Archinect - Features

AfterShock #4: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Neuroscientific Architecture Research

2014-10-14T15:50:00-04:00

You’ve heard it before. In the span of architecture folklore, this origin story is old hat: I wanted to become an architect because it combines art and science. As pithy as it sounds, this always struck me as problematic, because it presumes that such a combination is easily wrought. What is really going on, at the arguably-genetic root of architectural practice, that manages the push and pull between expression and empiricism? Architecture occupies that limbo space between the quantifiable and the phenomenological, and that gap is insistently being narrowed by technology – not only in design, but in how we actually perceive our surroundings.

AfterShock #3: Brains and the City

2014-07-24T10:30:00-04:00

Navel-gazing has become a data-driven sport. We are awash in technology that allows us to track our own activities, and then take responsibility for that scrutiny, holding us accountable for calories consumed or credit cards exhausted. The quantified-self movement can be a sandstorm of uselessness, or it can sublimate into constructive action. If we try to focus our navel-gaze to better understand ourselves, it seems imminent that such scrutiny will next focus on the brain.

Aftershock #2: "Serendipity Machines" and the Future of Workplace Design

2013-11-27T17:59:00-05:00

AfterShock is a non-conclusive series that grapples with the impact and responsibility of contemporary architectural design, hoping to instigate dialogues on how to make architecture more accountable.

AfterShock #1: Architectural Consumers in the Experience Economy

2013-09-11T11:53:00-04:00

AfterShock is a non-conclusive series on Archinect that grapples with the impact and responsibility of contemporary architectural design, hoping to instigate dialogues on how to make architecture more accountable.