Architecture and Empathy

Full text

Architecture
and
Empathy
Juhani Pallasmaa
Harry Francis Mallgrave
Sarah Robinson
Vittorio Gallese
A Tapio Wirkkala-Rut Bryk Design Reader
Architecture and Empathy Juhani Pallasmaa, Harry Mallgrave, Sarah Robinson, Vittorio Gallese A TWRB Design Reader

Architecture and
Empathy
a Tapio Wirkkala - Rut Bryk Design Reader
with contributions from
Juhani Pallasmaa
Harry Francis Mallgrave
Sarah Robinson
and Vittorio Gallese
edited by Philip Tidwell
published by the Tapio Wirkkala-Rut Bryk Foundation

Contents
Empathic and Embodied Imagination:
Intuiting Experience and Life in Architecture
Juhani Pallasmaa
Enculturation, Sociality, and
the Built Environment
Harry Francis Mallgrave
Boundaries of Skin: John Dewey,
Didier Anzieu and Architectural Possibility
Sarah Robinson
Architectural Space from Within:
The Body, Space and the Brain
Vittorio Gallese
A Conversation on Empathy
Juhani Pallasmaa, Harry Francis Mallgrave,
Sarah Robinson and Vittorio Gallese
Contributor Biographies
About the TWRB Foundation
ISBN:
978-0-692-53919-4
Copyright:
Copyright 2015 Tapio Wirkkala—Rut Bryk Foundation, all rights reserved.
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without responsibility for errors or omissions. We have attempted to contact
all copyright holders, but this has not been possible in all circumstances. We
apologize for any omissions and, if noted, will amend in any future editions.
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Architecture and Empathy
Juhani Pallasmaa
Empathic and Embodied Imagination:
Intuiting Experience and Life in Architecture
Why is it that architecture and architects, unlike film and
filmmakers, are so little interested in people during the
design process? Why are they so theoretical, so distant
from life in general?
[Jan Vrijman, Dutch ilmaker]1
Architecture and Images of Life
Contemporary architecture has often been accused of emotional
coldness, restrictive aesthetics and a distance from life. This criticism
suggests that we architects have adopted formalist attitudes, instead of
tuning our buildings with realities of life and the human mind. In all
honesty, don’t we usually design our houses on the basis of functional
and aesthetic criteria, rather than imagining them as resonant settings
and backgrounds for situations of lived life? “Let us assume a wall:
what takes place behind it?” the French poet Jean Tardieu asks provoc-
atively.2 But do we architects have the same curiosity for life?
The weak sense of life in our buildings may not only result from a
deliberate emotive distance or formalist rejection of life’s complexities
and nuances, it may simply be that geometric configurations are easier
to imagine than the shapeless and dynamic acts of life and the ephem-
eral feelings evoked by architecture. Joseph Brodsky, the poet, makes a
blunt suggestion to this effect: “[The city of memory] is empty because
for an imagination it is easier to conjure architecture than human be-
ings.”3
No doubt, Modernism at large—its theory, education as well as prac-
tice—has focused more on form and aesthetic criteria, than the interac-
Juhani Pallasmaa
Above: Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1490-1510. Central panel
“Imaginary Paradise”. Museo del Prado, Madrid.

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tion between built form and life, especially mental life. Le Corbusier’s
famous credo, “Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent
play of masses brought together in light,”4 turned architecture into a
visually autonomous art form. Regardless of his formalist credo, Le
Corbusier’s works project forceful emotional experiences; here the poet
and artist in the architect’s complex character take over the theorist and
polemicist. Yet, architectural form is humanly meaningful only when
it is experienced in resonance with life—real, remembered or imag-
ined. The minimalist style of the recent decades has tended to distance
architecture even further from events of life. Again, I need to add that I
believe in the value of reduction myself, but this reduction must aim to-
ward the essentials, not away from them. Constantin Brancusi forcefully
reminds us of this requirement in his statement, “The work must give
immediately, at once, the shock of life, the sensation of breathing.”5
I am calling for an architectural thinking that incorporates life in all
its practical and mental implications, one that goes beyond the Vitruvian
trinity of “utilitas, firmitas, venustas.”6 The reductive attitude toward life
denies its essential spontaneity and messiness, which tends to turn life
itself into a formal and predictable behavior. As John Ruskin concludes:
Imperfection is in some way essential to all that we know
of life. It is a sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of
a state of process and change. Nothing that lives is, or
can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent
[…] And in all things that live there are certain irregulari-
ties and deficiences, which are not only signs of life but
sources of beauty.7
Images of Form and Experience
As I began my studies in architecture at the Helsinki University of
Technology in the late 1950s, professor Aulis Blomstedt, the ideological
counterpole to Alvar Aalto in the Finnish postwar architectural scene,
taught us, “The talent of imagining human situations is more impor-
tant for an architect than the gift of fantasizing spaces.”8 Indeed, quali-
ties of physical space, behavior and mental tuning are interrelated.
When designing physical spaces, we are also designing, or implicitly
specifying distinct experiences, emotions and mental states. In fact, as
architects, we are operating in the human brain and nervous system
Juhani Pallasmaa
as much as in the world of matter and physical construction. I dare
to make this statement as science has established that environments
change our brains, and those changes in turn alter our behavior.9 The
connections between the mind and the physical setting is much more
fundamental than we have believed.
Already in the 1960s psychologists observed that the behavior of an
individual varied more in different settings than the behavior of other
subjects in the same setting. The notion of “situational personality” was
introduced to describe this condition.10 Today we know that environ-
ments give rise to permanent structural changes in our brain and
neural systems. In his book Survival Through Design, Richard Neutra
already professed, “Today design may exert a far-reaching influence
on the nervous make-up of generations.”11 Architectural spaces are
not just lifeless stages for our activities. They guide, choreograph, and
stimulate actions, interests and moods, or in the negative case, stifle
and prohibit them. Even more importantly, they give our everyday
experiences of being specific perceptual frames and horizons of under-
standing. Every space, place and situation is tuned in a specific way,
and it projects atmospheres that promote distinct moods and feelings.
We live in resonance with our world and architecture mediates and
maintains that very resonance.
Two Imaginations
Buildings are products of imagination; every human structure has first
existed as an intentional mental image. Isn’t it depressing to realize
that all the ugliness in our surroundings is a consequence of human
intentionality and thought? In my view, there are two qualitative
levels of imagination; one projects formal and geometric images while
another one simulates the actual sensory, emotive and mental encoun-
ter with the projected entity. The first category of imagination projects
the material object in isolation, the second presents it as a lived and
experienced reality in our life world. In the first case, the imaginatively
projected object remains as an external image outside of the experienc-
ing and sensing self. In the latter case, it becomes part of our existential
experience, as in the encounter with material reality. The neurological
affinity between what is perceived and what is imagined, has been well
established in scientific studies, so I will not say more about this issue.12
The formal imagination is primarily engaged with topological or geo-

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metric facts, whereas the emphatic imagination evokes embodied and
emotive experiences, qualities, and moods. Maurice Merleau-Ponty
introduced the evocative notion of “the flesh of the world,” to denote
the lived reality in which we dwell. The empathic imagination evokes
multi-sensory, integrated and lived experiences of this very flesh.13
Creative Imagination
Henry Moore, the master sculptor, gives a vivid description of the
simultaneous embodied internalization and imaginative externalizing
power of artistic imagination:
This is what the sculptor must do. He must strive
continually to think of, and use form in its full spatial
completeness. He gets the solid shape, as it were, inside
his head—he thinks of it, whatever its size, as if hold-
ing it completely enclosed in the hollow of his hand. He
mentally visualizes a complex form from all round itself;
he knows while he looks at one side what the other side
is like; he identifies himself with its center of gravity, its
mass, its weight; he realizes its volume, and the space
that the shape displaces in the air.14
This precise account of a great artist suggests that the act of imagining
spaces and objects, is not solely a matter of visual projection; it is a pro-
cess of embodiment, identification and feeling the entity as an imagi-
nary extension of one’s self, through embodied simulation. The artist’s
body becomes the work, and simultaneously, the work becomes an
extension of his body. Every creative person works unconsciously with
herself, as much as with materials, forms, sounds, or words. Einstein’s
famous confession of the visual and muscular thinking in his work on
mathematical and physical problems is an authoritative suggestion that
all thinking has an embodied component.15 Imagination is not a quasi-
visual projection; we imagine through our entire embodied existence
and through imagination we expand our realm of being. Thinking is
actually a way of molding one’s world as if it were sculptor’s clay, and
in fact Martin Heidegger compared thinking with cabinet making. To
this line of thinking Henry Moore added a crucial comment on the role
of the conscious intellect: “The artist works with a concentration of his
Above: Henry Moore carving in his studio in the late 1970s.
Juhani Pallasmaa

