Transcriber: kate shi Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
Have you ever walked into a room and felt immediately at ease?
Somehow the light and the atmosphere instantly changed your mood?
Or have you walked into a place and felt terrified
and wanted to immediately escape?
Even though we have these experiences of the power of place, we seldom ask,
“How do places make us feel that way?”
“How do they provoke fear?”
“How do they provoke love?”
“How do they shape our thoughts and actions?”
I’m an architect, but I started out in philosophy,
and philosophers tend to ask “why” sorts of questions:
“Why are things the way they are, and why does that matter?”
Well, architects ask “how” kinds of questions:
“How can I make things?”
“How can I make things better?”
And I, coming from two different backgrounds, am constantly asking both.
I’m obsessed with understanding
how the places in which we dwell shift our perceptions,
pattern our cultural habits,
and help us to interact or not interact socially.
And buildings can do all these things.
Yet architects and designers tend to be considered as a luxury.
It's a luxury item, something afforded to the wealthy few.
But architecture and design pattern our world in importantly profound ways.
But we can’t understand - we can’t even begin to understand those ways
until we get rid of two basic errors of thought.
We have this habit of thinking that we’re isolated individuals
and that our surroundings are separate from us.
And buildings, in that way of thinking,
are containers into which we come and go without consequence.
But I’d like to invite you today to rethink two of our most basic categories:
our self and our world.
Now, if we think of ourselves in terms of our body,
our body obviously stops at the surface of our skin.
But think about the way we use tools.
Tools extend our body and they extend our capacities.
Think about how a blind person uses their cane.
It’s like an organ of perception, helping them to navigate their world.
Or what about musicians?
When they play, their instruments are extensions of their body,
and using that instrument changes the neural connections in their brains.
And when they stop using that particular instrument,
those neural connections fade away.
Use it or lose it. That’s what neuroplasticity is.
But tool use isn’t only one way that our bodies extend into the world.
If you stand with your arms outstretched,
the space just beyond your fingertips is called your peripersonal space.
That's what neuroscientists named it.
And have you ever noticed how when you’re walking down a street,
you automatically adjust your stride to somebody else’s,
somebody you’ve never met, who’s right next to you?
And somehow you both do this dance?
That’s your peripersonal space in action.
And even right now where you’re sitting,
the person next to you is sharing your body space envelope;
they’re interconnecting and interpenetrating.
But that’s not all.
This energetic envelope that surrounds our body is constantly moving
according to environmental and situational cues.
So if the person sitting next to you seems friendly, your body space opens.
But if they seem threatening, your body space closes.
So we have this amazing ability to extend into the world around us
and it keeps us safe,
and it also keeps us on the lookout for opportunities in our environment.
And we have this astonishing ability
to integrate and incorporate the things of the world into ourselves,
to expand our skills and expand our very horizons.
Our very survival depends on this.
If we didn’t eat, drink and breathe in the outside world,
we would never be able to survive.
But think of another way that’s less obvious than that
in which the outside world works its way into our bodies.
When you walk the streets of Venice,
the cobblestone streets will be subtly exercising your sense of balance.
Your vestibular system, that’s also your nervous system in the bottom of your feet.
Researchers found that Europeans who regularly walk on cobblestone streets
keep their balance as they age as compared to their American counterparts.
So “use it or lose it” is true also in this case.
If our environment doesn’t present us with opportunities,
those opportunities, those skills we have fade away,
So if even the materials, the placement, and the texture
on the surfaces which we walk on,
can have these changes on our body chemistry and our pace,
imagine the larger-scale changes
that our environment is having on us every moment of every day.
And if you think of yourself in terms of your mind,
we also tend to think it’s right here, wrapped up right in our skull.
But let’s consider one of our most important mental faculties,
our sense of memory.
If you close your eyes and recall a moment in your life,
can you remember that moment
without also remembering where that occasion took place?
Memory is always situating,
and place and memory are deeply intertwined.
So memories are not locked up somewhere deep inside your skull,
but they're summoned and awakened in our experiences in place.
And it turns out that the part of our brain that helps us to remember
is the very same place that helps us navigate new spaces.
So memory is situated and practiced,
and so in a way, it it’s also inside and outside of us at the same time.
So, when we go back to the question of the self,
who are you without your memories?
And if those memories are situated in certain places,
are those places also part of your very self?
What would it mean to give up this idea,
this worn out idea that we're separate from our environment?
Because that way of thinking
has led to the production of buildings and urban spaces
which have not taken deeper human
and more-than-human needs into consideration.
We already have the knowledge and know-how to make places that promote life
in the largest sense of that word.
It’s well known that integrating nature and features of nature
not only it helps us heal better,
learn faster, and lead a higher quality life.
Schools can be tuned
to support the discipline and discovery of the learning process.
Hospitals and care centers can be active partners in the process of healing.
An ordinary experience like a trip to the grocery store
can be an experience that exercises your body while it stimulates your mind.
Dwelling places can offer a sense of refuge
while also carefully letting the outside world in.
And public places can connect us beyond divisions of age, race,
class and gender,
which will promote greater social integration.
Urban spaces can be framed by buildings,
and buildings can pattern our urban life in ways that invite, excite, and unite us.
So we’re interconnected with each other and our surroundings
in more ways that we realize.
And so the line between where we begin and the world ends
is a shifting and open question.
So we have to ask not only how our buildings shape us and each other,
but we have to realize that every move we make as designers and architects
is also laying the patterns and the future habits,
the bodies and minds of future generations.
So how do we want to live, and who do we want to be?
Thank you.
(Applause)