Neuroarchitecture E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Architectural Design
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 234

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Applying the insights of neuroscience to architecture has the potential to deliver buildings and spaces that measurably promote well-being and create healthier or more effective environments for specific activities. There is, however, a risk that neuroarchitecture will become just another buzzword, a passing architectural fashion or a marketing exercise just as 'eco', 'green' and 'sustainable' have become. This issue of AD offers the reader an alternative to 'neuro' sound-bites and exposes them to the thinking which led to the design of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour (SWC), a pioneering medical research facility designed to foster collaboration between researchers. Multi award winning, the SWC was one of the first buildings in the world designed to take into account what has been learned about how the work space affects behaviour and is a highly effective building in which to work. Readers will gain a richer, deeper insight into the complex mental and existential aspects of architecture, design, and our many senses, how they interact and might interact in the future, and how that knowledge can be used to design more effective buildings and built environments.

Leseprobe

2

ISSN 0003-8504

ISBN 978 1119 685371

Neuroarchitecture

06/2020

About the

Guest-Editor

05

Ian Ritchie

06

Introduction

Why Do People Feel More

Comfortable in One Space

than Another?

Ian Ritchie

Le Corbusier and

Iannis Xenakis,

Couvent Sainte-Marie

de la Tourette,

Éveux-sur-l’Arbresle,

France, 1959

14

Mind in Life

in Architecture

Ian Ritchie

A Conversation with

Architectural Historian

Alberto Pérez-Gómez

50

Designing for

People

with Dementia

Níall McLaughlin

Losing Myself

60

Mind

Landscapes

Navigation, Habitat

and Imagination

James Corner

Níall McLaughlin and Yeoryia Manolopoulou,

Losing Myself, Venice Architecture Biennale,

2016

Sergei Gepshtein

Species

of Space

36

Charles Spence

Designing for the

Multisensory Mind

42

Resonant

Bodies in

Immersive

Space

Sarah Robinson

28

Stage Left, Stage

Right – The

Heavens & Hell

Embodied Meaning &

Memory in Performance

Michael Boyd

22

3

Guest-edited by Ian Ritchie

Fact and Fiction and Design

Implications

Light Regulation of

Circadian Rhythms

Russell G Foster

66

72

A Conversation with

Psychobiologist Vittorio Gallese

Disembodied Worlds

– Body, Brain and

Architecture in the

Digital Age

Ian Ritchie

Towards an Architecture

of Expanded Kinship

Plant

Consciousness

Andrew Todd

100

128

From Another Perspective

Architect Manqué

Michael Sandle

Contributors

134

Studio Andrew Todd,

Château d’Hardelot Elizabethan

Theatre, Condette, France,

2016

Museums and the

Embodied Mind

Barry C Smith

Sensory Engagement with

Artworks and Architecture

88

Neuroscience

Does Design

What the Brain’s Architecture

Can Teach Architects

Danbee Kim and Adam R Kampff

94

Visual Neuroscience

for Architecture

Seeking a New Evidence-

Based Approach to Design

Thomas D Albright, Sergei Gepshtein

and Eduardo Macagno

110

80

A Biological Reading

Harry Francis Mallgrave

News from

Nowhere

118

Wicked

Neuroarchitecture

Fiona Zisch

Reciprocity, Shapeshifting

Problems and a Case for

Embodied Knowledge

Neil Spiller

4

ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN

Profile No.

November/December

2020

268

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06/2020

Front cover: Ian Ritchie

Architects, Sainsbury

Wellcome Centre for Neural

Circuits and Behaviour,

University College London

(UCL), London, 2016. ©

Adam Scott/Ian Ritchie

Architects. Neuron-firing

image projected onto

the facade ©The Margrie

Laboratory, SWC.

Inside front cover: Ian

Ritchie Architects, Farsons

Old Brewhouse and Trident

Park, Mrie¯hel, Malta, due

for completion 2021. © Ian

Ritchie

Page 1: Iannis Xenakis,

Polytope of Cluny, Thermes

de Cluny, Paris, 1972

Acknowledgement

Ian Ritchie acknowledges

Eva Menuhin’s dedicated

assistance in the preparation

of this edition.