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realm. Sculpture is similarly, a piece of stone and a mental image, and
a building is likewise a utilitarian structure and a mental suggestion—a
spatial metaphor of human existence. This dual essence and double fo-
cus is fundamental to the mental impact of art. Experiencing an artistic
image seems to create a momentary short circuit between our cognitive
and emotive orientations. We do not usually recognize that we actually
dwell in architectural metaphors, poeticized images that provide spe-
cific frames and horizons for experiencing and understanding our own
life situation. Besides, works of art and architecture alter our percep-
tions of the world. As Merleau-Ponty suggests, “We come not to see the
work of art, but the world according to the work.”20
As Alvar Aalto testified, architectural ideas are not usually born
as clear and final forms; they arise as diffuse images, often as form-
less bodily feelings. They are eventually developed and concretized
in successive sketches and models, refined and specified in working
drawings, turned into material existence through numerous hands and
machines, and finally, experienced as purposeful utilitarian structures
in the context of life. Yet, even the art of poetry is engaged with the
material world and the body, as the poet Charles Tomlinson points out:
Painting awakes up the hand, draws in your sense of
muscular coordination, your sense of the body, if you like.
Poetry, also, as it pivots on its stresses, as it rides for-
ward over the line-endings, or comes to rest at pauses in
the line, poetry also brings the whole man into play and
his bodily sense of himself.21
The British painter and essayist Adrian Stokes makes the ultimate
argument, “In a way, all art originates in the body.”22
Imaginative Construction and Dwelling
What I have said so far, raises an essential question: How can archi-
tectural ideas and aspirations (particularly emotive qualities) emerge
as immaterial feelings of the designer and be translated into the actual
building before finally being experienced by the person inhabiting it?
And how can such vague and weakly formalized feelings be com-
municated? Firstly, it seems crucial that the designer master the entire
process in order to mediate and materialize his/her intentions. A
Juhani Pallasmaa
whole personality, and the conscious part of it resolves conflicts, orga-
nizes memories, and prevents him from trying to walk in two direc-
tions at the same time.”16 The intellect provides the ground and control
for the process, but the poetic image does not arise from reason alone.
Creative Imagination
I wish to argue firmly that true qualities of architecture are not formal
or geometric, intellectual or even aesthetic. They are existential and
poetic, embodied and emotive experiences, which connect us with the
deep human historicity of occupying space. They arise from our exis-
tential encounter with the work, rather than merely through vision. Ar-
tistic images are not “pure” formal configurations; they are images that
are embedded in the soil of human historicity, memory and imagina-
tion. True architectural images are always unconsciously reaching back
to our biological historicity. Alvar Aalto suggested that architecture and
its details derive in some way from biology.17 No wonder Semir Zeki,
the neurobiologist, suggests the possibility of a theory of aesthetics that
is biologically based.18 Poetic images are always new and ancient at the
same time. Architectural images evoke recollections, feelings and asso-
ciations. Existentially meaningful architectural images cannot be mere
formal fabrications or inventions, as they are bound to echo our mental
world, and artistic experiences are thus essentially exchanges; we expe-
rience them as part of our life world and give them their meanings.
Architectural qualities are constituted in the act of experiencing the
work, as philosopher John Dewey argued of works of art in general.
By common consent, the Parthenon is a great work of
art. Yet it has aesthetic standing only as the work be-
comes an experience for a human being (…) Art is always
the product in experience of an interaction of human
beings with their environment”19
The value of artistic works is that they are experientially and emotively
real. Artistic works are not symbols or metaphors of something else,
they are an authentic experiential reality themselves. All art, in fact, ex-
ists simultaneously in two realms, that of physical matter and execution
as well as that of mental imagery. A painting is paint on canvas, but at
the same time, it is an image and narrative in the imaginative mental

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talented architect constructs the entire edifice in his/her imagination;
every great building has been built twice, first in the immaterial realm
of imagination and then in the material world under laws of physics.
In fact, we must say that every great building has been erected several
times, since even a master hardly ever realizes his/her first idea. And
every profound building has been imaginatively inhabited by its de-
signer. Paul Valéry poetically points out the extreme subtlety required
of the architect in transmitting experiential intentions:
He gave a like care to all the sensitive points of the build-
ing. You would have thought that it was his own body he
was tending […] But all these delicate devices were as
nothing compared to those which he employed when he
elaborated the emotions and vibrations of the soul of the
future beholder of his work.23
This is Phaedrus describing the care by which Eupalinos, the architect
in the poet’s dialogue Eupalinos, or The Architect, proceeded in his de-
sign process. “My temple must move men as they are moved by their
beloved,” the poet adds.24 I also wish to add in passing that there is a
distinct sensual and erotic quality in meaningful spatial and architec-
tural experiences, as they are essentially sensuous embraces. Every
great architectural space is the architect’s embrace; but an architectural
space is also simultaneously the mother’s and the lover’s embrace.25
Architecture as a Gift
It is usually understood, that a sensitive designer imagines the acts,
experiences and feelings of the user of the space, but I do not believe
human empathic imagination works that way. The designer places
him/herself in the role of the future dweller, and tests the validity of
the ideas through this imaginative exchange of roles and personalities.
Thus, the architect is bound to conceive the design essentially for him/
herself as the momentary surrogate of the actual occupant. Without
usually being aware of it, the designer turns into a silent actor on the
imaginary stage of each project. At the end of the design process, the
architect offers the building to the user as a gift. It is a gift in the sense
that the designer has given birth to the other’s home as a surrogate
mother gives birth to the child of someone who is not biologically
capable of doing so herself. In unspecialized indigenous cultures every-
one was capable of giving this architectural gift, by building one’s own
dwelling, and all animals can still do it. As buildings are extentions of
our bodily and mental faculties, the metaphor of giving birth even has
an extended meaning. Profound architecture is a gift in still another
sense; it transcends its given conditions and conscious intentions. A
creative work is always more than could be rationally deducted or fore-
seen, otherwise it would not qualify as a creative act.
Creative Team Work?
The idea of projecting one’s self in the process of emphatic imagination
evokes another crucial question: how does the mental projection take
place in collective work, such as team work in a large design office?
In fact, all architectural projects today are bound to be some kind of
collaboration. In my view, it requires the sensitivity and fused identity
of a well rehearsed musical ensemble to succeed in the demanding and
seemingly impossible task of collective imagination. It also requires a
shared atmosphere and a charismatic conductor. However, team work
rarely achieves the intensity and integrity of a work conceived by a
single creator. Group work tends to strengthen the rational, stylistic,
and conscious aspects of design as a result of the need of communica-
tion. Isn’t it impossible to think how a deeply emotive and subcon-
scious work, such as Alvar Aalto’s Villa Mairea or Säynätsalo Town
Hall, Le Corbusier’s Chapel at Ronchamp, the late churches of Sigurd
Lewerentz or Luis Barragan’s Chapel for the Capuchinas Sacramentar-
ias del Purísimo Corazon de María could arise from team work? They
have to be a result of a singular emotive, synthesizing and empathic
imagination. These ideas have evidently been incubated in a singular
personality.
I am also concerned with the disappearance of a sense of life in
todays’ design processes through the increasing uncritical use of the
computer, which tends to distance the object of design from the natural
and internal link with the human psyche and body, a link which is
provided by the eye-hand-body-mind connection of drawing combined
with an empathic imagination. My second concern in relation to exces-
sive computerization is, that architectural and artistic meanings are
always existential meanings, not ideational propositions. That is, art
articulates our experiences of the world directly in their existential di-
Juhani Pallasmaa

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mension. The fundamental message of art is always ‘this is how it feels
to be a human being in this world.’ How could a basically mechanized
process, however delicate and subtle, bring about such meanings? In-
stead of being authentic reflections of life—the foundational reality of
architecture—the human figures depicted in computerized renderings
appear as mere decorations, like flowers in a vase.
The design process is a vague and emotive process that alternates
between internalization and projection, thinking and feeling, embodi-
ment and conceptualization, association and rejection, trial and error.
Eventually it becomes increasingly concrete and precise. The projected
reality is internalized, or “introjected” to use a psychoanalytic term,
and the self is simultaneously projected out into the space. A gifted
architect feels and imagines the building, its countless relationships
and details as if it were an extension of his/her own body, as Valéry
suggested above.
The geometric and formal dimensions of architecture can usually
be rather precisely identified and imagined through formal imagina-
tion, especially when combined with projective technical aids, such as
axonometric and perspectival drawings, physical models, or computer
simulations. The lived characteristics—the building as a setting for
activities and interactions—call for a multi-sensory and empathic
imagination. Significantly, the designer does not project the building
into his/her current reality of life; he imagines the reality of the build-
ing and places himself there. The fact that computer renderings usually
appear lifeless and emotionless arises from the fact that the process
itself does not contain an emotive and empathic component. It is the
result of cold projective mechanics in mathematicized space.
Syncretic Imagination
An extraordinary imaginative capacity is revealed by Mozart describ-
ing the feeling of gradual disintegration of temporal succession in his
creative process:
I spread it [the composition] out broader and clearer, and
at last it gets almost finished in my head, even when it is
a long piece, so that I can see the whole of it at a single
glance in my mind, as if it were a beautiful painting or a
handsome human being; in which way I do not hear it in
Juhani Pallasmaa
Left: Sigurd Lewerentz, St. Peter’s Church, 1966, Klippan, Sweden.

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my imagination at all as a succession—that way it must
come later—but all at once, as it were […] the best of all is
the hearing of it all at once.26
No doubt, a building can also be similarly sensed ‘all at once’ as a
singular sensation, a kind of ‘universal substance’ by a genius of spatial
imagination. It is not surprising that musical and spatial intelligences
have been suggested among the dozen categories of human intelligence
beyond the intelligence measured by the standard IQ test.27
Yet another quality of our perceptual and emotive system was
evoked by Heinrich Wölfflin in his dissertation in 1886. “How is it
possible that architectural forms are able to invoke an emotion or a
mood.”28 Indeed, how does Michelangelo’s architecture and sculpture
evoke such deep feelings of melancholy and Mozart’s music so delight-
fully energetic and optimistic moods? Michelangelo himself argued
that everything in art and architecture arises from the human body,
and indeed, his buildings and sculptures are bodies and muscles of
marble that have fallen in deep and poetic melancholia. Michelangelo’s
every volume, structural member, line and profile seems to be alive,
like the muscles and tendons of a human body in tension.
Imagination and Embodied Simulation
The capacity of works of art, even completely non-representational
forms and colors such as the Suprematist works of Russian Construc-
tivism, the geometric compositions of Dutch De Stijl, or the color fields
of American Abstract Expressionism, to evoke emotional reactions in
the perceiver has remained a mystery ever since this non-represen-
tational art form emerged a century ago. Psychoanalytic theories at-
tempted to explain such mysterious mental and emotional experiences
through the idea of unconscious projection of self, or fragments of self,
on the perceived object. The recent discovery of mirror neurons and
theoretical suggestions arising from this discovery, have opened new
interpretations to this enigma. Neuroscience explains this mental phe-
nomenon by means of our inherent neural systems that are specialized
for this subconscious imitation, or embodied simulation. As already
Aristotle saw the significance of mimesis as the ground of all learning,
we are not dealing with any novel discovery.
I will not attempt to say more about mirror neurons and mirror sys-
Juhani Pallasmaa
Above: Michelangelo, Tomb of Giuliano di Lorenzo de’ Medici with Night and Day, 16th
century, Basilica of San Lorenzo, Florence.

