Tuning Architecture with Humans

Davide Ruzzon

ISBN 10: 8869774007 / ISBN 13: 9788869774003

Published by Mimesis International, IT, 2022

About this Item

The features of humankind's interaction with the natural enrivonment have, over the course of evolution, slowly consolidated specific models of behavior. In the social dimension, these primitive schemes of interaction between the body and the enviroment have generated the blooming of consciousness and gradually also of language. Neuroscience sheds light on the mechanism by which the artifical envionrnment - i.e. architecture - has represented a crucial moment of change in improving human beings' cognitive capacities. This fact situates the beginning of architecture in an even more distant past. There are certain natural situations which, taken together with humankind's actions and body, in the phase of homo erectus, which can therefore be considered the very first architecture. In particular, the technology and architecture which humankind has developed over the last two centuries, along with cultural and social transformations, have modified the environment without a sufficient awareness of the fundamental role played by nature in cognitive evolution. Today's cities, and the entirety of our environmental conditions, are nothing other than the mirror image of this fogetting.

Seller Inventory # LU-9788869774003

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Tuning Architecture with Humans
• Publisher: Mimesis International, IT
• Publication Date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 8869774007
• ISBN 13: 9788869774003
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New
• Dimensions: 17W x 1.7H x 24D centimeters 17 centimeters width by 1.7 centimeters height by 24 centimeters depth

About this title

Synopsis

Human behavior shaped by nature informs architecture, revealing how built environments influence cognition and well-being.

Through thousands of years of evolution, features of the natural environment helped to mold human behavior. As social beings, early humans also found resonance with each other in relation to their surroundings, and even developed emotional templates for certain situations, such as climbing a hill. These in turn lead to gestures and spoken language. Neuroscience has shed light on these mechanisms and led to discoveries about how early architecture contributed to human cognitive development. A significant shift occurred when natural elements, such as hills and trees, became influences on constructed shelters and monuments. This book clarifies how the beginnings of architecture were coupled with kinematic patterns formerly associated with natural settings. Without such patterns we would not have the full range of Embodied, Extended, Enacted or Embedded Cognition—to use contemporary terms. Today’s alienating-built environment, fueled by technology, contains urban areas in both new and existing cities that have denied the nature of human behavior as it evolved to sustain social and cultural life. Such conditions hastened the fossil fuel crisis and climate change, among other problems. Tuning Architecture with Humans offers new ways of understanding the nature of our crises, and shows how the human sciences can contribute to more human-centered approaches to architecture, urbanism, and landscape design.

About the Author

Davide Ruzzon is an architect. Since 2016 with Lombardini22 has developed TUNED, a project focused on the application of Neurosciences to Architecture. He is the curator of TArch, and since 2017 Founder and Scientific Responsible of the NAAD Master at the IUAV of Venice.