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Table of Contents

Introduction

Tyler Stevermer __________________4

Section 1: Technology

Are We Homo sapiens Yet? Mark Jarzombek __________________10

Beginnings: Drawing Early Architecture Timothy Cooke Andrew Ferentinos ________________26

The Pharmakon and the Machine Ginger Nolan _____________________38

Section 2: Perceptibility

Homo microbis: The Human Microbiome, Figural, Literal, Political Stefan Helmreich _________________52

Refashioning the Microbial Body Mariel Villeré _____________________60

Translucent Bodies Simone Ferracina _________________70

Section 3: Cognition

Cognition in the Flesh …The Human in Design Harry Francis Mallgrave ___________76

Hans Berger and the E.E.G. Krister Holmes____________________88

Section 4: Medicine

Normal and Pathological Humanity Caroline A. Jones Michael Hagner ___________________100

Treating the Body: Architecture and Biomedicine Sofia Lemos Nick Axel 108

The Milieu Intérieur Matt Johnson ____________________120

Formation and Variation: Woltereck’s Concept of Reaktionsnorm and the Potentials of Environment Ryan R. Ludwig ___________________134

Section 5: Product

Transgressing Limits: Performance and the Sentient Event Jillian Crandall ___________________150

“Degrees Of Freedom”: On Frank and Lillian Gilbreth’s Allocation of Movement Elliott Sturtevant __________________160

The Spirit in the Machine: Mutual Affini- ties between Humans and Machines in Japanese Textiles Jenny Hall 170

Corpus Commodus Alissa van Asseldonk ______________182

thresholds 42 —

human —

Edited by Tyler Stevermer

Journal of the MIT Department of Architecture

Table of Contents

Introduction

Tyler Stevermer _____________4

Section 1: Technology

Are We Homo sapiens Yet? Mark Jarzombek ____________10

Beginnings: Drawing Early Architecture Timothy Cooke Andrew Ferentinos __________26

The Pharmakon and the Machine Ginger Nolan _______________38

Section 2: Perceptibility

Homo microbis: The Human Microbiome, Figural, Literal, Political

Stefan Helmreich____________52

Refashioning the Microbial Body Mariel Villeré ________________60

Translucent Bodies Simone Ferracina ___________70

Section 3: Cognition

Cognition in the Flesh …The Human in Design

Harry Francis Mallgrave _____76

Hans Berger and the E.E.G. Krister Holmes ______________88

Section 4: Medicine

Normal and Pathological Humanity Caroline A. Jones Michael Hagner _____________100

Treating the Body: Architecture and Biomedicine

Sofia Lemos Nick Axel ___________________108

The Milieu Intérieur Matt Johnson _______________120

Formation and Variation: Woltereck’s Concept of Reaktionsnorm and the Potentials of Environment

Ryan R. Ludwig _____________134

Section 5: Product

Transgressing Limits: Performance and the Sentient Event

Jillian Crandall ______________150

“Degrees Of Freedom”: On Frank and Lillian Gilbreth’s Allocation of Movement

Elliott Sturtevant ____________160

The Spirit in the Machine: Mutual Affini- ties between Humans and Machines in Japanese Textiles

Jenny Hall __________________170

Corpus Commodus Alissa van Asseldonk ________182

Thresholds 42 Human

Editor

Tyler Stevermer

Assistant Editors

Dariel Cobb Jackson Struthers Davidow Nathan C. Friedman Elizabeth Galvez Christian A. Hedrick Ann Lui Rixt Laurien Woudstra

Advisory Board

Mark Jarzombek, Chair Stanford Anderson Dennis Adams Martin Bressani Arindam Dutta Diane Ghirardo Rodolphe el-Khoury Vikram Prakash Kazys Varnelis Gwendolyn Wright J. Meejin Yoon

Special thanks to Irene Hwang

Editorial Policy

Thresholds, the Journal of the MIT Department of Architecture, is an annual, blind peer-reviewed publica- tion produced by student editors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Opinions in Thresholds are those of the contributors and do not necessarily reflect those of the editors, the Department of Architecture, or MIT.