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Architecture and Empathy Juhani Pallasmaa
NOTES
1 Jan Vrijman, ”Filmmakers Spacemak-
ers”, The Berlage Papers 11 (January,
1994].
2 Jean Tardieu, as quoted in Georges
Perec, Tiloja, avaruuksia [Espéces
d’espaces] (Helsinki: Loki-Kirjat,
1992), 50.
3 Joseph Brodsky, On Grief and Rea-
son: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1997), 43.
4 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Archi-
tecture (London: The Architectural
Press, 1959), 31.
5 Constantin Brancusi, as quoted in
Eric Shanes, Brancusi (New York: Ab-
beville Press, 1989) 67.
6 Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Archi-
tecture [De Architectura Libri Decem]
(New York: Dover Publications, 1960).
7 John Ruskin, as quoted in Gary J.
tems today as we have one of the discoverers of these phenomena, Dr.
Vittorio Gallese as our contributor. Equally, I will not go into the philo-
sophical evolution of ideas on empathy, Einfühlung, “inner imitation”,
or “corporeal resonance” as this line of thinking will be addressed by
Harry Mallgrave in his contribution. He deserves much appreciation for
recovering this line of inquiry that was developed German scholars and
thinkers of the 19th century since Robert Vischer but has been rather
forgotten in the philosophy of modernity and modern art.
According to Joseph Brodsky, the inherent suggestion of every poem
is “Be like me,” and here the great poet seems to anticipate the hidden
workings of our mirror neurons before neuroscience had identified this
neural activity.29 Brodsky also refers to the ethical lessons of great liter-
ary works. All great works of art speak convincingly for the capacity
of human empathic imagination , intuition and compassion. But what
else could true artistic ingenuity be other than the capacity to imagine
something that no one has yet perceived or experienced, and to bring
that vague sensation into physical and lived reality?
Imagination is not a singular phenomenon as the writings of
Jean-Paul Sartre, Edward S. Casey, Richard Kearney and many other
philosophers have shown. In his book on poetic imagery, Water and
Dreams, Gaston Bachelard divides imagination into two categories:
images of form and images of matter. He argues that the latter are more
poetic and deeper of the two.30 I wish to add a third category to the phi-
losopher’s pair of imaginative realms: images of life. I venture to argue
that these images of growth, movement, change, action and becoming
are the least understood of images. In my view, profound architectural
images are not substantives, they are verbs. They serve as invitations
for action and at the same time, promises. In the arts as well, these are
the images that give rise to a sense of life.
Coates, Erik Asmussen, Architect,
(Stockholm, Byggförlaget, 1997), 230.
8 Aulis Blomstedt, as quoted by the
author from Blomstedt’s lectures at
the Helsinki University of Technology
in the early 1960s.
9 See for instance Fred Gage, “Archi-
tecture and Neuroscience” (keynote
lecture at the AIA National Conven-
tion, San Diego, California, May 8-10,
2003).
10 See for instance Walter Mischel, Per-
sonality and Assessment (London:
Wiley, 1968).
11 Richard Neutra, Survival through De-
sign (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1954), 7.
12 I referring to research carried out
under the supervision of Dr. Stephen
Rosslyn at the Harvard University
in the mid 1990s as reported in Ilpo
Kojo, “Mielikuvat ovat aivoille todel-
lisia [Images are real for the brain]
Helsingin Sanomat, March 26, 1996.
13 Merleau-Ponty discusses the notion
of the flesh in his essay ”The Inter-
twining – The Chiasm,” in The Visible
and Invisible, Claude Lefort, ed.,
(Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1964), 9.
14 Henry Moore, “The Sculptor Speaks,”
in Henry Moore on Sculpture, ed.
Philip James (London: MacDonald,
1966), 62-64.
15 Albert Einstein, “Letter to Jacques
Hadamar,” in The Psychology of
Invention in the Mathematical Field,
Jacques Hadamar (Princeton: Princ-
eton University Press, 1945), 142-143.
16 James, Henry Moore, 62.
17 See for instance Alvar Aalto, “The
Humanizing of Architecture” (1940),
in ed. Göran Schildt, Alvar Aalto In
His Own Words (New York: Rizzoli,
1998).
18 Semir Zeki discusses the notion at
length in his book Inner Vision: An
Exploration of Art and the Brain (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
19 John Dewey, Art As Experience (New
York: Putnam, 1934). 4, 231.
20 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as quoted in
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and HIs
Emissary: The Divided Brain and the
Making of the Western World (New
Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2009) 409.
21 Charles Tomlinson, “The Poet as
Painter,” in Poets on Painters, ed.
J.D.McClatchy, (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990), 280.
22 Adrian Stokes, The Image in Form:
Selected writings of Adrian Stokes,
ed. Richard Wollheim, (New York:
Harper & Row, 1972), 122.
23 Paul Valéry, Dialogues (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1956), 74-75.
24 Ibid., 75.
25 I discuss this notion further in depth
in my essay “The Eroticism of Space,”
in Encounters 2: Architectural Essays,
ed. Peter MacKeith (Helsinki: Raken-
nustieto, 2012), 59-65.
26 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as
quoted in Anton Ehrenzweig, The
Psychonalysis of Artistic Vision and
Hearing: An Introduction to a Theory
of Unconscious Perception (London:
Sheldon Press, 1975), 107-8.
27 Howard Gardner, Intelligence Re-
framed: Multiple Intelligences for the
21st Century (New York: Basic Books,
1999). 41-43.
28 Heinrich Wölfflin, “Prolegomena to a
Psychology of Architecture,” in Harry
Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios
Ikonomou, eds. and trans., Empathy,
Form, and Space: Problems in Ger-
man Aesthetics, 1873-1893 (Santa
Monica: Getty Center for the History
of Art and the Humanities, 1994), 149.
29 Joseph Brodsky, ”An Immodest Pro-
posal,” in On Grief and Reason (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997),
206.
30 Gaston Bachelard, Water and
Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination
of Matter (Dallas: Dallas Institute,
1983), 1.

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20
Architecture and Empathy
Harry Francis Mallgrave
Enculturation, Sociality, and
the Built Environment
The history of architecture is not a history of buildings or their styles. It
is a history of ideas and how they have shaped the way we think about
ourselves and our built environments. These ideas, in turn, are quite
naturally directed by larger cultural forces. Yet what is most interest-
ing about this connection between culture and the practice of design is
that those periods in which the arts have been profoundly shaped by
stylistic change have generally been those periods in which architec-
tural theory has been more emphatically influenced by cultural ideas.
A historian could cite countless examples of this relationship—from
the mosques and cathedrals of the Middle East and Western Europe
to the secular culture of modernity at the turn of the 20th century—
but the point can be readily conceded. Even something as seemingly
mundane as the cultural wars of the 1960s had a significant impact on
architectural practice. The ideological divide separating the collectivist
typologies of Aldo Rossi from the populist polemics of Robert Venturi
resulted in a stylistic change in the following decades that was equally
deep-felt and poignant.
Around the time this process began to play itself out, however, the
terms of the architectural debate shifted in one significant regard. The
advance of poststructural theory with its inherent “incredulity toward
metanarratives” was acutely hostile to the notion of any unified theory,
cultural or otherwise, and traditional approaches to design with their
grounding in the humanities soon found themselves out of step with
the decentered abstractions under which architecture now labored on
the one hand, or with the new formalism that software-based technolo-
gies promised on the other hand.1 Even something as benign as the
“green movement” of the 1990s—severed from any connection to a
broader theory—followed in the tracks of the new technological deter-
Harry Francis Mallgrave
Above: Cast of footprints in Laetoli, Tanzania, 3.6 millions years ago, Australopithecus
afarensis (“Lucy”), in the Museum of Natural History, Washington D.C.
Photo by Tim Evanson, Creative Commons.

23
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Architecture and Empathy
minism, and one need not wonder why the contradiction between the
thermostat settings of a room and the R-values of the glass walls that
encased it was invisible to many designers. Now precluded from mak-
ing any cultural statement about the world, many architects surren-
dered their sketch pencils to the parametric logic of the machine. A new
age was proclaimed, one that altogether excluded consideration of the
human occupant from the designed “object.” In the two decades since
the fall of the poststructural semiotic, architectural theory—its adher-
ence to the word—has come to a standstill and virtually ceased to exist.
Let me begin with a very basic question: Can architectural theory
ever again reconcile itself with a broader humanistic or cultural theory?
I know this question might still be viewed as impolite in some
academic circles, particularly to that generation raised on the “traces”
of the past, but then again I think part of the problem is terminologi-
cal. Can an architect today make a statement about human culture and
how might this be possible? One critical observation needs to be made
at the start. The cultural theory of the second decade of the new millen-
nium is vastly different from the cultural theory that collapsed under
its speculative approaches of a half-century ago. Today we are much
better informed about our own biology.
Of course cultural theory is largely an invention of the 20th century
and the early pioneers in the fields of sociology and anthropology. The
positivist Emile Durkheim, for instance, saw the “science” of sociology
as the impersonal investigation of “social facts,” the shared morality
and emotional life of a particular society. Max Weber perceived a link
between individual behaviors and the religious and political institu-
tions in which they were bred. Franz Boas viewed culture as a system
of habits, dispositions, and beliefs trans-culturally crafted from the
materials at hand. Many of these approaches, however, fell out of favor
in the middle decades of the 20th century. The anthropologist Clifford
Geertz, for instance, viewed culture less through specific behavioral
patterns and more as a provisional set of recipes or social rules inter-
preted through the domain of cultural symbols and their meanings.
The underlying premise to all such systems was that humans were
born into the world as biological entities, but then mostly shaped
by larger cultural forces. The perennial question of “nature versus
nurture” (biology versus culture) was generally decided in favor of the
latter; humans, after all, come into the world with a “blank slate.”
It was only in the late-1960s—as architectural design was embark-
ing on its meander into the stylistic past—that this view began to be
challenged, and then initially from disciplines circling the outer orbit of
mainstream academic thought. The German ethologist Konrad Lorenz,
for instance, drew upon his study of animal behaviors to suggest
that many behavioral patterns of species were in fact innate, and that
specific cultural propensities of humans, such as aggression, might be
a result of genetic adaptations. The zoologist Desmond Morris, in his
book The Naked Ape (1967), pointed out that many human behaviors
were little different from those of the great apes, a somewhat startling
admission to many. Sociology came under more direct assault in the
next decade with the publication of Edward O. Wilson’s book, Sociobiol-
ogy: The New Synthesis (1975), which challenged the legitimacy of any
cultural theory without a more basic biological underpinning. Over the
first twenty-six chapters of the book, the Harvard biologist meticulous-
ly studied the behavioral patterns of various species in terms of their
genes and behavior, and then in the twenty-seventh chapter he turned
his attention to humans—insisting that genes do indeed influence
such things as gender behaviors, social bonding, and human culture.
In a follow-up study co-authored with Charles Lumsden, Genes, Mind
and Culture (1981), Wilson proposed the hypothesis of gene-culture
co-evolution. His views initially encountered intense opposition within
the traditional departments of academe.
By the turn of the present century, however, the corner had been
turned. Not only did theories of gene-culture coevolution win the day,
but they did so with a level of sophistication (gained from such knowl-
edge as the sequencing of DNA) that was impossible only a few years
earlier. In the ensuing years virtually every (formerly autonomous)
field of the sciences and humanities has undergone a significant trans-
formation and become interdisciplinary. One realm of biological theory
known as niche construction, for instance, postulates that just as we
alter our physical and cultural environments, so do these changed en-
vironments alter the genetic structures and behavioral patterns of who
we are. Our brains, bodies, and environments (material and cultural)
are no longer seen as entities to be independently investigated, but as
highly dynamic and interacting systems connected with each other
biologically, ecologically, and socially. The philosophical and cultural
implications of such a perspective are enormous. This is no less so for
Harry Francis Mallgrave

