Metzger Neuroarchitecture

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-3-86859-934-3
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

Architektonische Räume sind Anker unserer Erinnerung. Mittels unseres sensorischen Bewusstseins verorten wir uns im Raum; das Gehirn nutzt Oberflächen und räumliche Systeme, um unsere Lebenswelt zu speichern und zu ordnen. Diese Erkenntnis bildet die Grundlage für die Übertragung aktueller neurowissenschaftlicher Forschungserkenntnisse auf die architektonische Praxis, wie sie in diesem Buch diskutiert wird.

Neuroarchitektur verknüpft Neurowissenschaft, Wahrnehmungstheorie und Gestaltpsychologie, Musik, Kunst und Architektur zu einem ganzheitlichen Ansatz, der Gesetze der Strukturbildung und die Bewegung des Menschen im Raum ins Zentrum stellt. Christoph Metzger, Autor von Bauen für Demenz und Architektur und Resonanz, analysiert Bauten von Alvar Aalto, Sou Fujimoto, Hugo Häring, Philip Johnson, Hermann Muthesius, Juhani Pallasmaa, James Stirling, Frank Lloyd Wright oder Peter Zumthor im Kontext der Amsterdamer Schule der Architektur und deren Kritik am Funktionalismus, um Grundlagen und Kriterien einer zeitgemäßen, anthropologisch geprägten Architektur zu entwickeln, die neurowissenschaftlichen Erkenntnissen verpflichtet ist.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Metzger, Christoph

