ORO Editions

The pavilion creates careful views outward and toward itself. Using a double layer of concrete beams, Fehn creates a column-free space, weaving around the existing trees. The roof, pigmented to glow, a metaphor for sunlight falling on a quilt of snow (Taylor-Foster 2016) is felt as "concrete manifestations of the living presence of nature" (Norberg-Shulz + Postiglione 1997).

photos

these felt emotional states serve an evolutionary purpose of keeping the body in balance, regulating life functions such as thermal balance, food access and physical safety. What Demasio (2018) and others call feelings are built "on top of" emotions:

Feelings are mental experiences, and by definition they are conscious; we would not have direct knowledge if they were not. But feelings differ from other mental experiences on several counts. First, their content always refers to the body of the organism in which they emerge. Feelings portray the organism's interior—the state of internal organs and of internal operations…

Demasio's second characteristic of feelings is that they have valence as their defining element; that is, humans fundamentally experience them as a spectrum of good to bad, or positive and negative valence—as a moment-tomoment mental translation of exterior life conditions.

How this gets translated to architecture is that architectural emotion can be thought of as the body's physiological response to the built environment. How one feels about being in a building arises first from these emotions and then become conscious. Repeated over time, feelings can become concepts, the material for intellectual abstractions. Like the phenomenologists, the body is considered as foundational for any architectural perception, yet neuroscience is more interested in the biological explanation for how the body responds to and interacts with the world, a third-person objective view, rather than the first-person view of the experiencer.