Focus of the matter

from Neuroarchitecture. Neuroscience as a project tool

Motivation

This current aims to put the user at the center of design, not only as the recipient of the architectural project, but also as the starting point of the entire process. The user is not the end, but the origin of the entire project.

This means, first of all, overcoming the theoretical parameters that characterize the utilitarian and mechanistic functional architecture of the 20th century: the proportion, formal or compositional values are meaningless by themselves when they leave the cognitive reality of the person and turn architecture into a discipline that looks at itself. Talking about a direct relationship between form and function should not lead to excluding the inherent needs of the occupant of this architecture.

Secondly, it is also intended to advance and overcome the theoretical approach framed in the so-called architecture of the senses or sensory architecture. This current based on holistic perception rejects iconographic or compositional appeal as the central axis of the project, the essence of most contemporary design. However, beyond its achievements, it bases its proposals on reflections and individual sensitivities that can make it difficult to materialize.

Works of art and architecture of diverse origins and intentions such as the Vals Baths by P. Zumthor, the Matter of Time by R. Serra, the Giraldi House by Luis Barragán, the work Earthroom by W. de María, the Holocaust Memorial by P. Eisenman or Olafur Eliasson’s Room for One Color installation show the effectiveness of a spatiality that understands the sensory component it generates on the visitor. However, a scientific approach to the matter is necessary to extract values and parameters to produce this effect in a systematic way.

Faced with the intuitive mode of sensitive architecture and the exaggerated pragmatism of current design, it is proposed from this work that Neuroarchitecture establish a triaxial system ‘person, form and function’. This framework would seek to be the starting point to constitute a methodological alternative responding to functionalism; at the same time as being the trigger for research and essays that deepen the scientific knowledge of cognitive processes to overcome sensory architecture. The subject, defined by their cultural condition and specific perception, will model from their neural anatomy what the qualities and structure of the space that surrounds them should be.

Fig. 0.6 Giraldi House, Luis Barragán (1976)