This is just a random thought, but it occured to me that a lot of those anxious/comfortable architectural sensations could be explained by fight-or-flight responses. Like if there is a space you feel is defensible, not so small as to feel boxed in, not so large as to leave you exposed, with multiple directions of excape, you would instinctively feel that was a comfortable space. As I think about it that ballance between feeling hidden and feeling able to spot threats describes all the spaces most people consider comfortable.

Obviously this is a very subjective condition and there are like 1000 other factors.

Zumthor's Thinking Architecture addresses this subject.

I know a girl who paints beautiful large oil paintings. I went to her show before asking her about her process, inspirations, etcetera, and just wandered around looking at the paintings, most of which seemed to pull at me. Well I found myself totally captivated by one painting, and stood and just stared at it, and felt warm and happy. She came around and I asked her to explain what was going on.

Well it turns out that she looks at pictues of cells and various magnified tiny portions of the human anatomy and makes luscious oil paintings from them.

The one I was looking at? An abstract painting derived from a womb.

Architecture is not the only art that comford the instant perception of something, being just right. I find the being just right one of the indications of real arts ; when it is unique ,just right, and obviously beautifull then you can reconise it as art, true arts. Other things can be ast aswell, but this one usealy define art not nessery architecture, but that aswell.

I actually cannot explain how some things just seem right.. esspecially gaudi's guell cript.. it's magical. It cannot feel but right.. the light trough the stainglass, the lines that flow.. the aspect of a sacred cave just like a mother's womb.. now that I think back I don't recall any construction/building that made me feel so right.

That is good, but what bother me, then is not my perception like you. My vorry are how to expand the methods ,do it possible with new unseen ,way's to shape volumes on a screen and to produce these "just right" features of a new architecture . Sorry my angle is not the spetector my aproach are quite different , than average museum guests , I know that the new oppotunities will create wonders out of reach further, than what you would ever expect, from hands-on tradisional building and sculptoring means. From my perspective the things you can design in a virtual 3D inviroment as a CAD program resemble a paragime shift towerds the enourmous oppotunities, the old masters are proberly all clever and ok in their perception of build works and architecture , but I can't use that for anything.

fantasizing about the experience of the building before the actual experience i think is a significant factor...

Here is one that look as if he feel just right. --- or the other guy's ; "Let us see if this Baby can fly -- "

Here is an article that seems to propose that a sense of "rightness" may be found in proportion.

Or maybe it's not "rightness" as in physical correctness - what Michael Benedikt in "For an Architecture of Reality" compared to the sense that everything comes together with the satisfying "clunk" of a car door shutting. Benedikt used "realness" but agreed that there is something else, something immaterial or better non-phsyical, that comes into play WHEN the material stuff is all "right".

Many different people have told me that Ronchamps has a sense of being the work of god - not in a strictly christian meaning, but that there is "something else going on there" to quote one of my history professors.

The reading I've been doing recently on how our brains function and how we make cross-references in perception - perceiving red as a "hot" color for example - would seem to point to us desiring to be able to understand the structure of what we experience while simultaneously knowing it is not only rational. How one designs in the "right" kind of irrationality is a mystery to me.

Please such 3D model could be projected Exact, sound light structural offence and means can be drawn as diagram lines, floors at various hight walls as ever shape build-in furniture , spaces within same volume not interconnected tree houses in one.
Just realising is not enough, the tools how a new tool is controlled, visual or by numbers, by blueprint or by rule, --- just stop using sticks and timbers, profiles all the tradisional means, evaluate what tools there are, how they work .

Wasn't "rightness" part of Vitruvian perception? Firmness, Commodity & delight? Nonetheless, I believe it has more to do with a collective acceptance. Much of what we valour we considered anything but right a few generations earlier. The stories of old ladies throwing eggs & cabbages at the Reitveld house - although as architects albeit later consider it a seminal building. It is perhaps through exposure we've accepted these buildings are being "just right!"

Yes just right is comford, Detail and quality, so if today's architecture fail that just right entity, then some of this is missing ; I know what, beauty.

I dind very little of these Icons just right, thay all fail some important property ,often even those that shuld display just that, even fail innivation and new thinking and a lot of it never will become just right simply as it wotk in a very limited brance of architecture .

by michael bierut

Imagine your son waking up on Christmas morning and rushing to open his presents in breathless anticipation of getting a shiny new iPod, only to find out he's got a Zune, which is like coming second in chess.

When I read this on David Galbraith's blog a few weeks ago, I had a moment of deja vu. More than twenty years ago, I heard an author describing an identical experience, except it he was talking about a little boy who was hoping for a real baseball bat; his clueless parents got him a perfectly good non-Louisville Slugger instead.

You know it when you see it. There's the iPod, and there are all those other MP3 players; there's the Louisville Slugger, and there are all those other baseball bats. As you've probably heard, Steve Jobs unveiled a long-awaited product last week; he intends to reduce the competition to nothing more than all those other phones.

What makes something the real thing? It's more than functionality, popularity, or beauty. The name of author who told the Louisville Slugger story was Owen Edwards, and he had just written a book that gave the phenomenon a name: Quintessence.

read on >>

Every archinecter around the Philly area should probably visit the Wharton Esherick House - not to be confused with Louis Kahn's Esherick House. There is something about that place and it wasn't designed by an architect. Actually, its hard to say that it was "designed" at all in the sense that an architect may use it. Go and visit! And as cliche as this may sound, I felt the same way in Falling water and Villa Savoye.

philarch-
i thought kahn did design the wharton escherick shop, and it was later converted into a house by someone else.