25
24
Architecture and Empathy
25
Harry Francis Mallgrave
architectural theory, which guides us in the practice of physically alter-
ing our living environments. Only now, however, are a few architects
beginning to take note of this vast and growing body of research and
its many design implications.
Human Evolution
Although biological breakthroughs have led the way in fashioning the
new models of human nature and cultural behavior, a number of other
fields have also supplied important pieces of the puzzle. Only a few
decades ago it was the consensus of many paleoanthropologists that
Homo sapiens underwent a major cognitive breakthrough around 50,000
years ago, resulting in such things as the cave paintings of southern
Europe, complex language, and other symbolic forms of cultural trans-
mission. Today we take a much longer view of our past and with good
reason. For if we broaden the timeline of our lineage out to several
million years, we gain a quite different perspective of who we are and
from where we came. Already with the genus Australopithecus afaren-
sis—the discovery of “Lucy” in 1973, dating to 3.6 million years ago—
we meet a semi-erect primate who had moved away from the tropical
forests of our great ape cousins and began to forage in the savannahs of
East Africa. Another set of major adaptations are found with the begin-
ning of the Homo genus around 2.4 million years ago, and particularly
with the species Homo erectus, a bipedal species with a physical stature
and body proportions similar to our own. Against this backdrop, the
appearance of Homo sapiens a mere 200,000 years ago is little more than
a footnote to a much lengthier evolutionary timeline.
If we examine the growth of cranial capacity over the same time
period, two things stand out. The first is that up until the species Homo
habilis, the so-called “handy man,” the brains of our ancestors had not
enlarged much beyond our primate cousins. The cranial brain size of
Lucy, for instance, barely outstripped that of a modern-day chimpan-
zee. The second is the massive jump in brain sizes with three species in
particular: Homo erectus (a term that I will use in a broad sense), Homo
heidelbergensis (a species that emerged in East Africa between 800,000
and 600,000 years ago, to which I will refer simply as the Heidelbergs),
and Homo sapiens. Yet brain sizes in themselves do not tell the whole sto-
ry, and, in restricting ourselves to these last three species, we can learn
much by also taking into account their social and cultural behaviors.
5
Million
Years Ago
4
Million
Years Ago
3
Million
Years Ago
2
Million
Years Ago
1
Million
Years Ago
0
Present Day
‘Ardi’
‘Lucy’
Homo habilis
Homo erectus
Homo heidelbergensis
Homo sapiens
Ardipithecus
ramidus
(Ardi)
Australopithecus
afarensis
(Lucy)
Homo
heidelbergensis
Homo
sapiens
Homo
habilis
Homo
erectus
Evolutionary Timeline in Millions of Years

27
26
Architecture and Empathy Harry Francis Mallgrave
Homo erectus not only enjoyed a brain almost double in size to that
of pre-Homo species, but his Acheulean tool kit (1.8 to 1 million years
ago) was obviously not the driving factor in its enlargement; in fact,
it remained little changed over much of his lengthy timeline. Yet the
social behavior of Homo erectus was strikingly different from that of
earlier species. He hunted in larger groups at greater distances in time
and space, which demanded enhanced communication and group-co-
ordination skills much beyond those of apes. With his much enlarged
body and brain size, he also needed greater nutrition, which eventually
necessitated the introduction of meat into the diet and the invention of
cooking to make these high-protein foods more efficient for digestion.
There may well have been other social behaviors associated with this
species, such as imitation, laughter, and other aspects of what Merlin
Donald has called mimetic culture.2
If we turn to the African Heidelbergs, we find another large increase
in brain size and more complex behavioral patterns, in fact behaviors
not far removed from those of our own species. Again we find an
increase in group activities and the size of social communities. Trade
comes into play, and anatomical changes in the vocal cord and ear
canal announce the rudiments of more sophisticated speech. The use of
ochre also offers the possibility of body ornamentation. And when we
combine these behaviors with the mastery of fire, for which we have
solid evidence beginning around 500,000 years ago, we have other im-
plications as well, such as the likely appearance of music, song, dance,
and architecture—to which I will return shortly.
The appearance of modern humans in Africa around 200,000 years
ago, again with larger brains, no doubt drew much from these earlier
cultures and social behaviors. Our closest cousins, the Neanderthals,
likely also emerged from the lineage of the Heidelbergs only slightly
earlier than humans and they died out around 40,000 years ago. And
the more we learn of the Neanderthals (who indeed had larger brains
than humans), the more similar are the behaviors of the two species.
In any case, those things that we hold up today as unique to human
behavior, such as symbolism, complex language, and artistic repre-
sentation, were really little more than icing on the cake, as it were, an
evolutionary cake that had been baking for millions of years. There-
fore the foremost question of many paleoanthropologists today is not
what drove our evolutionary changes over the last 50,000 years, but
what took place over the last two million years to create the particular
behaviors that we today possess.
‘Ardi’
‘Lucy’
Homo
habilis
Homo
erectus
Homo
heidelbergensis
Homo
sapiens
1500
1000
500
0
Modern Chimpanzee
Volume in Cubic Centimeters
2 million
years ago 700,000
years ago 200,000
years ago
Large brain increase, joint
intentionality, hunting skills,
greater range, gesturing,
proto-language, cooked meat,
laughter, mimetic culture
50% brain increase, larger
groups, division of labor,
communal hearths, mentalizing
likely music, dancing, use of
ochre, practice of architecture
Collective intentionality
syntactical language, burials,
symbolism, art, writing,
agriculture, jewelry, cumulative
cultural evolution
Cultural TimelineBrain Size
Homo heidelbergensis Homo sapiensHomo erectus

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Architecture and Empathy
Another researcher to make a similar case but from a different per-
spective is the Oxford professor and evolutionary psychologist Robin
Dunbar. He too first put forward his ideas in the 1990s by raising the
question of what evolutionary factors could have led to the enlarge-
ment of an organ—the brain—that consumes twenty percent of the
body’s energy production while possessing only two percent of the
body’s mass.5 Darwinian principles of Natural Selection do not provide
an adequate explanation. His answer effectively turned conventional
evolutionary theory on its head because he argued that we are by
nature social animals, and it was the cultural complexity of our ever
expanding social networks (our families, friends, enemies, clans, and
larger social alliances) that necessitated the expansion of our cogni-
tive powers in order to cope with this social reality. In the two decades
since Dunbar first put forward his “social brain hypothesis” a growing
body of research has been amassing to support his contention.6 Today
the importance of social cognition in sculpting our unique evolutionary
trajectory is scarcely contested.
An Architectural Model of Cultural Development
Both of these cases made on behalf of our fundamentally social natures
were important developments within the context of the cognitive
theories of the 1990s, but neither seeks to explain the neurological
means by which early hominins pursued this particular social turn.
No doubt there were a host of instrumental variables involved with
sociality, such as the importance of bipedalism (face-to-face contact)
and the new demands of collective foraging in the more exposed
savannahs of East Africa, but the neurological maps and components
for this social behavior had to be in place as well. Our interest at the
present, however, is in incorporating this social turn into a more
general cultural theory, one that can provide some insight into
architectural design. Some interesting and recent philosophical models
provide us with a means to do this.
We are, as the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl noted many years
ago, “animate organisms” sensorially and emotionally attuned to our
surroundings. Yet the predominant interest of philosophy throughout
the 20th century was its almost exclusive focus on the rational aspects
of consciousness. Cognition, within philosophical literature in fact, has
often been reduced to this single capacity: the exercise of the Cartesian
The Social Brain Hypothesis
The consensus that has been emerging in the last two decades is that
the single most important factor driving anatomical changes and cogni-
tive development in early human primates was the increasing complex-
ity of their social life. This is a major departure from the tool-based
measuring rod of just a few decades ago, and it is one that has in the
last few years become supported with a gathering body of evidence
gained from the increasingly more refined analysis of early hominin
remains. We not only know our lineage much better, but we also have a
much enhanced picture of aspects of our cognitive development.
One of the first cognitive theorists in this regard was Michael
Tomasello, currently the co-director of the Max Planck Institute for
Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. His research is different from
others in that it is focused both on the cognition of great apes and the
social development of children. And where many primatologists in
the past have emphasized how similar we are to great apes in many of
our emotional and behavioral patterns, Tomasello—by broadening the
concept of cognition to include the social sphere—makes a strong case
that we are quite unique within the primate world.
His thesis is that early in our evolutionary history we initiated the
process of cumulative cultural evolution, or the ability to take creative
inventions and pass them down to succeeding generations for modi-
fication and improvement. The reason that we were able to create this
cultural “ratchet effect,” as it were, was because we developed one
social skill that the great apes did not, which was the ability to see
other members of our species as intentional beings with mental lives
similar to our own.3 This unique form of social cognition becomes
evident in children around nine months of age, and by two years
children already outstrip mature primates in their ability to commune
with others in a process of joint intentionality and cooperation. In a
more recent study he argues that this skill was likely first cultivated
with the beginning of the Homo genus, but with the Heidelbergs came
more sophisticated communicational tools, such as pantomime, simple
representation, self-monitoring, inference, and a willingness to bind
and conform with others in social groups.4 His argument is essentially
a variation on niche construction. Just as we change the aspects of our
cultural context, so does our ever-changing culture alter our cognitive
structures.
Harry Francis Mallgrave

