For an architecture in harmony with man
Neuroscience applied to architectural design
The contents below were discussed during the event of 7 September 2017 “The brief that creates value — Neuroscience applied to architecture"
di Lombardini22
As soon as you enter a space, if you listen to yourself, you recognize that you already have a judgment: you have not yet studied where you are, but you already have an idea. This idea arises from the 'atmospheric' quality that all the elements of architecture together determine. Geometry, topology, masses, light, rhythm, materials, sounds, smells, heat, pressure and texture: all these elements together, together, determine an atmosphere. The appropriateness of an atmosphere is such, if it supports the women and men who in the concreteness of everyday life, day after day, breathe that atmosphere, in the use of the 'institutions of man'.
The reverberation of research in the world of neuroscience on architecture becomes brighter and brighter. The discoveries made in the world of neuroscience in the last twenty years have produced a knowledge of the relationship between our body and the brain and between this unitary system and the space in which we are immersed, superior to what has been learned in more than two millennia of human history. The awareness of all this cannot fail to transform the approach to the design of the places in which we spend 90% of the time of our lives.
In the United States, some realities have been consolidating for some years now: Perkins+Will, one of the largest design firms in the world, founded the Human Experience Lab, directed by Eve Edelstein, with the task of introducing, in an operational way, this scientific knowledge into the practice of project development. A similar laboratory was also born in New York, the International Arts + Mind Lab, directed by Susan Magsamen, within the Brain and Science Institute of John Hopkins University. Last but not least, for a decade now, in San Diego, California, the ANFA, 'Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture' has been active, with the same aim, that is, to create a bridge between scientific studies on the functioning of the body&brain system and the development of architectural design.
Even in Italy, steps forward are being taken in this direction. In Milan, a new project was born TUNED, a new tool to guide the development of the architectural project in tune with the realization of the needs and expectations of the users of the spaces. The deep expectations of the human being can find an answer in architecture, not in aesthetic but in environmental terms.
WHAT IS TUNED?
Harmony is a word that has almost completely disappeared from the vocabulary of architects. Yet today, thanks to a renewed dialogue between science and humanistic knowledge, it is possible and necessary to rebuild a new harmony between man and his actions, his experiences and architecture. Bringing man back to the center of the architectural project: this is the ultimate goal of TUNED.
The characteristics of the designed space, in the case of new buildings as well as renovations or interior design, can be defined by placing the human being at the center of the project, thanks to the knowledge gained in the scientific world. By studying the emotions and feelings expected by people during the experiences, lived within the spaces of the city, parks, streets, to go from the house to the school or the workplace, the project adapts and transforms itself to bring closer, or rather to harmonize, the signals that the light, the design, the materials, the sounds, the color of the spaces continuously transmit to our eyes and, even more importantly, to our body.
TUNED, therefore, in a brief, develops documents and three-dimensional graphic schemes, capable of guiding the final development of the preliminary project, ensuring that, by putting together the quantitative needs, the regulations and the context, and using the computer-aided design programs and BIM, it is possible to arrive at asustainable architecture perfectly oriented to people's needs. TUNED's goal is to develop works that can bring out in users emotions and feelings that are consistent with the deepest expectations that are triggered every day.
This balance protects the biological value and human potential together with the economic value of buildings and public spaces created according to this design method.
In Italy, one of the first companies to have believed in TUNED is Serenissima Sgr Spa, whose objective is promote and manage real estate funds aimed at maximising the value of the assets in the portfolio, developing initiatives also of infrastructural value by placing shares with national and foreign investors.
Franco Torra, Head of Asset Management of the company, has in fact declared that he looks at “with interest in using neuroscience as a driver to create guidelines that bring the reuse project to align with the expectations and needs of users, who have the true sentiment and knowledge of the activity to be carried out inside the immobile container”. The basic assumption is that “significant parts of the existing real estate assets in Italy are today often devoid of users or hypotheses for reuse. Investors, who cannot ignore the relationship between the property and its ability to generate income, feel the need to restore value to these assets, going through a process that puts the user back at the center of the project, placing him as a central player in the regeneration process".
He is echoed by Simone Panizza, Asset Manager at Serenissima Sgr Spa, who stated that the interest in neuroscience was born from the need to identify innovative tools that can enrich the property management process, especially in the most critical situations, where the challenge is to identify the best approach to bring out positive elements and then enhance them to the best.
Real benefits
The aim of TUNED is to help create the context in which everyone can express themselves at their best. Today more than ever, the project has the most suitable tools to take care of the experiences of people who use architectural spaces every day. TUNED is structured to support new construction, renovation, interior and landscape design interventions.
Michela Balconi, professor of Neuropsychology and Cognitive Neuroscience, Neuropsychology of Communication, and Neuroscience and Well-being in Lifespan for the Faculty of Psychology of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan and Brescia, head of the Research Unit in Affective and Social Neuroscience, is firm in stating that “today neuroscience, architecture, biology, anthropology, art and social sciences help to rebuild a richer and deeper bond between us and the place where we live. We are convinced that neuroscience can improve our knowledge of the environment. Consequently, the urban environment improves our life and the quality of the world.”
Expectations of human experiences
Every day, as soon as we return to consciousness, after sleep, we begin to make decisions of different types and relevance. Each decision triggers an experience and produces an expectation. In everyday life, on the radar of consciousness, at its higher levels, the deepest expectations do not appear. The immediately demandable objectives are visible, while it is more difficult to access the deep level of expectations: if you try infatti di pre-cognitive expectations.
Waiting is an unknown and as such produces an imbalance, a vibration. It triggers a tension that modifies the homeostatic balance of our organism: a basic emotion is thus configured, connected, at the level of the proto-self, to the basic emotion of fear. The objective of the waking consciousness, which formulates choices, is to restore our organism to balance through experience. If the inputs that this experience transmits to the organism are in tune with expectations, a condition of balance is gradually restored: fear is reabsorbed and the homeostatic framework is balanced.
