Synopsis
Scholarship has sought to explain design primarily as developments and trends by understanding the influential ideas of a period, which doesn't explain why people become attached to design and cultivate it over time. For this purpose we must also gain understanding of collective cognitive processes and the meaning of design to people. This work, the result of thirty years of observation and study, examines the interplay between culture, design, and conscious and unconscious thought processes through the development of design observed first in ancient structures and then in interiors and artefacts associated to architecture. A key observation of the author is that buildings and people sometimes suggest each other, a mind phenomenon that connects people and buildings intimately in cognitive and sensory ways. While architecture can be evoked in the design of peoples appearance, anatomy can be echoed in architecture too. The designs of some structures materialize over and over in architectural interiors and objects. Their repetitive manifestation says that this event is not transitory. The two representations, architecture in people, and people in architecture, are interesting concepts in need of explanation. The important products of creativity have outlasted their creators. Society holds fast to favorite architecture--the attraction of ancient aesthetics is still active today. Images from the past connect with the contemporary psyche, reflecting architecture as an instrument of expression to which people respond. Because the cultivation of design involves both created outcomes and the cognitive behavior of people, the input of the public is vital, and an important piece in the picture of creativity that has been missing from the existing literature. Among the books conclusions is that the mind has its own built-in processes (important in pre-human history) that prompt individuals to find or construct shelter. The author also recognizes a phenomenon observed in philosophy, namely that in developing knowledge the mind sometimes arrives at solutions that parallel the solutions of nature. The workings of the mind that arrive at human outlines could be a natural theme, or a way to function and comprehend a sheltering form, a phenomenon that is intimately a part of the larger picture
About the Author
Cecilia LEWIS KAUSEL, born in Santiago, Chile, is a Full Professor of Interior Architecture at Mount Ida College in Newton, Massachusetts. She received BA degrees in Biology and Physical Anthropology from U-MASS and an SM from the Department of Architecture at MIT. An IDEC member and AIA associate and the author or editor of over twenty publications, as a result of a 1995 studio she taught on the1920's Bauhaus model house she won a Guest Professorship in architectural theory and built form at the Bauhaus School of Architecture of Weimar. Certified by the NCIDQ Board, she also holds the license of the State Board of Architects and Interior designers of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. She has been director of the Interior Architecture Department at Mount Ida College; a research affiliate at MITs Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, a Guest Professor at the Bauhaus, and a researcher at the Ministry of Public Works of Spain. Her work has been published internationally. In December 1998 Prof. Lewis Kausel was invited to put in book form the lectures of Santiago Calatrava. The book, Santiago Calatrava: Conversations with Students, a joint venture of the Departments of Architecture and Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2002.
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