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Architecture and Empathy
cogito. Theories of embodiment—the recognition that we are human
beings whose minds, bodies, environment, and culture are intercon-
nected at sundry levels—first appeared as a way to correct this bias.
The first red thread connecting early embodied approaches, such as
those of John Dewey and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, was the emphasis
placed on the affective or emotional dimension to our cognition, which,
save for a philosopher or two, has traditionally been much under-
stated. The second has been the recognition that the perceiving body
is not just a convenient biological housing for our mental engines, but
the body, in the most fundamental ways, shapes our very thinking.
This explanation, predicated on the discovery of mirror mechanisms in
humans, has sometimes been called a sensorimotor or embodied model
of cognition. As Vittorio Gallese and George Lakoff have discussed it in
relation to language, we code or traduce environmental stimuli into ac-
tion potentials—that is, we conceptualize objects not through a process
of abstraction but through the perceptual act of simulating how they
are to be responded to, handled, or manipulated. Language likely came
about not through some new mental process of symbolic cognition, but
through our real-life encounters with the environmental field—that is,
our ability to interpret gestures and later translate them into sound.7
The idea of embodied cognition has also been emphasized by many
present-day phenomenologists.8 Because the brain, body, physical and
cultural environments are dynamically integrated with each other on
multiple levels, the developmental process of human life reconstructs
itself with each new generation in response to the ever-changing ge-
netic, cellular, social, and cultural factors. The brain, the body, and the
environment are in effect codetermining of each other and therefore co-
evolving. These ever-changing dynamic fields, as Evan Thompson and
Francisco Varela have characterized them, take place on three levels or
cycles of operation: 1) the organismic regulation of the body through
homeostasis; 2) the sensorimotor and affective coupling between the
organism and environment; and 3) the intersubjective or socio-cultural
interactions with others, again mediated by our sensorimotor and af-
fective systems.9 Collectively, these three cycles provide a theoretical
model for architectural design.
Homeostasis is eased by built environments that are moderate
or conducive to the limits of our biological systems: healthful and
designed with respect to our sensory needs and comfort. Of course this
has been a long-standing baseline of good design, but when we come
to the second cycle, the sensorimotor and affective coupling between
the organism and the environment, we see this problem in an entirely
new light. How do we, as animate organisms, respond to certain archi-
tectural materials, spaces, lighting conditions, scales, degrees of detail-
ing or ornamentation, tactile and auditory stimuli? This is a fecund
area for both psychological and neuroscientific research, and with the
new neuroimaging technologies available we will no doubt see many
breakthroughs in our understanding of these matters in the near fu-
ture. The objective is not to provide norms or guidelines for design but
rather to understand the human experience of the built environment in
order to align the design better with our biological natures.
My interest today, however, is with the third of these cycles, our inter-
subjective or socio-cultural interactions with others. Here again, as with
theories of embodiment, the same two developments of the 1990s—a
new emphasis on emotion and the discovery of mirror mechanisms—
have paved the way toward a much better understanding of our social
and cultural needs. Our transformational understanding of human emo-
tion, in large part owed to the pioneering efforts of Jaak Panksepp and
Antonio Damasio, has already had a momentous effect on the human
sciences.10 Today emotion is no longer viewed as a psychological state of
mind in opposition to logical reasoning, but as reason’s very biological
foundation. Emotions are simply “affect” or electrical/chemical programs
that shape or shortcut the way in which we perceive the world, basi-
cally as pleasurable or non-pleasurable events. In its simplest definition,
emotion is the pre-reflective response of an organism to a stimulus, and
translated into architectural terms it can be described the pre-reflective
response of the human organism to the built environment. All architec-
tural design is emotional—both on the level of our coupling with the
built environment (whether we like the design or not) and in how our
design mediates or fosters our socio-cultural interactions with others.
The discovery of mirror mechanisms has similarly provided a new
insight into how we perceptually engage with the world. They were
first discovered in macaque monkeys in a lab at the University of Par-
ma in the early 1990s, and within a few years humans were also shown
to possess them, although in a more complex way.11 Mirror mecha-
nisms are sensorimotor circuits that fire not just when we perform an
action, but when we see or hear someone else performing an action,
Harry Francis Mallgrave

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Architecture and Empathy
such as playing the piano or lifting a tea cup. Effectively, parts of our
sensorimotor circuits respond as if we were performing the action, ex-
cluding those motor circuits by which we would actually perform the
action. The process has been called one of “embodied simulation” and
it is the reason why we enjoy watching an athlete or a ballet dancer. In
the last regard, we in our own minds become the dancers on the stage.
Around the turn of this century the issue was raised of whether
mirror mechanisms might also explain how or why we are so facile
at reading or sharing the emotions of others. Our eyes may well with
tears in watching a sad movie, and a happy person entering a room
quickly brightens the mood of others. If we see a friend, we seem to
know immediately their state of mind, as if we share an empathic ac-
cord with them. A series of neuroimaging studies were undertaken to
probe the basis of human empathy, and in one notable experiment, in
which subjects watched actors displaying emotions of “disgust” after
inhaling the contents of a vial, scientists found the activation of circuits
in two areas of the brain (anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex)
in which we process and monitor our own feelings of disgust.12 It
seems that through certain mirror mechanisms we internalize neuro-
logically the emotions of others.
The way in which these mirror mechanisms operate with regard
to emotions is still being debated today, in large part because of the
complexity of the problem. Human empathy possesses deep evolution-
ary, biochemical, and neurological underpinnings, which activate the
cortical and limbic areas, brainstem, autonomic nervous and endocrine
systems. Nevertheless, these mirror circuits do underscore just how
basic empathy or sociality is to our human natures. We do not become
social through cultural training; we are born social. In one recent study
utilizing four-dimensional ultrasonography, twins in the womb were
shown to be responsive to one another as early as fourteen weeks after
conception.13
What has emerged from this new perspective of ourselves is also
a very tidy explanation of how we have distinguished ourselves from
our primate ancestors. We took the mirror mechanisms already present
in our primate ancestors and—over the course of two-million years—
bridged the cognitive, sensorimotor, and somato-visceral dimensions
of our evolution. At the same time we cultivated a new and more com-
plex social cognition, allowing us as well a unique sense of self.
Harry Francis Mallgrave
Above Left and Right: “Disgust,” from Charles Darwin, The Expression of Emotion in Man and
Animals (1872).

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Architecture and Empathy
Aesthetic Attunement
Our essential social natures carry with them a host of architectural im-
plications of which architects have long been familiar, such as the extent
to which our environments promote or inhibit social behavior. Again, I
do not believe a cultural theory can provide any firm guidelines in this
regard, but it can provide important insights into the aesthetic dimen-
sions of our being. One implication of sociality on which I want to focus
today is what I will refer to as aesthetic attunement. The word attun-
ement carries with it a revealing musical connotation, but it also can im-
ply an affective sense of mood or atmosphere. The word is reminiscent
of the advice that Aldo van Eyck repeatedly offered designers, which is
to think of architecture not in abstract terms such as space and time, but
rather in more social terms as “place” and “occasion.”14 The anthro-
pological point he was making was how deeply rooted in our human
natures is this impulse for social and communal aesthetic expression.
Earlier in my cultural timeline with regard to the Heidelbergs, I made
reference to music, dance, and the practice of architecture appearing
as early as 500,000 years ago. Let us take the case of architecture first.
In the 1960s a Paleolithic settlement was unearthed under the present
city of Nice, France, where the outlines of a number of timber huts with
center posts were found, some huts over twelve meters in length and
each had a hearth inside. The Mediterranean community was occupied
by the Heidelbergs and was dated to 380,000-400,000 years ago, or twice
the vintage of Homo sapiens.15
Over the last thirty years, excavations have unearthed a lakeside
settlement in central Germany, revealing the footprints of what seem
to be three round living structures with hearths outside their doors.
Archaeologists also uncovered several workshop areas and a large
circular paved area approximately ten meters in diameter, in which
ritualistic events had taken place. The occupants of this village were
not the Heidelbergs but later members of Homo erectus, who dwelt there
around 370,000 years ago.16
In a cave approximately forty-five kilometers west of Barcelona,
extensive diggings have uncovered a rich collection of artifacts. On
one level archaeologists found the imprints of timber posts, presumed
to be part of a lean-to structure built against the rear of the cave wall.
Inside the outlines of the structure were five hearths, a little over a
Harry Francis Mallgrave
Above: Gottfried Semper, 1878. Courtesy of the GTA, ETH-Hönggerberg.