Correspondence

Thresholds—MIT Architecture 77 Massachusetts Ave, Room 7-337 Cambridge, MA 02139

[email protected] http://thresholds.mit.edu

Published by SA+P Press MIT School of Architecture + Planning 77 Massachusetts Ave, Room 7-231 Cambridge, MA 02139

Copyright ©2014 Massachusetts Institute of Technol- ogy. The individual contributions are copyright their respective authors. Figures and images are copyright their respective creators, as individually noted.

LCCN: 2013957868

ISSN 1091-711X ISBN 978-0-9835082-9-8

Design by TwoPoints.Net

section three

— cognition

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76 Harry Francis Mallgrave 77 Cognition in the Flesh …The Human in Design

COGNITION IN THE FLESH …THE HuMAN IN DESIGN HARRy FRANCIS MALLGRAVE

The individual human subject is the encultured bodily sub- ject. In this way the knowing and feeling subject is not the brain in the head, or even the brain plus the body, but the socially and culturally situated person, the encultured human being.

Evan Thompson, Mind in Life1

Let’s begin with a seemingly simple question. How does the encultured bodily subject, to use Evan Thompson’s epithet, experi- ence architecture?

If one were to survey the history of Western architectural thought—and one need not recount the writings of Vitruvius, medieval abbots, Alberti, Piranesi, Boullée, Bötticher, Giedion, or Charles Jencks to make this point—one would have to conclude that we experience architecture primarily through its representa- tional values. Architecture reflects ideas, and ideas are things that appeal to our rational understanding. The unstated tenet behind such a belief is that we are thinking beings quite distinct from other animals, culturally set apart by our unique powers of reason and conceptualization.

1 Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007), 411.

But what would happen if we were able to empty archi- tecture of all of its semantic content? Would we experience anything? Of course we would. Martin Heidegger, for one, noted that we do not simply confront “things” simply in a symbolic way. We are “beings-in-the-world,” thrown there in fact, with primitive moods and emotions, as well as with particular skills by which we understand or cope with things around us. Things are not abstractions waiting to be interpreted but “equipment” pre-theoretically defined by their manipulability or “handiness.”2

The psychologist James Gibson amplified this point by noting that perception is no passive sensory activity of recording data for the “thinking” brain to assimilate. At its very inception perception is the engagement of the whole organism moving within an environmental field: exteroception through proprio- ception. It is already an act of conceptualization because the organism and the environment are reciprocal in their connect- edness. Similarly, Gibson insisted that the mental environment cannot be separated from the physical one, “as if there were a world of mental products distinct from the world of material products.”3 He termed his thesis of direct perception an “ecologi- cal psychology.” More recent theories on the origin and embod- ied nature of language add further support to this contention.4

Our much better understanding of our evolutionary his- tory over the last few years has also put these issues into bet- ter focus. Homo sapiens, strictly defined, came into existence around 200,000 years ago, yet our immediate hominin ancestor, Homo erectus, extends our behavioral lineage back another two million years. In this light, the root of all of our presumably su- perior mental activity extends far into our pre-human past.

This greater antiquity of our biological heritage has in turn ushered in the new fields of evolutionary biology and evolution- ary psychology. Both operate from the premise that the biologi- cal structure, sensory apparatus, and the behavioral adaptations of humans were largely crafted in the east African savannahs over the course of the last two million years, against which the events of the past ten thousand years (the so-named ‘birth’ of civilization) could have done little to alter our behavioral pat- terns or environmental propensities. These newer models of cognition suggest that our esteemed representational values

2 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper & Rowe, 1962), 97-98. 3 James Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual perception (Hillsdale: Law-

rence Erbaum Associates, 1986), 130. 4 See especially George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chi-

cago: university of Chicago Press, 1980), and philosophy of the Flesh (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

Ephesus, Turkey. Photograph by author.