What shape do expectations take?
They present themselves to the nuclear consciousness of the subject as basic feelings, they are in fact the very essence of every experience. When, in the course of the experience, the feeling that resurfaces is in tune with the initial expectation, it is reawakened for 'nesting' one of the basic positive emotions of our deepest self: joy, research, care or pleasure. Matured in the course of evolution, expectations are therefore universal, even if they are always expressed differently, in every cultural and geographical context.
The architectural environment, in which this process takes place, can play against or in favor of rebalancing. Its effects, recorded by the receptors of the complex body-brain organism, can weigh down or facilitate the rebalancing process constantly active in each individual. “The next step will be to understand how the sensations stored and produced by the symphony of the body's sensors, then mapped in the brain circuits, can be translated into signs and forms, materials and lights in the space of architecture.
Only if this passage, in fact, has a good outcome, can the fundamental condition be created for the triggering of the embodied simulation that allows the subject who has direct sensorial experience of the final product of this transfer, that is, of the architectural form, to unconsciously relive the movement of lifting from the ground and therefore the connected emotion, until the underlying feeling emerges into consciousness, as the essence of the experience of listening and doing”. Tuned Architecture, Davide Ruzzon and Vittorio Gallese.
A NEW LEXICON
It was necessary to create a new terminology capable of naming previously ignored components and factors in architectural practice.
I cluster are a set of units (cores) which in the overall perception must produce an emotional reverberation of the expected feeling. Each single cluster is associated with a sensory-motor metaphor. Each nucleus is associated with one of the phases which make up the body movement — equilibrium, load, release energy.
The sensorimotor metaphor operates at a prelinguistic and precognitive level. Only in the last phase of the evolutionary history of our species did humans develop linguistic and abstract conceptual abilities. In previous evolutionary states, communication was prelinguistic and used sensorimotor metaphors to convey meanings and emotions. These evolutionary states are inscribed in our sensorimotor system and are evident in our life from embryonic development to the first part of childhood, since ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis. When humans become adults, they express themselves linguistically with abstract concepts that nevertheless underlie sensorimotor metaphors. The linguistic dimension of the world is based on a corporeal approach to the world itself. This means that our language and our abstract thoughts inevitably trigger mechanisms linked to the sensorimotor system which is divided into teleceptors (smell, sound, sight), exteroceptors (temperature, pressure, touch), interoceptors (heartbeat, breathing, digestive system), proprioceptors (musculoskeletal system, inner ear).
TUNED performs a physiological analysis of the four groups of receptors in the human body for each phase of the movement that generated the sensorimotor metaphor.
In each nucleus of the clusters, a regulation of the architectural components takes place to produce the same responses detected in the physiological analysis on the four groups of receptor systems (teleceptors, exteroceptors, interoceptors, proprioceptors).
After having evaluated the conditioning that the physical context produces on the architectural intervention, we proceed to identify the characteristics that the space to be created will have to assume, in order to transmit signals to the sensory system of the users, capable of triggering the embodied simulation of the sensorimotor metaphor.
The three phases of movement (balance, load, energy release) coincide with the three nuclei of the clusters. Through the sequential perception of architectural stimuli, the emotion and feeling linked to the sensorimotor metaphor are gradually recovered from memory.
Each layer of the motor system corresponds to an aspect of the architecture (topology, geometry, rhythm, proxemics, color, texture, materials, geometry, light).
Embodied simulation is an experience that occurs when a user has a significant perception: in this case, signals are recorded at a sensorial level that, when integrated, are able to bring back from memory a sedimented experience, lived or imagined, with its own emotional baggage.
Memory also reactivates the emotional charge of bodily movement. On the basis of these emotions, thanks to consciousness, a basic feeling quickly coagulates. When this coincides with the basic feeling expected from the experience (for example: healing, learning, living) a harmony is achieved, and an intense pleasure is felt. The place thus appears adequate for the purpose. The physical and planning dimension are fused.
The methods, therefore, to construct the passage of the sensorimotor metaphor to architecture, to allow the development of an embodied simulation, can be summarised in four phases:
- Analysis of changes in the receptor system of the human body.
- Architectural Signal Identification (FEG).
- Realization of the space according to the brief.
- Resurfacing of feeling through simulation.
BETWEEN EARTH AND SKY
Not only does Italy not come last, therefore, in the international race to meet the sciences and the arts, but this operational process appears capable of clearly indicating how to ground knowledge that seemed to belong to the ether, to the world of pure knowledge. The trait d'union between earth and sky, between application and theories, was precisely the body, its movements and the emotions connected, which in the design of space are translated and then recovered in the multisensory perceptive experience.
Source: http://ocio.lombardini22.com/post/lombardini22-e-in-cnr-di-parma-protagonisti-di-un-progetto-di-ricerca
TUNED is the new tool to guide architectural design in harmony with the realization of the needs and expectations of the users of the spaces. Wanted by Lombardini22 and Davide Ruzzon, an architect from Padua, scientific director of NAAD 'Neuroscience applied to architectural design' of IUAV, the University Institute of Architecture of Venice.
NAAD is the first master's degree dedicated to neuroscience applied to the field of architecture.
The lessons, divided into three modules – Anatomy and physiology of architectural perception; Architecture and the body-brain system; Pre-cognitive human demands and experience of architecture – will provide the tools to design architectures capable of ensuring well-being, starting from scientific axioms made available thanks to progress in neuroscience studies, with particular reference to public and private spaces such as nursing homes, hospitals, offices, prisons, stations, social housing, shops and sports facilities.