37
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Architecture and Empathy
to suggest that they likely devised the rudiments of the ritual, tempo-
ral, narrative arts.
Neuroimaging today is revealing that the circuits for processing
music and language overlap and are intertwined, suggesting that
music and language likely arose as two related forms of human vocal
activity. The anatomical changes allowing nuanced vocal expression—
the drop of the larynx, the development of the hyoid bone and hypo-
glossal canal, the rounding of the ribcage and the thoracic respiratory
muscles allowing extended expiration—all were on the road to their
human formation around 1.5 million years ago, although they were not
fully developed until 100,000 years ago. This in itself suggests the long
and progressive development of the artistic instinct.
Much discussion of human empathy has centered on just how at-
tuned we are to each other emotionally, how being around another
person can awaken a mood within us, how a simple event around a
campfire can instill in us a powerful and unforgettable memory. Many
writers have attributed the same power to architecture—that is, how
a good architect informs a built environment with a range of potential
moods and creative sensibilities. In their writings Juhani Pallasmaa and
Peter Zumthor have repeatedly invoked the term “atmosphere” in rela-
tion to architecture, in relating how the setting of a room or a view into
a plaza informs the behavior of those experiencing it. From a social and
cultural perspective, then, architecture can be defined as the creation of
mood, the making of a place for social rituals, the modest interchange
of ideas, or even a good night’s sleep. Yet this empathic attunement
with others seems increasingly difficult to maintain as a priority in
today’s design process. The software programs of the digital age will
certainly not promote it, and university courses related to humanist
themes have over the years been removed from the architect’s educa-
tion. How do we regain this sense of culture? How do we cultivate
aesthetic sensibilities in sympathy with our new understanding of who
we really are?
As a historian I am drawn to historical examples. Some years ago
I did an abundance of research on the ideas of Gottfried Semper. In
re-reading him recently I was struck by how his style theory was in so
many ways a cultural theory applied to architecture. On a pragmatic
level, his Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts (1860-63) was a stylistic
interpretation of every known culture of his day—everything from the
meter apart, around which four to six family members likely gathered.
Vegetal deposits seem to be remnants of grass beds, suggesting a cozy
cave community inhabited around 55,000 years ago. The inhabitants of
this cave were Neanderthals.17
My point in these three examples is not to quell our sense of human
pride, but rather to demonstrate that many if not most of our human
behaviors, including that of building habitats, are older and more
widespread than our particular species. And the common denomina-
tor in all three examples is the hearth, which the 19th-century archi-
tect Gottfried Semper called the “social motive” for architecture. His
premise, first articulated in 1851, was that there were four primordial
motives underlying design: the hearth, mound, roof, and the textile
motive of enclosure.18 The hearth was the social motive because it was
around the fire that the first human gathered after the chase to enjoy
a meal and engage with each other socially. The other three motives
arose to protect this “moral” element. The mound or platform raised
the fire off of the damp earth, a structural framework allowed a roof
overhead, and vertically hung mats shielded it from the wind. Yet if
people gathered around a hearth to keep warm or enjoy a meal, what
else did they do?
No one will ever know when the first member of Homo erectus fell
into a dance, but we know that he had an erect frame, good muscula-
ture, and the physical endurance well suited to dance, and it is highly
likely that he danced. Similarly, no one will ever know when a human
ancestor employed a bone to make a rhythmic beat on a tree trunk or
hollowed log, but it was undoubtedly far in the past. The mere exercise
of walking upright on two legs cultivates a sense of rhythm, something
deeply rooted in our actions and leisure sporting activities. Once again,
no one will ever know when a mother first hummed a quieting song to
a newborn infant, but no one seriously disputes the universal affiliative
interactions between mothers and infants. They are evident in every
species, and it is likely that the first hominin lullaby was hummed very
long ago in our evolutionary past.
We have evidence of the first hominin cultivation of fire 1.6 mil-
lion years ago, and we have widespread evidence of large communal
hearths beginning around a half-million years ago. So again I raise the
question: What did human ancestors do around the fire? How did they
socially engage with one another? I do not think it is much of a stretch
Harry Francis Mallgrave

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Architecture and Empathy
design of Assyrian warrior helmets to Maori tattoos and Scandinavian
stave churches. On another level, however, it was an exposition of
aesthetic attunement, how architecture and music have their mutual
origin in rhythmic space and time movements, a string of pearls, the
beat of an oar, and social dances.19 Of his four motives for architecture,
there was one that was particularly dear to Semper, which was the
textile or walling motive. It was the centerpiece of his cultural theory
because it was inherently aesthetic in the very act of its making, already
artful when the first human strung two branches into a wreath or wove
two different colored grasses into a mat.
His fascination with this motive also led him to his principle of
Bekleidung, or the act of “dressing” a work with aesthetic sensibilities,
which for him achieved a particularly brilliant apotheosis in Hellenic
culture. In his lengthy elaboration of this theme, he opens with a com-
mentary on Hellenic clothing, once again underscoring the cultural
perspective. He cites a fragmented passage from Democritus, who
commented on the “violet-blue, purple, and saffron-yellow patterns”
displayed in the undergarments of Ephesian women, which Semper
follows with a detailed description of the beauty of the draped peplos
and Doric chiton.20 Such observations on clothing might seem remote
from the practice of architecture, but his point is precisely the oppo-
site. If the jewelry and draped clothing of the Ephesians had attained
Harry Francis Mallgrave
Above: Caryatids, South Porch of the Erechtheum, Athens.
Photo by Thermos, Creative Commons.
such exquisite refinement in their lines, materials, and color during
this period of art, the lines, materials, and polychrome dressings of
their monuments must have been similarly inspired. In short, Greek
garments and Greek monumental architecture arose from one and the
same artistic culture, and therefore exhibited the same expression of
aesthetic consciousness. Thus the Greek temple, and its improvised
predecessor, was a less a religious edifice than a social or celebratory
building dedicated to its cultural foundation. In his words,
The festival apparatus—the improvised scaffold with all
its splendor and frills that specifically marks the occa-
sion for celebrating, enhances, decorates, and adorns
the glorification of the feast, and is hung with tapes-
tries, dressed with festoons and garland, and decorated
with fluttering bands and trophies—is the motive for the
permanent monument, which is intended to proclaim to
future generations the solemn act or event celebrated.21
It is at this point that Semper inserts his very telling footnote on the
“the dressing and the mask,” an aesthetic and humanistic motive that
was for him as old as humanity. Architecture, similarly, was nothing
less than the quintessential expression of human culture, the art of
masking social form in a way that reveals the universality of human
Above: Gottfried Semper, Reconstruction of the Acropolis in Athens, around 1833
(watercolour, 18.6 x 34 cm, mounted on a paper of 26.9 x 41.1cm),
Courtesy of the GTA, ETH-Hönggerberg.

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Architecture and Empathy Harry Francis Mallgrave
artistic impulses. It is an art, moreover, enshrined in every genuine
cultural event, from the allegorical sculptures of Phidias to the bardic
observations of Shakespeare:
I think that the dressing and the mask are as old as hu-
man civilization and that the joy in both is identical to the
joy in those things that led men to be sculptors, painters,
architects, poets, musicians, dramatists—in short, artists.
Every artistic creation, every artistic pleasure, presumes
a certain carnival spirit, or to express it in a modern way,
the haze of carnival candles is the true atmosphere of
art. The destruction of reality, of the material, is neces-
sary if form is to emerge as a meaningful symbol, as an
autonomous human creation.22
There is a fear in some academic circles that drawing upon the knowl-
edge now being gained in the new interdisciplinary fields will some-
how lead architecture into the creative dead end of determinism and
cold repression. I could not disagree more strongly with such a view
and in fact believe the opposite to be the case. The point Semper makes
in these cited passages is precisely the point that we should bring into
our discussions of cultural theory and architectural practice today. If
indeed our early human ancestors engaged in laughing, singing, and
dancing around a fire as early as a million years ago, we should at last
recognize ourselves for the singers, dancers, and masked personas we
really are. “Who in the world am I?” Lewis Carroll once asked. We are,
for the first time in human history, beginning to identify crucial pieces
of this great puzzle. And this new “humanist” knowledge, far from be-
ing reductive, will actually allow us to reclaim the multiple dimensions
of our ever more distant humanity.
NOTES
1 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmod-
ern Condition: Report on Knowledge,
trans. Geoff Bennington and Brain
Massumi (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1979), xxiv.
2 Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare: The
Evolution of Human Consciousness
(New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2001).
3 Michael Tomasello, The Cultural Ori-
gins of Human Cognition (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University, 1999), 5.
4 Michael Tomasello, A Natural History
of Human Thinking (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2014), 48-66.
5 Robin I. M. Dunbar, “The Social Brain
Hypothesis,” Evolutionary Anthropol-
ogy 6 (1998).
6 See Clive Gamble, John Gowlett, &
Robin Dunbar, Thinking Big: How
the Evolution of Social Life Shaped
the Human Mind (London: Thames &
Hudson, 2014).
7 Vittorio Gallese & George Lakoff, “The
Brain’s Concepts: The Role of the
Sensory-Motor System in Conceptual
Knowledge,” Cognitive Neuropsychol-
ogy 22:3/4 (2005), 455-79.
8 See Evan Thompson, Mind in Life:
Biology, Phenomenology, and the
Sciences of the Mind (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2007).
9 Evan Thompson & Francisco Varela,
“Radical embodiment: neural dynam-
ics and consciousness,” Trends in
Cognitive Sciences 5:10 (February
2001), 424.
10 See Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuro-
science: The Foundations of Human
and Animal Emotions (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998); Antonio
Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion,
Reason, and the Human Brain (New
York: G. P. Putnam’sSons, 1994).
11 See Giacomo Rizzolatti & Corrado
Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain: How
Our Minds Share Actions and Emo-
tions (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008).
12 Bruno Wicker et al., “Both of Us
Disgusted in My Insula: The Common
Neural Basis of Seeing and Feeling
Disgust,” Neuron 40 (October 30,
2003), 655-64.
13 Umberto Castiello et al., “Wired to
Be Social: The Ontogeny of Human
Interaction,” Plos One 5:10 (October
2010), e13199, 1-10.
14 Aldo van Eyck, “Kaleidoscope of the
Mind,” in Miracles of Moderation, Eid-
genössische Technische Hochschule
Zürich (1976).
15 Henry de Lumley (sous la direction
de), Terra Amata: Nice, Alpes-Mari-
times, France (Paris: CNRS, 2009).
16 Dietrich and Ursula Mania, “The
natural and socio-cultural environ-
ment of Homo erectus at Bilzingsle-
ben, Germany,” in Clive Gamble and
Martin Porr, The Hominid Individual
in Context: Archaeological investiga-
tions of Lower and Middle Palaeolith-
ic landscapes, locales and artefacts
(London: Routledge, 2005).
17 Vallverdú, Josep et al., “Sleeping
Activity Area with the Site Structure
of Archaic Human Groups: Evidence
from Abric Romaní Level N Combus-
tion Activity Areas.” Current Anthro-
pology 51:1 (February 2010).
18 See Gottfried Semper, “The Four Ele-
ments of Architecture,” in Gottfried
Semper: The Four Elements of Archi-
tecture and Other Writings, trans. H.
F. Mallgrave and Wolfgang Hermann
(New York: Cambridge University,
1989), 102-03.
19 Gottfried Semper, Style in the Techni-
cal and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical
Aesthetics, trans. H. F. Mallgrave and
Michael Robinson (Los Angeles: Getty
Publication Programs, 2004), 82.
20 Ibid., 237-41.
21. Ibid., 249.
22 Ibid., 438-39.