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Architekturtheorie

Leseproben

Architecture Madeleine Region—Neural Paths When defining its themes, neuroarchitectural research rightly makes mention of Marcel Proust’s great novel, in which the madeleine episode (also known in English psychology as the Proust phenomenon), triggered a world of multisensory images in the memory. Embedded in an environment whose atmosphere is for the most part cold and menacing, a sensory experience becomes the center of a biographical account and the main thread of a narrative in which it is almost impossible to untangle the search for traces and images in the memory without a list of names and places. In the context of sensibilité, Proust’s style makes sensory experiences the basis of his descriptions—neurologically motivated perspectives according to the modern view—whose origins have something in common with Henri Bergson and his theory of memory. Right from the opening paragraphs, things remembered are described as inscriptions in the memory. Engravings, traces, and then patterns testify to sensory experiences and relate to rooms and atmospheres. In the field of architecture, this creates a combination of cognitively effective events linking neurological research and practical applications. Extra effort is required when reading in order to decode the syntax and references. Gilles Deleuze sees an extensive plan in the unusual structure and complexity of Proust’s novel, which he compares to an almost incomprehensible accumulation of boxes and containers1 filled with objects, people, and names. Reading the novel turns into the discovery of a series of related rooms and their architecture, which can be revealed like an unfamiliar city through experiences and later through internalized plans, maps, and mind maps. Recent research developments at the interfaces between neurology, hermeneutics, memory and biographical research, location theories, and architecture are identifiable in Proust’s novel as an unusual density of literary material. Moreover, it is only in the context of contrasting spatial situations that the “madeleine experience” can develop the power that then manifests itself as sensibilité in individual actions. It becomes a regular point of reference for the reader and suggests a chronology of events, although images of these form many layers in the memory. Thus, the quality of the text is built on sensorily exaggerated or even hypersensitive moments, whose stylized perception may lie outside the boundaries of what is felt to be “healthy.” Exaggeration becomes systematic; sensual events become the cornerstones of the narrative. “The author develops border areas and nuances of human perception and feelings with admirable precision; he reveals their changeability, their bewilderment, their insincerity and ambiguity, as well as their nobility.”2 He also places his narrative within the framework of an architecture that is described with equal accuracy. The quality of the detail Proust achieves places him in an area of literature that has its own distinct typology. “With regard to the structure, it is possible to recognize features of literature that are closely associated with the Enlightenment’s concept of sensibilité. The homme-sensible is a figure promoting identification, intended to make the readership aware of their own emotionality and moral quality. The aim of ‘sensitive’ literature in France and England is not entertainment but emotional instruction.”3 The author describes himself as vessel and as a room, whose body relates to other bodies in the form of people, things, and even architecture. Deleuze uses the image of the box and nest of boxes, as well as their arrangement in a chronological sequence, and draws attention to the musical composition of the narrative. It is about composed periods of time and makes use of imagery that may refer back to Arthur Schopenhauer. Proust’s portrayal of idealized rooms in the houses of his childhood, which are described in past times as atmospherically charged environments, is worthy of especial study. Here physical experiences are always experiences of spaces, embedded in a delicate, unusually nuanced, depiction of the rooms, which is conditioned by a particular view of the architecture. Before the architectural details of the setting, we first have the proportions, which Samuel Beckett described as follows: “The narrator cannot sleep in a strange room, is tortured by a high ceiling, being used to a low ceiling.”4 Reading these scenes thus offers a sensually exaggerated perception, as experienced by the delicate, sickly, pubescent boy. The author presents himself as the focal point of a scenario with a timescale alternating between experience and memory, whose changing levels are set against the constants of mental images. In order to make it possible to work out the course of the narrative and its chronological relationships, the scenes are set in a sequence determined by the seasons. The seasonal composition is reflected in various places in a small town and in private rooms. Summer and winter rooms of town and country houses reveal their destiny by day and by night. Rooms become dynamic stages, experienced as atmospherically charged zones and presented by the author as a framework for sensory details and their contexts. Things that appear fixed and immovable by day begin to move in the dark. For instance, when illuminated by a Kinetoscope and its sequences of pictures, the bedroom walls begin to move as if by magic. The bedroom becomes a screen displaying a diverse procession of living forms, whose images course through the room like a veritable installation.5 The familiar is abandoned, memory fails, and an endless, desperate search for reference points and orientation begins, much as might happen in sleep. Projection, dream, and reality melt into an almost impenetrable universe. This is also why the search for lost time appears as a search for places and rooms whose security invokes a home experienced in childhood. Proust writes: “These shifting and confused gusts of memory never lasted more than a few seconds; it often happened that, in my brief spell of uncertainty as to where I was, I did not distinguish the various suppositions of which it was composed any more than, when we watch a horse running, we isolate the successive positions of its body as they appear upon a bioscope. But I had seen first one and then another of the rooms in which I had slept during my life, and in the end I would revisit them all in the long course of my waking dream: rooms in winter, where on going to bed I would at once bury my head in a nest woven out of the most diverse materials—the corner of my pillow, the top of my blankets, a piece of a shawl.”6 The room mutates into a living organism, sometimes menacing, sometimes protective: “a zone of heat whose boundaries were constantly shifting and altering in temperature as gusts of air traversed them to strike freshly upon my face, from the corners of the room or from parts near the window or far from the fireplace which had therefore remained cold.”7 Of course, there is a special feeling of lightness about the summer rooms, “where I would delight to feel myself a part of the warm night, where the moonlight striking upon the half-opened shutters would throw down to the foot of my bed its enchanted ladder, where I would fall asleep, as it might be in the open air, like a titmouse, which the breeze gently rocks at the tip of a sunbeam.”8 The house as a solid structure with successions of rooms and areas identified by their atmosphere is contrasted with the flight of nighttime dreams. “When these walks of my grandmother took place after dinner there was one thing that never failed to bring her back to the house. … I ran up to the top of the house to cry by myself in a little room beside the schoolroom and beneath the roof, which smelt of orris-root and was scented also by a wild currant-bush, which had climbed up between the stones of the outer wall and thrust a flowering branch in through the half-opened window. Intended for a special and baser use, this room, from which, in the daytime, I could see as far as the keep of Roussainville-le-Pin, was for a long time my place of refuge, doubtless because it was the only room whose door I was allowed to lock, whenever my occupation was such as required an inviolable solitude; reading or daydreaming, tears or sensual pleasure.”9 The narrow room offers protection and becomes the place of further projections. “I would have kissed Mamma then and there, but at that moment the dinner-bell rang. ‘No, no, leave your mother alone. You’ve said good night to one another, that’s enough. These exhibitions are absurd. Go on upstairs.’ And so I must set forth without viaticum. … That hateful staircase, up which I always went so sadly, gave out a smell of varnish which had, as it were, absorbed and crystallized the special quality of sorrow that I felt each evening, and made it perhaps even crueler to my sensibility because, when it assumed this olfactory guise, my intellect was powerless to resist it.”10 The ascent to the upper floor turns out to be the announcement of a descent. The bedroom mutates into a darkened burial chamber: “Once in my room I had to stop every loophole, to close the shutters, to dig my own grave as I turned down the bedclothes, to wrap myself in the shroud of my nightshirt. But before burying myself in the iron bed which had been placed there because, on summer nights, I was too...

Über Autor(innen)

Christoph Metzger

Christoph Metzger