78 Harry Francis Mallgrave 79 Cognition in the Flesh …The Human in Design

are in fact extensions of organismic activities embedded in our adaptive evolutionary codes, which raises some interest- ing questions about our built environments, particularly our more recent ones. If we are biologically fitted to view the world with certain visual or environmental propensities, for instance, should not our built designs accommodate these propensities?

Evolutionary psychologists, such as Steven Pinker, have used this evidence to argue that the modernist values of the early 20th century failed because architects felt free “to write off people’s enjoyment of ornament, natural light, and human scale and forced millions of people to live in drab cement boxes.”5 Yet even if he overstates his case, we can no longer deny that we have an underlying biology and human instincts that have been honed over millions of years.

Another group of biologists have been underscoring the “biophilic” implications of this legacy.6 In the 1970s, for exam- ple, the geographer Jay Appleton proposed a “habitat-selection” thesis, which pointed out that in fashioning our made-made recreational environments we often replicate the terrain of our East-African ancestors.7 He noted that in our urban parks we seek out places of prospect and refuge (where we might survey things or take refuge from predators), we design landscapes with water (a daily human need), loose groupings of trees with broad canopies (allowing distant views and potential places of safety from predators), clear ground cover (to expose immediate hazards), and paths (signs of human cultivation).

Ephesus, Turkey. Photograph by author.

5 Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), x. 6 See Stephen and Rachel Kaplan, Cognition and Environment (New York:

Praeger, 1982); Gordon Orians, “An Ecological and Evolutionary Approach to Landscape Aesthetics,” in Edmund C. Penning-Rowsell and David Lowenthal (eds.), Landscape Meanings and Values (London: Allen and unwin, 1986), 3-25; Gordon Orians and Judith H. Heerwagen, “Evolved Responses to Landscapes,” in Leda Cosmides et al, The Adapted Mind (New York: Oxford university Press, 1992); Stephen R. Kellert, et al (eds.), Biophilic Design (New York: Wiley, 2008).

7 Jay Appleton, The Experience of Landscape (London: John Wiley, 1975).

Such hypotheses today are hardly startling. We pay more for the upper-story units in high-rise buildings that command a larger prospect, and abundant research has demonstrated the salutary effects of regular contact with nature—whether it be a walk in a park, digging in the backyard garden, or our jaunts to seashores or mountains, where we go ‘to recharge our batter- ies.’ A few years ago NASA commissioned a psychological study regarding long-term space travel, seeking to find ways to miti- gate the problems of sleep disorders, increased anxiety, social withdrawal, and the depletion of cognitive skills associated with the the sensory deprivation of Antarctic winters. The recommen- dation was to outfit spacecrafts with digital screens that would regularly rotate colorful images of nature.8

Evidence is overwhelming today that even brief exposure to natural light and greenery lowers our blood pressure, calms our tenseness, increases our focus, and more generally promotes happiness. These facts have significant architectural implications, whether for the homes in which we live or the cities in which we dwell—as many landscape urbanists are today acknowledging.9

Still another recent discovery of the biological sciences is our new understanding of neural plasticity, which also brings to the fore the issue of human culture. The underlying premise is Donald Hebb’s realization, of a half-century ago, that learning is a process of synaptic bonding.10 When two neurons fire together, growth in the synapse occurs, leading to a greater likelihood that they will fire in the same way under a similar stimulus. Through repeated firings, they will form established patterns or neural maps that become associative networks. If firings become less frequent, growth will deteriorate and eventually the connection disassembles.

Whereas we used to believe that our thinking processes were “hardwired” by the time we reach physical maturity, we now know that this is not the case. The brain, the human organ- ism in its totality, is surprisingly labile, and all learning over the course of a lifetime involves changes the brain’s neurologi- cal connections. The areas of the motor cortex that controls the movements of the last two fingers of the left hand, for instance, are substantially larger for concert violinists than for those who do not play the violin.