5

GUEST-EDITOR

ABOUT THE

IAN RITCHIE

Professor Ian Ritchie is director of Ian Ritchie Architects.

Founded in 1981, it is one of the world’s leading practices,

with a long-standing and consistent reputation for delivering

innovative, environmentally ethical designs that are cutting-

edge in terms of materials and techniques. The practice has

won over 100 national and international awards. In 1981

he also co-founded the design engineering firm Rice Francis

Ritchie (RFR) in Paris.

His interest in neuroscience in relation to architecture

stems from an invitation in 1994 to give a lecture on ‘Touch

in Architecture’ for an exhibition programme on the five

senses at the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik

Deutschland in Bonn. Later he expanded beyond ‘touch’,

addressing the other haptic qualities of buildings – sound,

warmth, smell and taste – for example in his ‘senses

narrative’ that accompanied his winning design submission

for ‘Scotland’s Home of Tomorrow’, the 1998 international

competition for social housing in Glasgow. In 2009 he

presented a research-and-delivery programme that enabled

his practice to win the international competition for the

Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour

at University College London (2016). This led to a deeper

engagement and rapport with many leading neuroscientists

across the globe, including Fred ‘Rusty’ Gage, Richard Axel,

Eric Kandel, Richard Morris, John O’Keefe and Peter Dayan.

Ritchie’s practices have realised and contributed to

major new planning, architectural and engineering works

throughout Europe, including the Reina Sofia Museum of

Modern Art in Madrid (1990), Leipzig Messe Glass Hall

(1995), Louvre Sculpture Courts and Pyramids (1993) and

La Villette Cité des Sciences (1986) in Paris, the Dublin Spire

(2003), and the temporary Royal Shakespeare Company

Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon (2006). Recent

landmark projects include the Royal Academy of Music’s

Susie Sainsbury Theatre and Angela Burgess Recital Hall

in London (2018). Current work includes a new theatre

in Cairo, a bridge in Dublin, masterplanning in Belfast

Docklands and Merthyr Tydfil in Wales, large residential

developments, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical

Medicine transformation, and a new business park and visitor

centre in Malta.

He is a Royal Academician and member of the Akademie

der Künste, Berlin, recipient of the Commonwealth

Association of Architects Award for Innovation, and was

the first foreign architect to receive the French Académie

d’Architecture Grand Silver Medal for Innovation. 1

Text © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Image © Ian Ritchie

Why Do People Feel

More Comfortable

in One Space

than Another?

Louis Kahn,

Salk Institute for

Biological Studies,

La Jolla,

San Diego, California,

1964

In 1957, Jonas Salk, developer of the first

safe and effective polio vaccine, began

his quest to fulfil his dream of creating

a collaborative environment where

researchers could explore the basic

principles of life and contemplate the

wider implications of their discoveries

for the future of humanity. Salk

partnered with architect Louis Kahn to

design such a research centre. Their

close collaboration resulted in what

is not only one of the great structures

of the 20th century, but also one of

the most important centres for

biological research on the planet.

Salk and Kahn’s foresight in the design

of the laboratories has also allowed

the Institute to remain a functioning

facility for advanced research.

6

INTRODUCTION

IAN RITCHIE

Architecture is a uniquely multifaceted discipline

integrating perception, imagination and artistic

expression with the physical world of space, light and

form – construction and its materiality – to create the

buildings in which humans live and, ideally, thrive.

Until very recently little has been known about how our

brains, bodies and buildings interact. Although architects

for centuries have depended on intuition and experience

to create environments that influence the people who

use a space, we know we have much to learn about

human responses to environmental stimuli.

Neuroscience is beginning to provide us with an

understanding of how the brain controls our bodily

activities, affecting how we think, move, perceive, learn

and remember. There is now concrete evidence that one

of the properties of the human brain is ‘neural plasticity’

– that our brains change as we learn – and that the brain

changes partly in response to our environment.

Architecture is imagined and, when built, shapes us.

