Neuroergonomics and sociogenesis, lectures part5

Neuroergonomics and sociogenesis
Internationa Society of Biourbanism
Summer School 2014
www.biourbanism.org - info@biourbanism.org

International Society of Biourbanism - Summer School 2014
From Nowhere to Now-here
The Power of the Weak in the
Construction of Place
Diogo Teixeira
diogo.teixeira@usj.edu.mo
Lecture 14

To sum up, Saarinen treats the users
as children; Price treats them as
objects.

Place attachment
The bonding that occurs between individuals
and their meaningful environments.

Place attachment
as individual experience
‘‘it is not simply the places themselves that are
significant,but rather what can be called
‘experience-in-place’that creates meaning’’
(Manzo 2005)

sensation perception conception
Experience
EMOTION emotion
thought THOUGHT

Place attachment as affect:
Topophilia
“the affective link between the person and the
place or physical environment. Diffuse as a
concept, vivid and concrete as personal
experience” (Tuan 1974)

“Human beings have persistently sought an ideal
environment. As it stands, it varies from one
culture to another, but in essence it seems to
entail two antipodal images: the garden of
innocence and the cosmos. [...] Thus we move
from one to another [...]; seeking a balance that is
not of this world.” (Tuan 1974)

“I have used the term topophilia to describe that
form of cinematic discourse that exposes the labor
of intimate geography – a love of place that works
together with the residual texture of cineres. [...]
This is the site of (in)visible traces, inscribed and
laid bare, yet enduring erasable on the white fabric
of the screen.” (Bruno 2002)

Affect in the
Construction of Place
Thrift (2007), in his introduction to non-
representational theory, proclaims a geography of
what happens to relate space and affect. He starts
by the event and its essential feature - the
surprisingness - to describe the world-in-motion
we live, in which decisions have to be made for the
moment, every moment.

Affect is not only emotion, nor is it reducible to the
affects or perceptions of an individual subject:
“Percepts are not perceptions, they are packets of
sensations and relations that outlive those who
experience them. Affects are not feelings, they are
becomings that go beyond those who live through
them (they become other)” (Deleuze 1995)

From the analysis of dance, Thrift extracts the key
innovations of non-representational theory:
1)Produce 'therapeutic' interventions rather than claim the
grand theory.
2)Focus on a class of experiences seldom addressed, the
trivial, the interactive, the game.
3)Questions the traditional tools (ethnography, focus groups,
and the like) for being cognitive in origin and effect.

What is Affect
in the Construction of Place?
1) A set of bodily practices that produce visible
behaviours (phenomenology and
hermeneutics);
2) A drive (psychoanalysis);
3) The property of the active result of an
encounter (Spinoso-Deleuzian);
4) A universal expression of emotion (Darwinian).

1) Corporeal because it uses the sensitive evidence we have
learned since childhood as cultural signifiers of intensity;
2) Embedded in time and in space;
3) Resisting the paradigm of reading-writing-text but still intelligible
to an awaken audience, as various forms of (e)motion;
4) Subliminal because it operates in the gap between action and
cognition as a kind of visceral shorthand only possible in small
spaces and subliminal times.

“I have tried to begin to show that the challenge of
affect is, at least in part, a challenge to what we
regard as the social because it involves thinking
about waves of influence which depend upon
biology to an extent that is rarely recognized or
theorized in the social sciences.” (Thrift 2007)

Affective Responses to
Architecture
“When I think about architecture, images come
into my mind. ” (Zumthor 2006)

Form
Primary: Extension and protection
Activation: Spatial differentiation
Dominance: Scale, symmetry, and repetition
Valence: Curvilinear spaces and objects

Colour
Activation: Warmth and saturation
Dominance: Contrast
Valence: Brillance and saturation

Material
It is common practice in architecture to associate
materials with certain qualities of expression:
- Steel to a massive and technical atmosphere;
- Glass to modern and clean;
- Wood to domestic;
- Stone to durability.

Vegetation
Plants and flowers are recognized as symbolic
gestures of positive thougths and desires and
expression of affect.
Many researchers consider that we are not
prepared for the urban lifestyle.
In fact, our genetic composition changed only
0,005% in the last 10.000 years.