8 Yvonne A. Clearwater and Richard G. Goss, “Functional Esthetics to Enhance Well-Being in Isolated and Confined Settings,” in Albert A. Harrison et al (eds.), From Antarctica to Outer Space (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1991), 331-48.

9 See Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty (eds.), Ecological Urbanism (zurich: Lars Muller, 2010).

10 Donald O. Hebb, The Organization of Behavior (New York: John Wiley & Son, 1949).

80 Harry Francis Mallgrave 81 Cognition in the Flesh …The Human in Design

The implications here are once again far-reaching. On the one hand we can always learn new things and refine our thinking capacities, even increase our IQs as a few studies have shown.11 On the other hand neural plasticity means that we are more susceptible than we formerly believed to such things as environmental and cultural changes, whether it be the material elements of our built environments (architecture) or the technol- ogies by which we navigate the world. Both, in fact, can enhance or inhibit our perceptual and cognitive processes, and at a much faster pace than conventional evolutionary theory allows. Our better understanding of neural plasticity has spawned an in- dustry of commentators pondering our new situation—ranging from Andy Clark’s championing of our cyborgian natures to the concerns of Warren Niedich that we are too easily being manipu- lated by the culture industry’s phatic images.12

In any case, I do not think architects yet appreciate the remarkable strides that the biological sciences and humani- ties have made over the past two decades. For the first time in human history, we are beginning to get a handle on our human natures, and the insights are forcing us to rethink radically the very tenets of our being.

A Few Implications for Designers

A good starting point would be to introduce a notion that has been altogether alien to architectural theory for more than a century—the idea of emotion. In simplest terms, emotion “is the process by which the brain determines or computes the value of a stimulus”13 Emotions are evolutionary “affect” programs gen- erated in the subcortical areas of the brainstem and limbic sys- tem, programs that in part protect our homeostatic processes.

The psychologist Lisa Barrett notes that when an organism encounters an environmental stimulus, the body first produces a “core” affect, an initial state of pleasure or displeasure (valence) arising from how the sensory properties of the stimulus (the environment) affect the organism’s vital condition. Neurologi- cally, this core affect proceeds along two closely related path- ways, both based in the OFC, the part of the brain’s prefrontal cortex tucked just behind the eyes. Without going into the details

11 Sue Ramsden et al., “Verbal and Non-Verbal Intelligence Changes in the Teen- age Brain,” Nature, 479, #7371 (3 November 2011), 13-16.

12 See Andy Clark, Natural–Born Cyborg (New York: Oxford university Press, 2004), and Warren Neidich, “Blow-up: Photography, and the Brain,” in Blow-Up (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2003), 33-102.

13 Joseph Ledoux, Synaptic Self (New York: Penguin, 2002), 206.

of these two systems, it is sufficient to say that one system (sen- sory) assigns a preliminary value for the stimulus and its impact on homeostasis, while the second circuit (visceromotor) modulates the autonomic, chemical, and behavioral response to the stimulus. Col- lectively, they produce an affective state bound to a particular situ- ational meaning, giving us the disposition to act in a certain way.14

When an emotional response to a stimulus is positive, a “hedonic” or pleasure circuit is activated: neural activity involving the brainstem, basal ganglia and amygdala, OFC, anterior cinglu- ate cortex, and insula. When we experience this “flush” of happi- ness, it is because dopamine has been released into the blood- stream, which rushes through the reaches of the brain and is “felt” throughout our whole bodies. Music, for instance, can ignite “chills down the spine,” a process that has been recorded in neuroimaging studies.15 The interesting thing about this hedonic circuit is that im- aging studies have shown it to be set into motion by a wide range of pleasurable experiences: maternal and romantic love, orgasms, a good meal, social acceptance, a beautiful sunset, a smile, and the visual and aural arts. And even though the multisensory experi- ence of architecture today cannot presently be monitored in way that one can measure the impact of a painting or music, we can presume that this circuit is also ignited by a particularly satisfying architectural experience.

