From Object to Experience

The New Culture of Architectural Design

Harry Francis Mallgrave

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781350059535
• eBook ISBN: 9781350059542
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Harry Francis Mallgrave combines a history of ideas about architectural experience with the latest insights from the fields of neuroscience, cognitive science and evolutionary biology to make a powerful argument about the nature and future of architectural design. Today, the sciences have granted us the tools to help us understand better than ever before the precise ways in which the built environment can affect the building user's individual experience. Through an understanding of these tools, architects should be able to become better designers, prioritizing the experience of space - the emotional and aesthetic responses, and the sense of homeostatic well-being, of those who will occupy any designed environment. In From Object to Experience, Mallgrave goes further, arguing that it should also be possible to build an effective new cultural ethos for architectural practice. Drawing upon a range of humanistic and biological sources, and emphasizing the far-reaching implications of new neuroscientific discoveries and models, this book brings up-to-date insights and theoretical clarity to a position that was once considered revolutionary but is fast becoming accepted in architecture.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Foreword by Sarah Robinson, “Architects Make Culture”
• Introduction
• 1. Architecture Is the Practice of Culture
• 2. The Culture Wars
• 3. A Cultural Model for Design
• 4. New Models of Perception
• 5. Aesthetic Perception
• 6. Feeling-for-Form . . . Feeling-for-Space
• 7. The Atmosphere of Place
• 8. The Hearth and the Storyteller
• 9. Ritualization and the Ethos of Design
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint