Motivation

“The buildings of our time may arouse our curiosity with their boldness and inventiveness, but they hardly give us a clue to the meaning of our world or our very existence.”

(Pallasmaa, 2000: 448)

The notion of form and its parts have been subject to the limits of industrial manufacturing, obsessed with reducing costs and time, to the detriment of its main objective: living. This utilitarian functionalism has turned the city and its buildings into merchandise, consumer objects where the ideas of spatiality and architectural theory are conditioned by the rules of the market and production relations.

At the same time, and on too many occasions, the relevant architecture has been relegated to centers of accumulation of wealth, where its configuration is required as a status symbol. On the contrary, the banal floods the generality of the territory to accommodate the rest of the population, “which is subjected to wandering through reduced spaces and is pushed into containers without considering their biological, spiritual and human conditions” (Gustav T. Fechner 1984 ).

On the other hand, it is estimated that people spend on average more than 90% of their time in buildings (Gary Evans and Janetta Mitchelle, 1998) and it is known that the environment directly affects neuronal development throughout our lives. Why can’t architecture make these spaces really improve our physical and mental health? Why does the failed model based on overcrowding and the non-city continue to be repeated?

Paradoxically, the affirmation of function has been followed by the denial of habitable space, reducing rooms to the limit and filling them with consumer goods. As Pallasmaa states, “our technological, consumer, and media culture consists of increasing attempts to manipulate the human mind in the form of themed environments, commercial conditioning, and mind-numbing entertainment.” (Pallasmaa, 2016: 72)

Given this, why not advance in criticism proposing as a response an architecture based on the sensory? An architecture capable of stimulating cognitive abilities, made up of spaces that arise from movement, from materiality, from the knowledge of the physical and sensitive qualities of the user to place them at the center of debate and research. Thus, one can speak of a Neuroarchitecture that translates the profound needs of the person into truly habitable spaces.

Fig. 0.2 Watercolor, Steven Holl (2016)

Source: architectmagazine.com

Fig. 0.3 Representation of neurons, Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934)

What is Neuroarchitecture?

From this Bachelor’s Thesis, it is proposed to define the recent term Neuroarchitecture as the intersection between the fields of neuroscience, psychology and architecture, taking as a reference the thesis in this regard proposed by Christoph Metzger in 2018.

The main objective of this discipline would be the search for systematizable project mechanisms whose implementation is based on a better understanding of the nervous and cognitive system of the human being. It focuses on redefining the lexicon of architecture such as interior space, transitions, materials, proportion, light and color, among others that will be detailed in this work, in order to understand them on a neural scale.

Source: artsy.net

Source: bjorndesign.net