Two points are essential to these new emotional models. First, emotions condition our response to our sensory fields or built environments, and they do so pre-reflectively—that is, much of the activity takes place prior to our awareness or “feelings” about events. This is a crucial point because architectural theory, in the last century in particular, has rarely taken human emotion into account. Yet it is important to understand that when we sit back and reflect upon architectural experience, we have in fact already made judgments about such things as the comfort of a door handle or handrail, the ease of a stair riser or tread, the texture of a floor material, the acoustic resonance or visual ambience of a room, the hand of a fabric, the smell of materials, and we do so largely intui- tively, or rather, prior to conscious reflection. We also in various ways make pre-conscious judgments about the materials selected, spatial relations, dimensional proportions, scale, patterns, rhythms, tactile values, and even the creative intentions of the architect.

14 Lisa Feldman Barrett, “The Experience of Emotion,” Annual Review of psychology, vol. 58 (2008), 373-403.

15 A. J. Blood and Robert J. zatorre, “Intensely Pleasurable Responses to Music Cor- related with Activity in Brain Regions Implicated in Reward and Emotion,” proceed- ings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 98 (2001), 11818-23.

82 Harry Francis Mallgrave 83 Cognition in the Flesh …The Human in Design

The second point is that our emotional response is funda- mentally embodied, in the sense that emotions also implicate the sensorimotor areas of the brain related to our bodily move- ments and corporeal awareness of them. This is a difficult point to summarize succinctly, but we do not simply stand back and, like a movie camera, mechanically record the stimuli before us; rather, if I can invoke a term of Robert Vischer of more than a century ago, we einfühlen or “feel ourselves into” this world through our bodies in an immediate way.16 If we descend along a corridor with a low ceiling, we walk with a crouch. If we enter a spatially luxurious room, we inevitably stand tall and our respi- ration deepens. If someone of normal height is forced to sit in an economy airline seat, that person will feel trapped and angry. We do so because our bodies are in fact “thinking”—responding to the environmental stimuli.

Such a thesis is hardly new. In 1888 Heinrich Wölfflin entitled his doctoral dissertation “Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture,” and opened with the question “How is it pos- sible that architectural forms are able to express an emotion or a mood?” He pointed out that we animate architectural events “because we ourselves possess a body”—that is, because the optic nerves stimulates the motor nerves and thereby sympa- thetically works on our own neural system through our bodily organization. Because we know the force of gravity through our own corporeal experience, for instance, we read the weight and balance of a building in gravitational terms. Wöllflin claims that we judge a work of architecture to be beautiful because it mir- rors the “basic conditions of organic life.”17

The recognition of our embodied natures is particularly important in this age of parametric design, which can often lead the designer down the path of greater abstraction. Students may be fascinated with the new power to wield or manipulate forms endlessly on a computer screen, yet design is indeed a zero-sum game. The aspects on which one focuses one’s effort during the design process largely determine what the final result will be. When one is enamored with formal exploration, one may well devote less attention to issues of scale, materiality, or detailing. When one focuses on the properties of form, one is bound to be less concerned with how the user actually experiences the ele- ments or appraises the ambience of the design.

16 Robert Vischer, “On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics,” in H. F. Mallgrave and E. Ikonomou (eds.), Empathy, Form, and Space (Santa Monica: Getty Center Publication Programs, 1994).

17 Heinrich Wölfflin, “Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture,” in Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space (note 16), 150-51, 160.

Whatever the advantages or limitations of software pro- grams, they will never relieve the architect of the responsibility for creating an environment conducive to human vitality, nor should they prevent us from pursuing more deeply the core features of architectural design. Architecture is inherently a mul- tisensory experience on multiple levels involving memories and a joy of play and anticipation, one that defies any deterministic or reductive prescriptions. The question of course is whether we have the tools of the cognitive understanding to do so present- ly—that is, understand how we really experience architecture?

