In this special guest lecture, the architect and professor Harry Francis Mallgrave will discuss human experience and how it influences architecture and the way we live.
Mallgrave’s work
explores how newer models of the humanities and social sciences, together with
technology, can help us to explore the nature of architectural experience in
both its emotional and multimodal dimensions.
Setting this in
the context of architectural theory, he will discuss the relationship between neuroscience
and architecture and will reveal the neurological justification for some very
timeless architectural ideas, from the multisensory nature of the
architectural experience to the essential relationship of ambiguity
and metaphor to creative thinking.
In this season of talks, neuroscientists, environmental
psychologists, geographers, and anthropologists will talk about their work and
how it relates to the field of architecture.
This series of
talks will be taking place online via zoom. All participants will be sent a
link to join ahead of the event.
Tickets are sold
on a donation basis. All proceeds from the sale of tickets directly fund the
work of the Baylight Foundation, which exists to deepen the public
understanding of experiencing architecture through residencies at Walmer Yard
and a cultural programme, as well as collaborations with artists, scientists,
and other practitioners and organisations in arts and sciences.
Harry Francis Mallgrave is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Illinois Institute of Technology and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. He received his PhD in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and has enjoyed a career as a scholar, translator, editor, and architect. In 1996 he won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award from the Society of Architectural Historians for his intellectual biography of Gottfried Semper, and for more than fifteen years he served as the architecture editor of the Texts & Documents Series at the Getty Research Institute. He has published more than a dozen books on architectural history and theory, including three considering the relevance of the new humanistic and biological models for the practice of design. His most recent book, Building Paradise: Episodes in Paradisiacal Thinking, is currently in press with Routledge Publications. Drawing upon a theme first raised by Alvar Aalto, it offers both a selected history of the idea of paradise as well as a ‘garden ethic’ for the ecological practice of design.
From our experiences
of ruins, to shopping centres or our own homes, Ellard’s writing looks at how these
elements of urban design have influenced us throughout history, and how are brains
and bodies respond to these different types of spaces.
The book investigates
the influence new technologies will also have on our evolving cities, and what world
we are, and should be, creating.
Ellard will be in conversation
with Walmer Yard’s keeper Laura Mark, and this will be followed by an audience
discussion.
In this season of
talks, neuroscientists, environmental psychologists, geographers, and
anthropologists will talk about their work and how it relates to the field of
architecture.
This series of talks will be taking place online via zoom. All participants will be sent a link to join ahead of the event.
Tickets are sold on a donation basis. All proceeds from the sale of tickets directly fund the work of the Baylight Foundation, which exists to deepen the public understanding of experiencing architecture through residencies at Walmer Yard and a cultural programme, as well as collaborations with artists, scientists, and other practitioners and organisations in arts and sciences.
Colin Ellard is a
neuroscientist, author and design consultant who works at the intersection of
psychology and architectural and urban design. Ellard is a professor of
psychology, specializing in cognitive neuroscience, at the University of
Waterloo in Canada, where he also runs the Urban Realities Lab. After spending
the early part of his career working on basic problems in visual neuroscience
related to spatial function in animals, he later turned his attention to
exploration of the human relationship with built settings. He is particularly
interested in understanding the emotional effects of architecture, which he
explores in both field settings and in synthetic environments using immersive
virtual reality. Ellard’s current projects include exploration of the
contribution of peripheral vision to architectural atmosphere, architectural
contributions to the emotion of awe, and physiological stress in high-density
urban environments.
In the third of our upcoming talks, Professor of Neurology, Psychology, and Architecture Anjan Chatterjee will take us on a journey through the beauty, pleasure and art.
His book, The Aesthetic Brain, uses neuroscience and psychology to explain why we are so concerned with aesthetics.
We’ll look at why we
find art, buildings, and places beautiful and question what part our brain
plays in deciding what we find aesthetically pleasing.
Chatterjee will give
a short presentation, and this will be followed by a discussion led by Walmer
Yard’s keeper Laura Mark.
In this season of
talks, neuroscientists, environmental psychologists, geographers, and
anthropologists will talk about their work and how it relates to the field of
architecture.
This series of talks
will be taking place online via zoom. All participants will be sent a link to
join ahead of the event.
Tickets are sold on
a donation basis. All proceeds from the sale of tickets directly fund the work
of the Baylight Foundation, which exists to deepen the public understanding of
experiencing architecture through residencies at Walmer Yard and a cultural
programme, as well as collaborations with artists, scientists, and other
practitioners and organisations in arts and sciences.
Anjan Chatterjee is
Professor of Neurology, Psychology, and Architecture at the University of
Pennsylvania and the founding director of the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics. The
past Chair of Neurology at Pennsylvania Hospital, Chatterjee’s clinical
practice focuses on patients with cognitive disorders. His research addresses neuroaesthetics,
spatial cognition, language, and neuroethics. He wrote The Aesthetic Brain: How
we evolved to desire beauty and enjoy art and co-edited: Neuroethics in
Practice: Mind, medicine, and society, The Roots of Cognitive Neuroscience: Behavioral
neurology and neuropsychology and the forthcoming Brain, Beauty, and Art:
Bringing neuroaesthetics into focus. He received the Norman Geschwind Prize in
Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology by the American Academy of Neurology and the
Rudolph Arnheim Prize for contributions to Psychology and the Arts by the
American Psychological Association.