This was recognised by the Academy of Neuroscience

for Architecture (ANFA), which was established under

the auspices of the 2003 American Institute of Architects

(AIA) Convention held in San Diego, home of the

Salk Institute for Biological Studies. The newly coined

discipline united the fields of anatomy, physiology,

pharmacology, psychology, medicine and behaviour

with biology, immunology, genetics, molecular biology,

chemistry, physics, electronics and artificial intelligence.

ANFA’s stated mission is to ‘promote and advance

knowledge linking neuroscience research to a growing

understanding of human responses to the built

environment’.

1 In his address to the AIA convention in

2003, Salk Institute President Fred ‘Rusty’ Gage made the

following observations, which are the core premise for

this issue of 2: ‘(1) The brain controls our behaviour; (2)

Genes control the blueprints for the brain’s design and

structure; (3) Environment can modulate gene function

and, ultimately, the brain’s structure; (4) Changes in

the environment change the brain; (5) Consequently,

changes in the environment change our behaviour; and

(6) Therefore, architectural design can change our brain

and our behaviour.’

Architecture Meets Philosophy Meets Art Meets

Neuroscience

Ian Ritchie Architects’ longstanding engagement with

neuroscience blossomed during the design process

of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits

and Behaviour at University College London (UCL),

when, during discussions at the Salk Institute about the

practice’s recent commission, Rusty Gage offered wise

insights into a research approach. As a result, the centre,

completed in 2016, was one of the world’s first buildings

‘designed with the mind in mind’, and its design process

unique because it proceeded ‘from the inside out’.

Before designing the building, the architects spent a

year visiting neuroscientists worldwide to understand

the state of their art and what they could envisage

their laboratories requiring years from now. Architects

and neuroscientists – in particular John O’Keefe (who

7

Ian Ritchie Architects,

Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for

Neural Circuits and Behaviour,

University College London (UCL),

London,

2016

right: Spatial flow concept drawing. The

scientists stressed their desire for flexible,

interconnected spaces that can be adapted over

time to create a dynamic place in which to study

science. When spaces flow into each other,

people cannot help but meet during the day,

blurring the boundaries between different areas

of scientific research. Turquoise is lab space,

yellow is write-up, red is satellite clinical space,

and purple is interaction space.

below: Two wavelengths and amplitudes create

the undulating facade and introduce a gentle

vertical rhythm to the streetscape. The wall is

composed of a unique assembly of prefabricated

modules of low-iron toughened structural cast

glass. These insulated and light-transmitting

modules carry integrated windows with their

own cast-glass louvres, which can be opened

and closed as desired to provide privacy and

to reflect the evening light. The white colour of

the translucent glass reflects light into the street

without creating glare.

8

was interim director of the centre, discovered place

cells in the hippocampus, and shared the Nobel Prize

in Physiology or Medicine in 2014 with May-Britt

Moser and Edvard Moser) and Peter Dayan (Director

of the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at

UCL from 1998 to 2018 and now Director at the Max

Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen,

Germany) – embraced the idea of collaborating closely

throughout the building’s entire three-year design

period to ensure that their spatial and research needs

were planned with function and atmosphere well into

the future.

Most scientific innovations or discoveries occur

when creative people from diverse fields of study work

together and exchange ideas and perspectives. The

Sainsbury Wellcome Centre was designed specifically

to assist this process by subtly enabling scientists to

meet easily, every day, encouraging conversations and

collaborations while still allowing individuals to be

private and in control of their own environments. This

was done by incorporating the results of neuroscientific

research to inform the spatial structure of the interior

architecture: about how people interact with the

space around them, the importance of adaptability,

the nature of light and its wavelengths in the working

environment, and how the spaces in which we live

and work affect our mood and behaviour. The nature

and organisation of the resulting interior spaces with

long, short and vertical views and varying volumes was

described by one of the scientists as akin to the scale-

free nature of the brain itself.

This issue of 2 aims to encourage a broader

understanding of how these research and design

disciplines can guide the design process for the

better, to clarify what we know at present about what

neuroarchitecture can bring to the quality of design

thinking and application, and what design can bring to

neuroscientific research. It draws together some of the

latest research in these fields, offering an accessible

overview of the discipline of neuroarchitecture.