Mirrors within Ourselves

With the discovery of mirror neurons in the early 1990s, an entirely new field opened for investigation.18 Mirror neurons, or mirror systems, are groups of neurons that respond to per- ceptual experiences in a simulating fashion. If I see or hear you playing the piano, mirror systems in my premotor and parietal cortices mimic areas of your brain activity as if I were playing the piano. If I am an equally skilled pianist as you are, these mirror systems are quite similar to your brain maps—except for areas of the motor cortex that would actually move my hands and fingers. Such a process has since been named embodied simu- lation.

Over the last decade hundreds of neuroimaging studies of embodied simulation in humans have taken place, but two or three experiments in particular should be known to architects. In one experiment, investigators were monitoring the mirror sys- tems of participants watching others being touched by people and objects. Surprisingly, they also found mirror activity when people observed two inanimate objects touching one another. In the concluding remarks of their paper, the researchers noted that “models of embodied simulation posit that the same neural structures involved in our own bodily-related experiences con- tribute to the conceptualization of what we observe in the world around us.”19

Architecture, of course, consists of materials and objects touching one another. Our craft is based on composition and detailing. We have also learned that when we view materials, we activate circuits in our somatosensory cortex, as if we were

18 See Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain (Oxford: Oxford university Press, 2008).

19 Sjoerd J. H. Ebisch et al, “The Sense of Touch: Embodied Simulation in a Visuo- tactile Mirroring Mechanism for Observed Animate or Inanimate Touch,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, vol. 20, #9 (2008), 1621.

84 Harry Francis Mallgrave 85 Cognition in the Flesh …The Human in Design

also touching the materials in an act of tactile understanding. All of this would suggest that when we experience a building in the flesh, we activate mirror (sensorimotor), emotional, and hedonic systems. In other words, in experiencing a building we emotionally simulate the forms, materials, and details with our bodies. When the perception gives us pleasure, our gray matter becomes flooded with chemicals announcing this fact to con- sciousness. Much of this activity is preconscious and emotional. We cannot in fact avoid emotion, however much we might try to do so. Emotions are the very lens through which we perceive the world.

A second study undertaken by Vittorio Gallese and the art historian David Freedberg carry this insight to another level. In reviewing a number of neuroimaging studies, the authors con- clude not only are these “embodied mechanisms encompassing the simulation of actions, emotions and corporeal sensations” fundamental to our reading of artistic activity, but they also entail “the artist’s creative gestures, such as vigorous modeling in clay or paint, fast brushwork and signs of the movement of the hands more generally.”20 In short, we simulate the energetic activity that went into the artistic creation. In viewing this As- syrian bas-relief, for example, we might read it reflectively as a narrative history of a proud warrior in victory, but in standing before it in the British Museum we experience it in an entirely different way. We study the delicate chisel marks that created it, we admire the intricacy and detail of the author’s hand—all be- cause we are simulating what it feels like to have our own hands chiseling the alabaster.

Humphrey Repton, Proposed landscape design at Wentworth, South Yorkshire.

20 David Freedberg and Vittorio Gallese, “Motion, Emotion and Empathy in Es- thetic Experience,” Trends in Cognitive Science, vol.11, #5 (2007), 199.

As it turns out this particular panel was of great fascination to Gottfried Semper, who studied it in London in 1850 shortly after his arrival in London. A few years later, in writing his book on Style, he often spoke of architecture in an animate way, pre- saging the research of Freedberg and Gallese. In describing the rusticated blocks of his Art Gallery in Dresden, for example, he notes how the cushion of each block bows outward to reflect the weight of the wall bearing down on it. He reports how the chisel blows must be directed toward the center of the block, so that its forces can be contained at the perimeter by the smooth band. In this way, he felt, the overall composition acquired a regular or eurythmic “beat,” a musical rhythm produced from the tension- filled network of simulated forces.21 When and why did architects cease to look at architecture in such vivid terms?