Biophilia
“innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes”
(Wilson 1984)
What started to be an instinctive activity – construction
– using what was available on site to give structure to
existence, became a complex process – design – through
the application of meanings coming from mythology,
symbolisms and social structures.

“Human beings connect physiologically and
psychologically to structures embodying organized
complexity more strongly than to environments that are
either too plain, or which present disorganized
complexity.” (Salingaros 2006)
In short: the presence of useful information is not
enough, it is the way this information is organized that
stimulates the connection.

“First, that we should bring as much of nature
as we can into our everyday environments so as
to experience it firsthand; and second, that we
need to shape our built environment to
incorporatethose same geometrical qualities
found in nature.” (Salingaros and Masden 2006)

Pattern Language
“with its 253 patterns that can each be shaped in a
myriad ways, constitutes a vision of an
environment that is extraordinarily rich in many
sorts of potential experiences – the very antithesis
of so much modern and contemporary
architecture and urbanism.” (Buchanan 2012)

Geo-metry
Geo-graphy

The question is not only the information – “natural elements,
figurative art, or ornament” (Salingaros and Masden 2006) –
nor its organization, but the way it presents itself: the
experience of mystery, in architecture as in theology, "as of
nudity, often muteness, fragility, doubt, silence and night; is
an experience of not knowing, not seeing, not having the
power... It is a repeated no that paradoxically ends up
becoming a meeting place.” (Tolentino Mendonça 2012)

Weak Architecture
Il Pensiero Debole (Vattimo and Rovatti 1983)
“Arquitectura Débil” (Solà-Morales 1987)
‘Delicate empiricism’ (Goethe)
The end of the classical period, of the vision of a
closed and complete universe as if it was a finished
whole.

Decorativeas to what is accessory and does not
requires an attentive reading because it emerges
from the periphery, the surroundings, the
atmosphere.
Monumental, not as a representation of the
absolute, but in the sense that Foucault gives to it
of trace or resonance.

“an architectonic proposition whose aim is to go deep
[...] can't find support in a fixed image, can't follow a
linear evolution. [...] Each design must catch, with the
utmost rigor, a precise moment of flittering image in all
its shades, and the better you can recognize that
flittering quality of reality, the clearer your design will
be. It is the more vulnerable as it is true.” (Siza 1980)

How is this related with emotion?
“certain stimuli are ambiguous enough to
activate more than one site, leading to a
composite emotional state. A bittersweet
experience is the result, a “mixed” feeling
arising from a mixed emotion. (Damásio 2010)

Ambiguity and Improvisation
“the ability to represent simultaneously, on the
same canvas, not one but several truths, each one
of which has equal validity with the others.” (Zeki,
1999)
“The value of cities is determined on the basis of
the number of places in them that are conceded to
improvisation.” (Krakauer 1964)

Embodied Metaphors
Because our conceptualization is metaphorical in nature,
performed mostly unconsciously (95%), and
metaphorical categories are interconnected with our
neural maps often at an early age, embodied metaphors
are those associated with our most basic and primal
emotions and impulses (example: the experience of
warmthof a child on parents arms).

Contemporary
Practices

Pier Vittorio Aurelio
Less is Enough

Urban Intervention
idealidades
Lisbon 1999

INDEX
1. Algorithmic sustainable design: theoretical key concepts – Antonio Caperna
2. A kind introduction to complexity – Alessandro Giuliani
3. Biourbanismand sociogenesis – Stefano Serafini
4. Algorithmic sustainable design: morphogenesis – Antonio Caperna
5. Pattern language – Antonio Caperna
6. Generative processes – Besim S. Hakim
7. Algorithmic sustainable design: “the Nature of order” – Antonio Caperna
8. Neuroscience and Design – Menno Cramer
9. Biophilic architecture and biophilic design – Antonio Caperna
10. Urban sociology – Katherine Donaghy
11. Biourban city – Antonio Caperna
12. Paracity – Menno Cramer, Katherine Donaghy
13. Placemaking – Angelica Fortuzzi
14. Weak architecture – Diogo Teixeira

Neuroergonomics and sociogenesis, lectures part5

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