Embodied Cognition in Architecture Writing: Language/Making
Round Table Discussion
April 4, 2016
Panelists:
Thom Donovan and Bronwyn Breitner “The Occupant Turn: When Architecture Imagines Specific Bodies”
Timothy Simonds and Ostap Rudakevyek: “Prepositions as an Architectural Medium”
Moderators:
Alex De Looz
Eliza Schrader
Architecture Writing: Language/Making is a transdisciplinary collaboration of the School of Architecture and School of Liberal Arts and Science that aims to conduct research and to develop experimental curriculum in critical theory and writing that bridges the various disciplines that support architectural practice. At a time when architecture incorporates new economies and new emerging forms of languages brought about by the interrelation of design variables through computational tools and techniques of the digital studio, language operates in multiple forms so as to create new structures between writing and studio practice in the development and presentation of projects. Conscious of the possibility that architecture can be generative of new types of sensitivity to the body and intersubjectivity in relationship to space, the program seeks to locate a critical position from within the production of architecture as it responds to literature, film and philosophy. Embodied Cognition in Architecture Writing will present the critical approaches of faculty members from the Architecture and Humanities who are engaged in the new practice, from a variety of perspectives, to show the ways in which those practices have entered into the first year design studio. Derived from the philosophical concept of body schema, embodied cognition sets out to define the ability to perceive the various elements of a situation while it is happening, and to be able to deftly negotiate performances and poetics that can describe and interpret the ongoingness of the situation. For the student who is asked to move rapidly back and forth between various platforms that constitute the digital studio, the practice in embodied cognition enables new forms of knowledge to be created and new ways of being in the world in the urgencies of a global economy.
SYMPOSIUM Embodied Cognition in Architecture Writing
DOUBLE OPERATIVE: Language/Making 