Assyrian panel from the Palace of Ashurnasirpal II, Nimrud (9th century BCE), British Museum, London. Photograph by author.

21 Gottfried Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, trans. Harry F. Mall- grave and Michael Robinson (Los Angeles, Getty Publications, 2004), 732.

86 Harry Francis Mallgrave 87 Cognition in the Flesh …The Human in Design

Gottfried Semper, Ashlar treatment of the Dresden Art Gallery, from Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten (II: 1863).

Let me close with one other point. For some years now Ellen Dissanayake has been tracking the origin of the arts—in evolutionary forms of play and in ritualistic and ceremonial behaviors, such as early human exercises in costume-making, music, and dance. In her more recent study Art and Intimacy, Dissanayake buffers her case by citing the work of Colwyn Trev- arthen, whose research focused on how mothers and infants build loving bonds through universal modes of interactions: the cooing patterns of vocal intonation, rhythmic exaggerations, and visual and tactile give-and-takes.22

Dissanayake then goes on to offer the hypothesis “that these same sensitivities and capacities, which arose as instru- ments of survival in our remote hominin past, are later used and elaborated in the rhythms and modes of adult love and art.”23 This conflation of love and art might initially have seemed odd, but around the time she was proposing her hypothesis several neuroimaging studies demonstrated that love and art do share a similar hedonic circuit.24

22 Ellen Dissanayake, Art and Intimacy (Seattle: university of Washington Press, 2000), 15-17.

23 Ibid., 6. 24 See, for instance, Semir zeki and Andreas Bartels, “The Neural Basis of Ro-

mantic Love,” Neuroreport, vol. 11, #17 (2000), 3829-34; Hideaki Kawabata and Semir zeki, “Neural Correlates of Beauty,” Journal of Neurophysiology, vol. 91 (2004),1699-1705; Semir zeki and Andreas Bartels, “The Neural Correlates of Maternal and Romantic Love,” Neuroimage, vol. 21 (2004), 1155-66.

Dissanayake took her case further, however, first by arguing that these “rhythms and modes” underlying artistic ex- pression extend back into pre-Paleolithic stages of human evo- lution and are pre-symbolic in their biological underpinnings. Second, that these rhythms and modes are related to emotional drives associated with enculturation, and are manifested in such things as social affiliation, making sense of our surroundings, acquiring competence in skills, and what she refers to as “elabo- rating upon.” All of these activities, when applied to architecture, seem to support her contention that the arts “emerged through human evolution as multi-media elaborations of rhythmic-modal capacities that by means of these elaborations gave emotional meaning and purpose to biologically vital activities.”25

If we rarely refer to the experience of architecture to- day as “cross modal sensations of tactility and kinesis” (to use Dissanayake’s expression), perhaps it is because we have for too long designed our habitats in overly conceptual terms And if we do so, it is perhaps because with all our learning we have forgotten that what we refer to as cultural changes are more simply “variations” on our ingrained bodily skills.26 Perhaps our focus on representational values has concealed the fact that architectural design is, on a primal level, simply the play of materials, colors, forms, patterns, and textures, and that the task of the architect is to design an environment that is both pleas- ing, creative, and revelatory. The role of the biological sciences today is not to prescribe any formula for making these creations special—that is the hubris of yesteryear. What biology is reveal- ing today is that we are highly complex creatures, sophisticated in our ideas yet at heart rather simple animals of pleasure. We respond to our built environment in many ways, but perhaps most importantly as cognitive animals in the flesh.

25 Ellen Dissanayake, Art and Intimacy (note 22), 145. 26 See Tim Ingold, “’People like us’: The concept of the anatomically modern hu-

man” in The perception of the Environment (London: Routledge, 2000), 373-91.