Scale-free networks are characterised by the presence of large hubs or nodes that are

highly connected to other nodes in the network. The interior spaces of the Sainsbury

Wellcome Centre are composed of a multitude of different spaces that flow into and link

with each other, creating an interlinked composition of spatially and organisationally

different scales. Here, double-height laboratories and write-up areas are illuminated by

the translucent cast-glass facade.

The centre’s theoretical computational unit’s spaces link to the experimentalists’ working

areas, and include this zenithally lit double-height space. There is a connecting gallery

alongside at the upper level with windows that open to allow discussions taking place

below to be shared, simultaneously acknowledging our human preference for long vistas

and catering to our innate curiosity.

The neuroscientists who were going to be working in the building explained that

chance conversations often sparked ideas, and that this can happen anywhere,

and how important it was that the building should support such serendipity. As

a result, the scientists are free to write on any glass surface within the building,

including the inside of the cast glass cladding.

9

10

Loops and Connections

The contributions to the issue stand alone while looping

back and connecting with others, as do the disciplines

within neuroarchitecture. Readers are invited to sample,

explore and perhaps discover, at the end, architect and

neuroscientist Fiona Zisch’s presentation of ‘wickedness’

as a natural consequence of deep and broad pan-

disciplinary thinking.

To inform and underpin the theme of ‘designing

with the mind in mind’, the theoretical background to

the subject is introduced in a brief conversation with

architectural historian Alberto Pérez-Gómez from Mexico,

now a Canadian citizen at McGill University, about the

historical evolution of our understanding of the mind

and life, the brain and body, and the body and space.

James Corner is an English landscape architect

practising mostly in America and Asia. He brings an

international perspective, exploring how landscape

engages the alternating simultaneity of prospect and

refuge, foreground and background, intimacy and

immensity, and fear and security – ancient needs and

fears that form part of our DNA.

The same DNA provides us with both inherited

concepts and acquired concepts

2 from the collective

experience of our shared biosphere. Behaviour drove

the evolution of our brain and the brain then affected

our behaviour – a neuro-behavioural loop. Architecture

is imagined and created, and when built shapes us – a

neuro-design loop. Harry Mallgrave, from the Illinois

Institute of Technology, explains how the biological

field of niche construction relates to the future of

design practice and how, as we alter our designed

environments, these transform our genetic, cognitive

and social patterns. The designed environment becomes

attuned with the embodied and multisensory

human organism.

Understanding the dynamic, multidimensional,

extended and interdependent body that neuroscience

describes means understanding it in terms of

multisensory awareness. Architect Sarah Robinson

writes about how vision’s predominance reinforces and

perpetuates an impoverished geometric idealisation

of the body, and how understanding our responses to

sound and touch expands not only our conventional

sense of the body, but also our traditional sense of space.

Charles Spence, Professor of Experimental Psychology

at the University of Oxford, illustrates how our senses

affect each other simultaneously, highlighting some

ways in which the rules of multisensory integration and

crossmodal influence are being revealed by neuroscience

and the potential relevance of a multisensory approach

to architectural practice.

Ian Ritchie Architects,

Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for

Neural Circuits and Behaviour,

University College London (UCL),

London,

2016

Access to the natural world is a critically

important psychological amenity for human

physical and mental well-being. The Sainsbury

Wellcome Centre’s extensive roof garden is

accessible to everyone working there, as well as

being a biodiverse habitat.

Ian Ritchie,

Touch and the Human Body,

1995

The human body is here depicted as

a sensory homunculus showing the

proportional representation of the

concentration of touch cells in the

human skin.

Understanding the

dynamic, multi-

dimensional, extended

and interdependent 

body that neuroscience

describes means

understanding it in

terms of multisensory

awareness

11

Current developments in social and natural sciences

emphasise our connectedness and affinity with systems

of cooperation and communication often occluded by

pre-existing paradigms. Andrew Todd, an English architect

practising mostly in France, explains how neuroscience

and phenomenology are valuable tools for architects

wishing to address our social nature and interdependence

with the ‘natural’ world to reduce alienation in a

world increasingly designed on screens for mediated

consumption on other screens.

The challenges posed by using 2D screen-based

artificial and disembodied worlds as design tools are

discussed in a conversation with psychobiologist Vittorio

Gallese, in the context of understanding how our 3D/4D

minds and biological bodies relate to the environments

we design with them.

