Читать книгу Inseminations - Juhani Pallasmaa - Страница 23

Profound architects have always intuitively understood that buildings structure, re‐orient and attune our mental realities. They have also been capable of imagining the experiential and emotive reactions of the other. The fact that artists have intuited mental and neural phenomena, often decades before psychology or neuroscience has identified them, is the subject matter of Jonah Lehrer's thought‐provoking book Proust Was a Neuroscientist.²⁴ In his pioneering book Survival through Design (1954), Richard Neutra acknowledges the biological and neurological realities, and makes a suggestion that is surprising for its time: ‘Our time is characterized by a systematic rise of the biological sciences and is turning away from oversimplified and mechanistic views of the 18th and 19th centuries, without belittling in any way the temporary good such views may have once delivered. An important result of this new way of regarding this business of living may be to bare and raise appropriate working principles and criteria for design’.²⁵ Later he even professed: ‘Today design may exert a far‐reaching influence on the nervous make‐up of generations’.²⁶ Thanks to electronic instruments such as the fMRI scanner, today we know that this is the case. Also, Alvar Aalto intuited the biological ground of architecture in his statement: ‘I would like to add my personal, emotional view, that architecture and its details are in some way all part of biology’.²⁷ The direct impact of settings on the human nervous system and brain has been proven by research in today's neuroscience. ‘While the brain controls our behaviour and genes control the blueprint for the design and structure of the brain, the environment can modulate the function of the genes and, ultimately, the structure of the brain. Changes in the environments change the brain, and therefore they change our behaviour. In planning the environments in which we live, architectural design changes our brain and our behavior’.²⁸ This statement by Fred Gage, neuroscientist, leads to the most crucial realization: when designing physical reality, we are, in fact, also designing experiential and mental realities, and external structures condition and alter internal structures. We architects unknowingly operate with neurons and neural connections. This realization heightens the human responsibility in the architect's work. I, myself, used to see buildings as aestheticized objects, but for three decades now, architectural images have been primarily mental images, or experiences of the human condition and mind. I have also gradually come to understand the significance of the designer's empathic capacity, the gift to simulate and empathize with the experience of ‘the little man’, to use Alvar Aalto's notion.²⁹