralized product of cognition—an accretion of human knowledge invented by no one that belongs to everyone. Cultural artifacts and institutions, including architecture, sediment aspects of shared knowledge and meaning as objective features of the world.

If the philosopher's role is to fathom the conceptual world, ours [architects] is to build its material manifestation.

Metaphors are not psychologically or ideologically neutral, they open epistemic channels of associations and meanings while closing off others.

In shaping matter, we shape experience—in shaping experience, we give form to life.

… our body has, nested within it, at least four bodies: our physical body, and the more ephemeral, but equally real, emotional body, mental body, and social body.

J. J. Gibson identified our five modes of perception, which he called externally oriented attention, as the basic orienting system, the auditory system, the haptic system, the tasting-smelling system, and the visual system.

In one instance, he [John Hull] notices that for sighted people, the affability of the weather is determined by predominately visual criteria. A nice day is synonymous with a clear blue sky. … For the blind person, the sound of the wind creates a tree and thunder builds a roof.

Researchers who study the buildings of ancient cultures suggest that their design may have been generated from predominantly acoustical rather than visual considerations. The caves at Lascaux may have been adapted to mimic the sound of beating hooves, Mayan pyramids may have been designed to sound like rain—these ancient places relied on human social interaction and participation to activate the multisensory space. 16 Just as the tree comes alive in a thunderstorm, so too can the actions of people become design features that enliven architectural space.

Touch receptors in the skin combine in the brain with vestibular, visual, and other touch information to help us retain our equilibrium. Studies show that Europeans who walk on cobblestone lose their balance more slowly than Americans who walk on flat sidewalks.

Modulating an otherwise flat, glass façade with texture renders the building more sympathetic to the migratory path of birds.

We know that being in gardens and natural settings helps to heal patients in hospitals. How can we design for the biophilia of scent?

Understanding the dynamic nature of visual perception would help us design with the poetry of light and shadow. The most effective stimulus for retinal cells, for example, is not evenly distributed light but linear contours with elongated edges between the light and dark areas. Shadows deepen mystery and ambiguity. Semir Zeki has convincingly shown that ambiguity in art activates the imagination.

We mistake the world in front of us—the one we can verify with vision—for the sole reality. Peripheral vision and echolocation cause space to open out around us, shifting our relationship with the world from one of domination and control to one of inclusion and nurture.

The heliocentric model effectively turned the world inside out. This exteriorization of the universe had profound psychological and philosophical consequences. … The once protected cosmos became a boundless world of objects obeying mechanical laws.

We now know that the thoughts and feelings that populate our subjective reality are not abstractions belonging solely to us; rather, they are constantly forming patterns of experiential interaction emerging from our continual engagement with the environment. What we understand to be our subjective reality is in fact an experiential process that is in and of the world, and not merely about the world.

Iain McGilchrist has pointed out that baby birds are as attached to their nests as they are to their mothers. John Paul Eberhard has shown how the architectural setting of the NICU is the primary caregiver for a premature infant. In both cases, the environment is a primary agent in the survival and flourishing of the vulnerable creature.

… we experience fictional realities through neurobiological mechanisms fairly similar to those through which we experience real life.

in humans, the motor brain is multimodal. Thus, it does not matter whether we see or hear the noise made by someone cracking peanuts, or locking a door. Different—visual and auditory—sensory accounts of the same motor behavior activate the very motor neurons that normally enable the original action.

The aesthetic value of works of art resides in their potential to establish a link between the intentional creative acts of the artist and the reconstruction of those acts by the beholder. In this way, creation and artistic fruition are directly related. To understand an artistic image, according to Hildebrand, means implicitly grasping its creative process.

… the feeling of physical involvement with a painting, a sculpture, or an architectural form provokes a sense of imitating the motion or action seen or implied in the work, while enhancing our emotional responses to it.

Beholders’ eyes not only capture information about the shape, direction, and texture of the cuts or strokes, by means of embodied simulation, they emulate the actual motor expression the artist used when creating the artwork.