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Architecture and Empathy
Sarah Robinson
Boundaries of Skin:
John Dewey, Didier Anzieu and
Architectural Possibility
Born of the Body
We are born of the body and we are born incomplete. Human infants
complete the last half of our gestation outside of the womb.1 The transi-
tion from a hunched posture to an upright walking position necessi-
tated a smaller pelvis, which means that the fetus must exit the womb
before its head grows too large to pass through the birth canal. Human
gestation thus has an internal and an external phase; the developmen-
tal process initiated inside the mother continues in intimate proximity
with her body after birth. Though vulnerable and utterly dependent,
the newborn is far from helpless, and arrives fully equipped to elicit
its own care. The baby’s delivery effects changes in the mother’s body;
bringing in her milk and flooding her with hormones that reinforce
bonding and increase pleasure. “When a baby is born a mother is born,
too,” Ashley Montagu observed.2 This intimate collaboration creates a
second protective envelope whose integrity and efficacy critically sup-
port the baby’s development and help it to flourish.
Our transition to the upright walking position also coincided with
the loss of our fur. The difference between human beings and other
mammals resides not solely in the greater size of our brains, but also
in the fact that our skin has softened and shed its hairy cloak. Our loss
of fur was an adaptation that afforded intensified bonding between
mother and baby. Skin to skin contact creates a thermal, emotional,
communicative, sensorimotor condition that extends the envelope
of the original womb. From this protected position, the baby’s world
gradually extends outward through an entourage of signals to the fam-
Sarah Robinson
Above: Pablo Picasso, A Mother and Child and Four Studies of Her Right Hand, 1904.
Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, Bequest of Meta and Paul J. Sachs
© Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS) / Kuvasto 2015.

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Architecture and Empathy
ily, the community and the larger environment. Clues about external
reality come forth in smiles, sounds, gentleness of contact, warmth of
embrace, solidity of carriage, the rhythms of rocking, the availability of
feeding, the quality of attention and the presence of others. Basic needs
like feeding and protection are accompanied by tactile, visual, audi-
tory and olfactory communication. The fulfillment of these vital needs
in the absence of sensory and affective exchanges is known to cause
irreparable physical and psychological damage or even death to the
baby.3 Evidence from the fields of interpersonal neurobiology and de-
velopmental psychology unequivocally concur that the biological and
social consequences of this early matrix of care cannot be overstated.4
Abandoning the Isolated Self
The loss of our fur and the consequent exposure of our skin to the
external world is ripe with biological, psychological, social and archi-
tectural implications. Our highly developed social intelligence is one
outcome of this primeval shift. To understand the full import of this
tradeoff we must, as the artist Paul Klee recommended, “return to our
origins”. The embryonic origin of the nervous system comes from what
were initially ectodermal cells, layers that were destined to become
our skin. Within our skin, the nervous system is distributed over and
through our entire body. Our skin is our earliest and most fundamental
medium of contact with our world, which is one reason that we call
touch the mother of the senses. We transmigrate from the aqueous
womb, to the outside world clothed in the same skin. In essence, the
skin is the surface of our nervous system turned inside out. The origin
of our neural tissue suggests that its purpose is synonymous with that
of the skin—both serve to connect our inner and outer worlds.5
The origin of all of our lives is the transition from the interior of our
mother’s body into the matrix of relationship in which we become fully
human. This reality means that the notion of the self as an isolated indi-
vidual is philosophically erroneous and scientifically obsolete. In place
of this image it is more accurate to adopt Antoine de St. Exupéry defini-
tion of the self as, “a knot into which relationships are tied.”6 We are
bound to the constraints and affordances of our biological, emotional,
and socio-cultural milieu. We become individuals through the constant
interplay and reflexive plasticity of interpersonal and environmental
forces. The true unit of evolution, then, is not the individual and his im-
mutable genetic repertoire, but the whole dynamic of the organism in its
environment. This means that we need to shift our preoccupation with
internal realities outward enough to notice the myriad and subtle ways
that the external world constantly shapes us. Fully coming to terms with
this profound interdependence demands that overcome the dualities
that have long separated mind from body, nature from nurture, culture
from biology and the built environment from its natural source. Because
the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey dedicated himself to overcom-
ing such false dichotomies, his work is very helpful in this regard.
Feelings as Senses
Dewey’s interpretation of emotion was perhaps the most controversial
and misunderstood aspect of his philosophy. He did not consider emo-
tions to be internal subjective states but rather objective indications of
the way experience reveals the world. While some feelings do indeed
refer to the bodily states and psychic attitudes of the organism, all feel-
ings are felt in relation to the objects they qualify. He argued,
The object and the feeling cannot be separated; they are
factors of the same consciousness […] The connection is
not an external one of the feeling with the object, but an
internal and intimate one; it is the feeling of the object.
The feeling loses itself in the object.”7
Feelings belong not strictly to the person, but to the whole situation—
as Dewey often pointed out, we say that, “The food is agreeable […]
that landscape is beautiful, or that act is right.”8
Dewey’s understanding of emotions seems radical because it up-
sets our inherited epistemological categories, yet he was not alone in
recognizing the flaws of existing modes of thinking. Gregory Bateson
similarly wrote,
The relationship between the self and others, and the
relationship between self and environment, are, in fact,
the subject matter of what are called ‘feelings’—love, hate,
fear, confidence, anxiety, hostility, etc. It is unfortunate
that these abstractions referring to patterns of relation-
ship have received names, which are usually handled in
ways that assume that the ‘feelings’ are mainly charac-
Sarah Robinson

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Architecture and Empathy
terized by quantity rather than by precise pattern. This is
one of the nonsensical contributions of psychology to a
distorted epistemology.9
To understand emotions in this way replaces the image of the isolat-
ed observer, whose feelings are wholly internal, with one of an active
participant in a sentient and responsive world of qualities that he/she
makes sense of through individual bodily experiences. Language fur-
ther corroborates this view. In Italian, the word sentire refers not only
to feeling, but also to tasting and hearing and general sensing; it is the
source of the word ‘sense’ and ‘sentiment.’ Similarly, the English word
feeling encompasses both our emotional state and our sense of touch.
The word feeling derives from the Greek root meaning ‘to pluck, as in
to pluck a harp.’ Emotion does indeed set a wave in motion. Dewey un-
derstood emotions to be eruptions in the dynamic patterns of relation-
ship—a kind of sensory perception, forming and informing our active
engagement in the world. As the etymology of language confirms, we
cannot separate our feelings from our bodily ways of perceiving the
world or divorce our senses from our feelings. Through our feelings we
make sense of the whole of the situation in which we find ourselves—
things begin to ‘make sense’ when grasped in this holistic way.
The Integrative Role of Emotion
Not only does the direct sense element—and emotion is
a mode of sense—tend to absorb all ideational matter,
but apart from a special discipline enforced by physical
apparatus, it digests and subdues all that is merely intel-
lectual.10
Dewey was well aware of the integrating role of emotion long before it
was confirmed by neuroscience. Like all of our senses, emotion is not
limited to a specific circuit or region of the brain. The limbic region,
once thought to be the center of emotion, appears to have wide rang-
ing effects on most aspects of mental functioning.11 After extensive
research on the literature of brain regions traditionally associated with
emotion and cognition, the neuroscientist Luiz Pessoa concluded that,
“parceling the brain into cognitive and affective regions is inherently
problematic and ultimately untenable.”12 Emotion and cognition are
interdependent dimensions of behavior that result from the activity
of multiple brain regions that are neither intrinsically emotional nor
cognitive, but contribute to behavior in distinct ways depending on the
broader neural context in which they participate.13 According to the
developmental psychologist and neuroscientist Kenneth Dodge,
All information processing is emotional, in that emotion is
the energy that drives, organizes, amplifies and attenu-
ates cognitive activity and in turn is the experience and
expression of this activity.14
The philosopher Giovanna Colombetti characterizes emotions as
self-organizing dynamic patterns that may be most effectively described
with the conceptual tools of dynamical systems theory. In her book,
The Feeling Body, she reclaims a broader and deeper notion of emotion
similar to the one espoused by Dewey. She understands emotions to
be sources of meaning that ground the more elaborate modes of sense
making in complex organisms; arguing that, “The richer and more
differentiated emotions that one finds in animal and human lives are
enrichments of the primordial capacity to be sensitive to the world.”15
An Ecology of Empathy
Like our emotions, empathy is a further expression of our innate sen-
sitivity to the world. Dewey thought that empathy was rooted in our
imaginative capacity, and he used the terms somewhat interchange-
ably—calling imagination empathic projection16 and defining empathy
as “entering by imagination into the situations of others.”17 In his view,
imagination and empathy are neither over and above our other sense
faculties, nor the exclusive capacities of the artist. Dewey stressed
that imagination is as normal and integral to daily life as is muscular
movement.18 Imagination is another kind of perceptual capacity—one
that amplifies perception beyond the immediate milieu, temporally
extending the environment in which we respond. Imagination is the
capacity to transform the possible into the actual, as Dewey said, “Only
imaginative vision elicits the possibilities that are interwoven in the
texture of the actual.”19
Such an understanding extends far beyond a plea for the domi-
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Architecture and Empathy
nance of the poetic imagination over the logical intellect, and beyond
the dualities of reason and imagination—faculties that Dewey argued
can be only distinguished in a heuristic or operational way. All mental
life is imaginative in so far as it “supplements and deepens observa-
tion,” by permitting, “clear insight into the remote, the absent, the
obscure.”20 Dewey warned against the tendency to equate the imagina-
tive, which is interactively engaged and rooted in actual conditions,
with the imaginary, which is subjective. Consistent with his interpre-
tation of emotion, neither the imaginary nor the imaginative occur ex
nihilo, apart from the bio-sociocultural matrix, rather they inhere in the
organism-environment interaction.
Whereas imagination extends and amplifies the world temporally—
pulling the possible into the real—I would suggest that empathy extends
our world spatially. Where imagination reaches into the future, empathy
enables us to project ourselves into the inner worlds of the other on the
basis of our own bodily states. Our bodily states do not overlap with
the bodily states of others, they are two distinct points of origin that are
bridged by empathy. This inborn pre-reflective capacity to perceive the
experience of others through the tissue of our own bodies—regardless
of whether those others are persons, creatures, places or things—is a
dynamic pattern of relationship that extends our awareness of the mul-
tilayered emotional latency inhering in the situation. Empathy expands
the domain of the personal to encompass the felt experience of the other,
enlarging, enriching and informing the basis of our possible actions.
Profoundly relational and inherently ecological, empathy reveals
the structure of our interaction with the world. The Czech philosopher
Jan Patočka said that, “The world is an empathy of a kind.”21 What
I think he means by this, is that empathy allows us to connect to the
world through our own bodies and in turn, the world opens itself to
us as we feel our way into it. As the mutuality of the mother-baby re-
lationship exemplifies, we dwell in a reciprocating circuit. We are built
to be received into a world to which we must connect, into a world that
fits us. Empathy is this deep reflexivity at the heart of life.
If we were to consider empathy as a feature of our sensorimo-
tor perceptual system, we would find its organs distributed widely
throughout the body-brain, intricately multimodal and amenable to
education and refinement. This is the case with mirror neurons—they
respond not only to visual stimulus but also to the sounds associated
Sarah Robinson
with specific actions, suggesting they are organs of a far-reaching,
deeply rooted empathic sense.22 Indeed, Vittorio Gallese, a contributor
to this volume and one of the original discoverers of mirror neurons,
suggests that they are most likely one aspect of the more pervasive
process of embodied simulation. He describes this process as an
automatic, unconscious and pre-reflective function of the brain-body
system that models objects and events initially triggered by perception
and subsequently modulated in the interplay of contextual, cognitive
and personal factors.23
An Architecture of Integration - an Emerging Paradigm
The discovery of mirror neurons and the interdependence of the hu-
man nervous system on the broader ecology to which we belong has
renewed and reinforced earlier intuitions about human nature. Native
peoples throughout the world have long celebrated the interconnected-
ness of all of life. The major world religions all hold compassion, a vari-
ation of empathy, as a core teaching. Yet these views have been margin-
alized in the Western emphasis on individualism, industrialization
and technological progress at all costs. Unfortunately, this dominant
paradigm is responsible for much of our contemporary architectural
landscape. Unresponsive to human vulnerability, far too many of our
buildings are objects whose insensitivity denies the interdependence
that makes us human in the first place.
Our architecture sediments our social, cultural and political values
and aspirations; it is a means through which we externalize our most
deeply held beliefs about ourselves and our relationship with the cos-
mos. And we are finding that many of our most cherished beliefs have
lost their validity. Our long held segregation of emotion from cognition
is not just an idea, it has been a guiding tenet in the formation of our
educational systems and our buildings as well as contributing to the rei-
fication of gender inequalities. The notion that reason is cognition bled of
emotion, and as such the defining feature of our humanity, has been in-
stitutionalized at every level of Western society. Affirming that emotion
is integral to our being in the world, to decision-making and to reason,
that emotion and imagination are immanent in every mental activity,
and that empathy is a critical capacity that can either wither or flourish
depending on environmental factors, necessitates far reaching changes in
the way we educate our children and the way we design our world.