Sergei Gepshtein, who directs research into adaptive

sensory technology at the Salk Institute, reviews mental

concepts of space in the arts and sciences which are

related yet distinct because they are viewed through

radically different lenses. He argues that it is important to

appreciate differences between these concepts of space,

learn about them in their contexts and then understand

how they mix in practice.

An example of the way actors and audience conceive

of space, how space can embody both meaning and

memory, and how both thought and feeling are linked with

spatial directionality is described by Michael Boyd, former

artistic director at the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Danbee Kim and Adam R Kampff are experimental

research neuroscientists at the Sainsbury Wellcome

Centre, studying how the brain builds a mental model

of its environment. They present basic knowledge about

biological evolution and areas within the brain responsible

for certain effects, written and illustrated with wit. They

imagine ‘built environments’ derived from these mental

models and have the welcome temerity to suggest how

neuroscientists would design these spaces.

The embodied mind in the context of museum

space is addressed by Barry C Smith, who has directed

UCL’s Institute of Philosophy at the School of Advanced

Study since 2008 and is a brilliantly creative pioneer

of collaborative research between philosophers,

psychologists and neuroscientists. We once shared a

public event presenting and discussing how we design

and how our senses, when experienced together – at

this event it was taste (wine), smell (wine) and hearing

(live music) – affect each other. He describes how

understanding the multisensory factors that modulate

people’s experiences of artworks in their settings offers

museum curators and architects opportunities to enhance

an audience’s sensory engagement with the collection.

Níall McLaughlin, an Irish architect practising mostly

in the UK, reflects on the role of architecture in providing

coherent environments for people with dementia,

describing the insights gained from his experience of

researching and designing a respite centre for people with

Alzheimer’s disease. His essay dovetails with the solid

evidential work on space and object visual perception

from Thomas D Albright, Sergei Gepshtein and Eduardo

Ian Ritchie Architects,

Trident Park,

Malta,

2020

Designing for the interplay of light

and shadow as a device to introduce

softness and interest to the facade of

these office buildings prevents them

from being monolithic for passersby.

It also responds to shading

requirements as part of the low-

energy, naturally ventilated spaces

with windows that open. These

allow people working inside to feel

and smell natural air perfumed by

the courtyard garden landscape

between every building.

12

Text © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 6-7, 8(t), 9(br), 10 © Ian Ritchie

Architects; pp 8(b), 9(t&bl) © Grant Smith; p 11 © Ian Ritchie; pp 12-13 © Karl Borg

Macagno. Albright, Director of the Vision Center

Laboratory at the Salk Institute, and Macagno, Founding

Dean, Division of Biological Sciences, University of

California, San Diego, were founding members of

ANFA’s Advisory Board in 2003. They review several

complementary experimental approaches that have been

developed in different branches of visual neuroscience,

and consider how these can be used in support of

evidence-based architectural and urban design.

The work of Russell G Foster, Professor of Circadian

Neuroscience at Oxford University, on light and its

wavelengths and their effect on our biorhythms, is

known among lighting designers and some architects.

He summarises what we know about the biology of

photoreception and the effect of lighting on circadian

entrainment, and explains that developing evidence-

based artificial lighting to create human-centric lighting

design is far from straightforward.

Measuring the Ineffable

Intuitive design, a phenomenal performance in itself, is

probably the main area where neuroscientific research

has the potential to help architects create environments

that support thriving human lives, by providing us with

a previously unimaginable level of physiological insight

into how we navigate and respond to our surroundings.

Yet neuroscientists are only beginning to learn and

understand about the huge complexity of the brain in

relation to its environment.

There is a tendency, particularly in the press, to

suggest that quantitative rigour and evidence-based

design can justify architectural quality. That is: design

based on measuring stimuli, sensory inputs and

perception rather than on empathic resonance. It is

hoped that this issue’s exploration of a tiny part of the

extraordinarily complex spectrum of human physical and

mental attributes as they relate to the built environment

has made clear that such reductionism is a blind alley.

