When Brains Meet Buildings

Understanding our brains can enrich our understanding of the ways we act and interact in a complex world, and how our experience of the built environment helps shape who we are and yet can be shaped by us in turn. This book presents action-oriented perception, memory, and imagination as keys to unlocking the neuroscience of the experience and design of architecture, and explores what it might mean for buildings to have “brains.” It offers a conversation addressed not only to architects and scientists but also to all who share a fascination with the brains within them and the buildings around them. Analysis of famous buildings and of homely examples introduces concepts like aesthetics, affordances, atmosphere, construction, manual action, scripts, and wayfinding, and the search for their neural substrates. It explores how evolution shaped a language-ready brain that is also architecture-ready. Case studies of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the Sydney Opera House introduce an account of how the brains and minds of architects operate, pursuing the idea that memory and imagination are interacting forms of mental construction, but that architectural design must eventually reach a form that can guide the physical construction of buildings. All these concerns set new challenges for collaboration between architects and neuroscientists, and for further research on the brains of humans and animals.