Hypothesis and objectives

The main objective of this Thesis is to show the potential of Neuroarchitecture and how it can be applied to the project development method. From this perspective, the architect must position themself as a mediator between the speculative theoretical discussion of their discipline and the quantitative results of studies in neuroscience about human behavior and their reactions to the built space. In this sense, it is intended to take a leap to overcome sensory or phenomenological architecture, since scientifically based knowledge would be directly introduced into project development.

This work seeks to raise and answer questions such as: how to integrate symbolic and experiential theory with all the advances in the field of neuroscience to make a Neuroarchitecture really feasible? How to translate the results of the investigations into the vocabulary and tools of architects? What parameters to study? Is it possible to quantify sensory architecture? And, above all, how to open the gaze of both fields to understand the collaboration between neurologists and architects as a vital need to continue advancing towards an integral and sensorially stimulating architecture?

Methodology and structure

This work has been carried out during the period running from February to June 2020 developing further a short essay written during an Erasmus stay at the Aarhus School of Architecture, Denmark (Aarch).

It starts from the interest in an architecture that manages to establish a sensitive spatiality with the user, but from a scientific basis that effectively tests the mechanisms used in the design. For this reason, the research carried out has focused on two main axes: the historical theory of sensitive, phenomenological and sensory architecture, on the one hand; and reading numerous articles and scientific references in the field of neuroscience that test different spatial parameters, collecting the reactions of volunteers from various studies.

In this work, an attempt has been made to balance the two mentioned branches, mostly finding coincidences in many of the hypotheses raised by sensory architecture. However, neuroscience is managing to go further with much more concrete contributions such as those that have been attempted to be reflected in this text.

The structure, beyond the state of affairs in both fields, aims to reflect this duality while integrating it and describing or enumerating from the architect’s perspective the different scales on which the practice of the discipline ends up focusing. The exposed project tools would follow an order that goes from the most general (global scale) to the most particular (material and immaterial scale), resembling the path that an architect would take when making decisions in the development of their work.

two trajectories