At the time of writing, the Covid-19 pandemic is

in the process of changing how we appreciate our

biosphere. We are discovering the strength of our social

connections, and the extent of our deleterious effect

on the natural world as skies clear and we realise how

different our cities could be. It is difficult to imagine that

architecture will not be changed as a result. Architects

have a major stake in the discussion of how the city

is going to evolve. The knowledge emerging from

neuroscience is a new, potentially powerful tool. We

have the concomitant responsibility to use it wisely. 1

Notes

1.www.anfarch.org/.

2. Semir Zeki, Splendors and Miseries of the Brain:

Love, Creativity and the Quest for Human Happiness,

Wiley-Blackwell (London and NewYork), 2009.

13

Mind in

Life in

Architecture

Ian Ritchie

A Conversation

with Architectural Historian

Alberto Pérez-Gómez

14

Ian Ritchie,

Vitruvius’s Qualities of Architecture,

2000

In his treatise De Architectura, the Roman architect Vitruvius asserted that there

are three principles of good architecture: Firmitas (Durability) – It should stand up

robustly and remain in good condition; Utilitas (Utility) – It should be useful and

function well for the people using it; and Venustas (Beauty) – It should delight

people and raise their spirits. The drawing illustrates some of the ways these

qualities are expressed and integrated.

15

For the eminent architectural historian Alberto Pérez-

Gómez, architecture offers us something specific

that distinguishes it from other disciplines – its basic

capacity to create places that provide us with meaningful

and resonant environments. The synthetic polarity

between form and function that often still characterises

discussions of architecture denies what we are learning

about the complexity of our physical and emotional

interactions with the architecture we produce and live

with. It is vital to remember that architecture is above all

lived space, intertwined with the temporality of human

action, and that its materiality matters greatly because

human consciousness is embodied and ‘enactive’

(enactive cognitive science is a new understanding of

what happens during an interaction between an (acting)

organism and its environment, whereby we selectively

create the latter). As a consequence, the physical spaces

that we make really do matter. They contribute to our

mental and physical well-being and our pathologies.

The Relationship Between Mind and Body

On the historical evolution of our understanding of how

the mind, brain, body and space interact in architecture,

and the relationship between the mind and life, Pérez-

Gómez says this ‘involves what is usually known as the

“hard problem” in neuroscience – one to which there

is no universally accepted answer. How is it that mind

arises from our biology?’

Andreas Vesalius,

Drawing from De Humani

Corporis Fabrica,

1543

Andreas Vesalius is considered the father

of modern anatomy. The Fabrica, as it is

commonly known, is the anatomical textbook

he had published at the age of 28. It consists

of seven volumes, and was a major advance

in the history of anatomy. One of the book’s

iconic images is this skeleton contemplating

its own death, represented by the skull

beneath its right hand. The narrative frame

alludes to philosophical issues surrounding

death and existence, and references the fact

Vesalius derived his knowledge from the

corpses of the humans he dissected.

Alberto Pérez-Gómez

In a wide-ranging interview,

Guest-Editor Ian Ritchie asks

Alberto Pérez-Gómez, the Saidye

Rosner Bronfman Professor

of the History and Theory of

Architecture at McGill University,

Montreal, about architecture and

human perception. Architecture,

Pérez-Gómez explains, operates

as a communicative setting

for societies; its beauty and its

meaning lie in its connection

to human health and self-

understanding.

16

Contemporary neurophenomenology (which studies

consciousness and mind as an embodied experience)

and so-called third-generation enactive cognitive

science indicate that ‘mind’ is both embodied – shaped

by aspects of the entire organism – and a function of the

organism’s interaction with its environment. However,

Pérez-Gómez believes ‘this position is controversial,

as it is critical of the most radical assumptions of

artificial intelligence and “intelligent architecture”’.

It also challenges historical theories of mind–body

relationships: ‘Contrary to Aristotle, for whom mind and

the living body were always united – since “soul” is the

capacity of the organism to act in manifold ways from

vegetative nourishment, sentience, motion and volition

to intellectual conceptualisation

1 – the 17th-century

French philosopher René Descartes must be held

responsible for imagining and promoting the separation

of consciousness and life, transforming the former into

an inner experience accessible to the intellect, the ego

cogitans – the soul.’