As the experience of the built environment and its affordances is shaped through the precognitive activation of motor simulations, the role of embodied simulation in architectural experience becomes even more interesting if one considers emotions and sensations. A typical and recurring experience in everyday life is reacting with positive or negative feelings upon opening a door and going, for the first time, into a new architectural environment.

The same applies to the haptic qualities of materials employed to design exterior and interior parts of architectonic spaces whose multimodal impact and desirability could be easily measured.

… the experience of a narrow room increases the somatosensory sensation of verticality, “thus enhancing bodily stability,” while conversely, a large room elicits “a destabilizing effect for the missing cue in peripersonal space provoking an illusory backwards movement.”

while the brain controls our behavior and genes control the blueprint for the design and structure of the brain, the environment can modulate the function of genes and, ultimately, the structure of our brain. Changes in the environment change the brain, and therefore they change our behavior. In planning the environments in which we live, architectural design changes our brain and our behavior.

High building performance (in terms of energy usage, water usage, carbon footprint, etc.) is an excellent and necessary goal, but it covers only quantitative outcomes, not necessarily qualitative outcomes (although when paired with thoughtful design, the quantitative and qualitative effects can be exponential and very powerful—a completely separate discussion).

Psychology and culture are not often measured by architects or clients unless post-occupancy evaluations are conducted. We live in an “age of metrics” focused on measuring building performance …

Dr. Eve Edelstein and Dr. Peter Otto, identified at least some of the reasons for millions of lives lost to medical error in hospitals. At the ANFA conference in 2012, they presented compelling evidence demonstrating the various audio problems contributing to these errors. Part of the presentation illustrated the difficulty in distinguishing names of medications at a nurses’ station because of the background noise and the similarity of medication names. Understanding the brain processes occurring when we hear is helping to lead to possible design solutions. Assessing intelligibility, sound masking, source location of the sound, building material selections, and physical room layouts were discussed as potential strategies for prevention of future errors. 

Also, many classroom designs, especially in older facilities, do not account for negative impact on learning due to disturbing noise or discomfort (too hot or too cold). … When staff use leaf-blowers outside a classroom window, the noise disrupts some students with special needs; often it takes up to twenty minutes for the student to recover and refocus on the lesson. While this is not a building design issue, similar problems can occur with noisy mechanical systems or inappropriate adjacencies of programs.

by Thomas D. Albright

Indeed, architecture has always bowed to biology: the countertop heights in kitchens, the rise:run ratio of stairs, lighting, water sources, heat and airflow through a building, are all patent solutions to salient biological needs and constraints.

But there are subtler instances in which a deeper understanding of human biology affords a qualitatively superior solution. Consider, for example, the ascendance of the door lever as a design imperative imposed by biology. Seen from a strictly biomechanical perspective, a door lever is a far better tool than a traditional round doorknob for opening the latch. Pressure to adopt this superior solution came largely from recognition that it could benefit people with certain biological limitations (“physical disabilities”). Not surprisingly, the U.S. Americans with Disabilities Act (1990) has mandated the use of door levers because their design is easy to grasp with one hand and does not require “tight grasping or pinching or twisting of the wrist to operate.”

… knowledge of how the human visual system is wired up may, for example, lead to unexpected predictions about the visual aesthetics or navigability of a building. At the same time, of course, the level of analysis of brain function should be appropriate for the question. In the same sense that knowledge of electron flow in a transistor offers few practical insights into what your radio is capable of, it seems unlikely that today's knowledge of patterns of gene expression that underlie brain circuits will yield much grist for the mill of design.

In work with Alzheimer's patients, for example, John Zeisel has shown that architectural design elicits certain outcomes that have clinical value: anxiety and aggression are reduced in settings with greater privacy and personalization; social withdrawal is reduced in settings with limited numbers of common spaces that each have a distinctive identity; agitation is reduced in settings that are more residential than institutional in character.

