Touching Architecture

Anthony Richard Brand presents his case delightfully well. We enact the built and natural worlds through our bodies, through our whole bodies. Armed with this new understanding of hapticity and mood, the next generation of designers will imagine lived environments quite different from what we uncritically accept today. Harry Francis Mallgrave, PhD Hon FRIBA, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Illinois Institute of Technology, USA This book participates in a current conversation questioning the assumptions of architecture as both a gratuitous aesthetic object, and as a mere optimized device for human shelter. Extending insights from new phenomenology and the neurosciences, and through a careful analysis of important contemporary design practices, Mr. Brand expounds on the concept of atmosphere for an architecture responsive to qualitative places and cultural values, introducing new insights about the centrality of touch at the basis of perception. Alberto Perez-Gomez, Emeritus Professor, McGill University, Montreal, Canada Focusing on the claim that touch is the most intimate human sense, architectural theorist Anthony Richard Brand delineates elements of a tactile phenomenology of buildings. His central question is 'how we are touched, moved, or affected by our architectural encounters.' To answer this question, Brand draws on a wide range of studies, including neurological research and phenomenological work on the lived body, synaesthetic encounter, and environmental atmospheres. He grounds his conceptual argument via perceptive case studies of buildings by eminent architects Steven Holl, Peter Zumthor, and Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. Brand's book is an important contribution to the growing literature on a phenomenology of architectural hapticity. David Seamon, Editor, Environmental & Architectural Phenomenology, Professor of Environment-Behavior and Place Studies, Department of Architecture, Kansas State University, USA This is a timely and powerful manifesto for a multi-sensory architecture, for buildings that appeal to the user as a living, moving, embodied participant, immersed in a 3-dimensional space unfolding in time. As well as introducing the conceptual tools necessary for understanding architecture in this way, it also applies them to a series of well-researched case-studies. Essential reading for anyone interested in this vitally important area. Jonathan Hale, Professor of Architectural Theory, University of Nottingham, UK