The Quest for Empathic Architecture

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Frontmatter

2. Introduction

   Paola Gregory

   Abstract

   In the last twenty years, empathy appears to have become the key to studying the relationship between the sciences, new technologies, philosophy, aesthetics, ethics and politics. Often referred to by Obama – We need to stand in somebody else’s shoes – empathy appears to “hit the mark” in summarizing a social vocation and, in particular, a way of sharing another person’s feelings, combining the different dimensions of being human, such as the emotional, cognitive and behavioral ones, together with the ethical and social ones.

3. 1. The Emotional Turn and the Rediscovery of Empathy

   Paola Gregory

   Abstract

   What is an emotion and what relationship is established between emotion and experience in the use of an architectural or urban space? We all feel emotions, but it is difficult to define them and understand what they actually are: whether they are shared by all human beings regardless of specific ethnic groups and cultures or, vice versa, whether they are profoundly rooted in time and space; whether they are cognitive phenomena, special sensations generated by conscious thought, or pre-reflective and pre-cognitive bodily responses; whether they are mainly individual or are triggered by social conditioning; lastly, what impact they have on our individual and collective lives.

4. 2. The Organism-Environment Circle

   Paola Gregory

   Abstract

   The centrality of the body in phenomenological reflection profoundly modifies the concept of space and environment in which the ‘embodied’ subject moves, since, by moving, “the agent does not limit itself to modifying the relationship between kinesthetic and perceptive sensations, it operates a real transformation of the perceived environment”,¹ opening the body to new perspectives and actions. Perception leads to movement and this results in a dynamic modification of perception, producing an emotive-cognitive response which is perceived in our ‘lived’ body. Movement, perception, emotion and cognition are therefore closely interrelated, in a circular system that defines the reciprocity of the organism-environment relationship, in which “the body is the active perceiver, and not a mediator between mind and world”.²

5. 3. Empathy and Neurosciences

   Paola Gregory

   Abstract

   The re-appraisal of the body and its emotions in cognitive and interpersonal processes began in the 1980s, with The Embodied Mind by Varela, Thompson and Rosch constituting a fundamental reference point, as we have seen (see supra, par. 2.2). In contrast with the mind-computer analogy that characterized classic cognitive science1 and the subsequent computational and connectivist developments² – both hinging on the idea of the mind as an abstract entity and a substance independent of the body that manipulates information in symbolic format according to a series of formal syntactic rules – the rediscovery of an “embodied mind” emerged from a set of interdisciplinary studies in which a fundamental role was played by the developments in neurosciences,³ in particular cognitive neurosciences. The latter, using a series of non-invasive techniques for displaying the functioning of the brain cortex and nuclei (such as functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI, positron emission tomography PET, and nuclear magnetic resonance NMR), showed how the brain makes cognition possible and, more generally, how the mind functions in relation to activities like memory, learning, emotion and the unconscious processes.

6. 4. Atmospheres

   Achieving Situational Aesthetics Paola Gregory

   Abstract

   We could define atmosphere as “what passes through and allows to pass”. “In Chinese thought – François Jullien writes – what we call “real” (reifying it) is conceived in terms of flurry, respiratory flow (qi: to translate it as “energy” is still too Greek)”; it is rather “the “in-between” [that] from which/through which every event proceeds and unfolds”.² In China, landscape painters have always been particularly sensitive to atmospheric qualities, expressed through concepts that merge rather than divide: shan-shui (literally mountain-water) and feng-jing (wind-light) highlight the compenetration that renders undivided, that disseminates and animates like the wind, or transforms solid into fluid, like a mountain transfigured into aqueous dissolution.

7. 5. Empathy and Architecture

   Paola Gregory

   Abstract

   Following on from the previous chapters, we could place empathy within four coordinates which, in our view, form four corners of a frame for architecture. These four corners are identified with four concepts: a) emotion; b) affordance; c) embodiment; d) atmosphere.

8. 6. A Different View

   Paola Gregory

   Abstract

   At the end of his contribution to the book Questions of Perception. Phenomenology of Architecture, Steven Holl, after going through his own – already extensive – design production, describes several of his experiences of architecture, with the intention of “illustrating the type of phenomenological nuances on which the foregoing argument relies”.¹

9. 7. Fragility and Strength of Empathy

   Paola Gregory

   Abstract

   In no other historical period, perhaps, has the thought of memory been so present and pressing as in ours: a thought that reflects on its past, reprocesses it, preserves it, but could also conceal it or, to some extent, betray it during its transmission. One thing is certain: starting from the more or less truthful representation we give of our past, we build our present and future identity and on this support we tell our story, we relate to others and we produce culture.

10. Backmatter