Attunement: Architectural Meaning after the Crisis of Modern Science
Attunement: Architectural Meaning after the Crisis of Modern Science
$20.95
Gómez, Alberto Pérez.
MIT Press, 2016
Book ID: 99202
Architecture remains in crisis, its social relevance lost between the two poles of formal innovation and technical sustainability. In Attunement, Alberto PŽrez-G—mez calls for an architecture that can enhance our human values and capacities, an architecture that is connectedÑattunedÑto its location and its inhabitants. Architecture, PŽrez-G—mez explains, operates as a communicative setting for societies; its beauty and its meaning lie in its connection to human health and self-understanding. Our physical places are of utmost importance for our well-being. Drawing on recent work in embodied cognition, PŽrez-G—mez argues that the environment, including the built environment, matters not only as a material ecology but because it is nothing less than a constituent part of our consciousness. To be fully self-aware, we need an external environment replete with meanings and emotions. PŽrez-G—mez views architecture through the lens of mood and atmosphere, linking these ideas to the key German concept of StimmungÑattunementÑand its roots in Pythagorean harmony and Vitruvian temperance or proportion. He considers the primacy of place over space; the linguistic aspect of architectureÑthe voices of architecture and the voice of the architect; architecture as a multisensory (not pictorial) experience, with Piranesi, Ledoux, and Hejduk as examples of metaphorical modeling; and how Stimmung might be put to work today to realize the contemporary possibilities of attunement.
304pp.,Pap.,English