As we have seen, contours that are nearby in visual space are more commonly similar in orientation, relative to those that are distant in visual space. Analogously, in the visual cortex, cells representing similar orientations are preferentially interconnected provided that they also represent nearby locations in visual space. There are evolutionary arguments one can make: it seems highly likely that this cortical system for organizing visual information conferred a selective advantage for detecting statistical regularities in the world in which we evolved.

… I speculate that the popularity of the cable-stayed bridge is also due, in part, to the fact that the gradually changing contours tap into something fundamental in the native organization of our visual system.

… the sensitivities of our sensory systems are adapted to the statistics of our environment, but those sensitivities may change—they may be recalibrated—when the properties of the world change.

The Cartesian understanding of cognition first appeared in architectural theory toward the end of the seventeenth century in the writings of Claude Perrault, the famous architect, medical doctor, biologist, and theoretician. He believed that architecture communicates its meanings to a disembodied soul (today often still identified with a brain, understood as the exclusive seat of consciousness), thoroughly bypassing the body, with its complex feelings and emotions.

This intuition appears to us whenever we stop being an object for ourselves—we are not “in” linear time. Rather, “time, or pure eternity, is in us.”

… these romantic philosophers posited a concept of self which first feels and then thinks; the I who wakes up every morning is not equivalent to the Cartesian ego (an I that can believe itself existing only because he/she thinks). 

In other words, the perceiver (subject), the perception, and the thing perceived (object) could never be said to exist independently; they are always codependent and coemergent, and therefore ultimately groundless or “empty” …

… every emotion is a variation of pleasure and pain, a condition of consciousness at the cellular level, always seeking homeostatic equilibrium.

By the same token, the external world—i.e., the city and architecture—truly matters, and we do not relate to it as if it were a text in need of interpretation or “information” conveyed to a brain: interpretation comes after we have the world in hand, and in this way architecture affects us along the full range of awareness, from prereflective to reflective.

… reflective self-awareness is not the only kind of self-awareness. Experience also comprises a prereflective self-awareness that is not unconscious. This includes particularly the prereflective bodily self-consciousness profoundly affected by the environment (architecture) that may be passive (involuntary) and intransitive (not object-directed).

… language is “emergent,” it “speaks through us” and captures meaning in its mesh; words point toward meanings but never fully coincide with them.

… architecture's gift is to reveal the true temporality of the space of human experience, one that is indeed open to spirituality: the experience of a present moment that, while it can be conceptualized by science (and our clocks) as a quasi-nonexistent point between past and future, is experienced as thick and endowed with dimensions—in a sense, as eternal.

Once we start to understand, through recent cognitive science, that our consciousness does not end with our skulls, it becomes easy to grasp that the emotive character of the built environment matters immensely: what matters, in other words, is its material beauty; its power to seduce us on one hand, and its capacity to open up a space of communication for intersubjective encounters on the other.

… if the quality of the lived environment is lacking—if we do not even look out to our surroundings for orientation and instead employ technological devices like GPS to find our locations in the world, for instance—our skills are continuously jeopardized and our actions actually reinforce our pathological nihilistic assumptions and the belief that “life is meaningless.” Rather than accepting that the built environment is merely a shelter, and all that matters is our possession of a sophisticated computer or an intelligent phone, these insights from neurophenomenology point to the crucial importance of our habitat, one that for humans includes the complexities of material cultures and spoken language.

It is easy to observe that human actions can change the mood in a room: it can be transformed through a charismatic speaker, lighting effects, artificial acoustics, etc. On the other hand, architects are capable of incorporating in their designed spaces a more lasting mood, one that we may associate with the room itself: solemn, strange, quiet, cheerful, reverential, oppressive, etc. It is important to point out that regardless of these precisions, our architectural experience is always ultimately dependent upon our participation in an event housed in the space; it is in such circumstances that architecture “means.”

Instrumental methodologies that seem to cancel the distance between theory (applied science) and practice are a dangerous contemporary delusion.

In the everyday world our bodies spontaneously express our moods; others directly pick them up and respond to them. Merleau-Ponty calls this phenomenon intercorporeality: “It is as if the other person's intention inhabited my body and mine his.”