Abstract:

Imagining is essential to making the architectural experience:
Architectural design students readily accept the pragmatics of the design process as they believe that they are problem solving. Conversely, they are wary of the impreciseness of the imagination necessary to channel an experience. Thus, the challenge of architectural design studio instruction becomes how to encourage students to transcend pragmatism and confront architectural embodiment - the lyrical experience. This paper will investigate the links between the making, interpretation, imaging, inhabiting and design application.

In the early 1990s at the University of Parma, neuroscientists conducted a series of experiments with macaque monkeys and discovered mirror neurons. They found that the monkey’s mirror neurons were fired by either performing, watching, and hearing physical acts. The transferring of this type of study to humans using functional magnetic-resonance imaging (fMRI) - neuroimaging - proved to be profound. In broadly transferring to the experience of architecture, this research puts the haptic realm in the forefront. The architecture experience of designing and inhabiting is fundamental in that the acts of the senses - seeing, feeling, touching, smelling, tasting, as well as hearing and memory inform the comprehensive appreciation of an architectural experience.

The placing of oneself in the project - imagining the situation desired - is essential to my studio pedagogy. Thus, architectural embodiment is essential. For the design studio students, the question becomes how can one interpret experiential thoughts to a comprehensible means?

Employing the knowledge regarding mirror neurons, I believe that the act of making and interpreting a collage based on the perceived experiences creates an active image, an image of participatory events, which is evocative and enables students to imagine and inhabit an architectural situation. By sourcing the imagined urban visual projects (collages) which were developed by Archigram (Archi tecture + tele gram), a group of British architects that responded to what they saw as the dreary, sterile architecture of 1960s, the students were able to see the potential of the active visual. The perceived engagement of the events transformed the maker and the viewer of the collage into a participant.

By understanding the experiential potential of the Archigram projects, each student created a collage of imagined reality and translated the experiences to the architectural project. This act of imagining and embodiment is significant to understanding that the architectural experience is critical to understanding the potential of architecture design.

Keywords:

Making, imagining, experience, mirror neurons, architectural embodiment, design studio.