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Architecture and Empathy
In order to develop psychical means for understanding psychic phe-
nomena, Anzieu thought it was important for the coming generation of
psychiatrists to cultivate a facility for thinking in images. An image can
generate an alternative model that respects the specificity of psychic
phenomenon in the context of both social and biological realities. A
theory that did not address these interacting dimensions, he thought,
was destined to reduce psychology to neurophysiology’s poor cousin.
Further, Anzieu found the prevailing fashion in the humanities of
imposing linguistic explanations onto social and cultural phenomena to
be inadequate. For him, the ego did not resemble a language, as it did
for Lacan. Instead, Anzieu modeled his notion of the ego on the human
body. He was able to overcome the dualities of culture and biology by
introducing the ‘skin-ego’—a metaphor complex enough, and pro-
found enough to contain both levels of reality. By emphasizing the skin
as a basic datum of an organic and imaginative order, he rooted his
thinking in the biological ground from which social interaction arises.
The Necessity of Limits
Along with his colleagues, Anzieu noticed that the nature of his pa-
tients’ suffering had shifted. The majority of his cases had previously
been straightforward neuroses, but they now consisted of borderline—
a state that borders neurosis and psychosis and possesses features
common to both—or narcissistic personalities. He was troubled that
the modern age was producing psychological disorders that resulted
from the abolition of boundaries. Whereas Freud developed psycho-
analysis in response to the climate of Victorian puritanism, Anzieu’s
psychoanalysis of limits addressed Western society’s utter lack of them.
He insisted that,
We need to set limits: on demographic expansion […]
on the acceleration of history, on economic growth, on
insatiable consumption […] on the compulsion end-
lessly to break records at the cost of over-training and
drug taking, on the ambition to always go faster and to
spend more, with all the overcrowding, nervous ten-
sion, cardiovascular illness and general discontent that
results. We need to set limits on the violence wrought on
nature as well as that perpetrated on human beings. This
includes the pollution of the earth, sea and atmosphere,
Architecture, because it exists at the intersection between natural and
human, between biological and cultural worlds, has long relied upon in-
tellectual developments in other disciplines. The rich insights uncovered
by neuroscience are poised to enrich and inform design and architec-
tural practice, yet we need to recognize that importing knowledge from
other fields also holds potential dangers. To mitigate potential misap-
plication or reduction of one field of knowledge to that of the other, we
need to recognize the limits and intended aims of each discipline.
The ‘Skin-Ego’
Here I would like to introduce the work of the French psychoanalyst
Didier Anzieu, because his struggle to place psychoanalysis on a firm
biological footing without sacrificing the wealth of its socio-cultural
and creative insights provides a striking parallel to the situation that
we architects confront as we assimilate the knowledge offered to us by
neuroscience.24 While I cannot give Anzieu’s work the detail it deserves
here, I do want to outline his general motivations and recurring con-
cerns. He worked from the 1950‘s through to the 1990‘s, during a time
when the physical and biological sciences were achieving considerable
success by narrowing their field of observation and theoretical interest.
Anzieu resisted the pressure to impose such a methodology on psy-
chology for fear that it would reduce the living body to the brain and
behavior to the cerebral functions for which it had been programmed.
He welcomed the new insights offered by neurophysiology with exem-
plary sophistication and recognized that while knowledge of the struc-
ture and functioning of the nervous system can afford great insight into
psychic phenomena, it does not, in itself, explain that phenomena.
Anzieu’s thinking echoed Dewey’s when he wrote,
Physiology can no more, of itself, give us the what, why,
and how of psychical life, than the physical geography of
a country can enable us to construct or explain the history
of the nation that has dwelt within that country. However
important, however indispensable the land with all its
qualities is as a basis for that history, that history itself
can be ascertained and explained only through historical
records and historic conditions. And so psychical events
can be observed only through psychical means, and inter-
preted and explained by psychical conditions and facts.25
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Architecture and Empathy
the squandering of energy, the need to produce every-
thing of which we are technically capable even when that
means creating mechanical, architectural, or biological
monstrosities […] By refusing to set limits anywhere, we
are headed towards catastrophe.26
His insistence on establishing boundaries and acknowledging limits
is even more urgently needed today. Marking out inhabitable, livable
territories for ourselves in physical, psychological and cultural terms
would counter the leveling and neutralizing forces that are the conse-
quences of industrialization. The psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist says that
most of his work essentially comes down to a matter of developing and
negotiating boundaries.27 Such limits need not be rigid or dogmatic, but
should be flexible and semi-permeable—like the boundaries that exist in
nature. The walls of cells for example, serve both to individuate and to
make mutual exchange possible. Boundaries limit and they also allow.
Another symptom of this pervasive loss of limits is the tendency in
Western thought to consider the acquisition of knowledge to be a mat-
ter of breaking through an outer shell to reach a nucleus or inner core.
While such an epistemology contributed to obvious successes (as well
as monstrous disasters) in the physical sciences, biologists who shifted
their attention from the nucleus to the outer membrane discovered that
the boundary of the cell functions as a sort of brain that programs ion
exchanges between inner and outer domains. Our current focus on the
brain as the center and source of all knowledge derives from a now
exhausted epistemology. We tend to forget that the brain is the upper
and expanded part of the central nervous system, whose primary
function is to relate the organism to its environment. An environment
that actively shapes thought and behavior, one woven through with
intelligence, of which our individual nervous system is but a part. The
word cortex, used to designate the outer layer of neural tissue, is the
Latin word for bark or shell. Our brain itself is skin, wrapped in skin—
it is center and periphery at once.
Interpenetrating Envelopes
The poet Paul Valéry captured this paradox of the skin when he wrote,
That which is the most profound in the human being is
the skin […] the marrow, the brain, all these things we
Above: Deborah Barlow, Dolice 1, acrylic, oil, galkyd, powdered pigments, substrates
and minerals on wood panel. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Sarah Robinson

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Architecture and Empathy
require in order to feel, suffer, think […] to be profound […]
are inventions of the skin! […] We burrow down in vain,
doctor, we are […] ectoderm.28
Returning to clues from embryology—the skin, the sensorimotor
organs and the brain are all formed from the ectoderm. The brain and
the skin are both surface entities or shells consisting of at least two
layers; the outer one is protective, and the one beneath serves to gather
information and filter exchanges. Anzieu’s skin-ego is modeled on this
organization of the nervous system. “It is this complex structure of
surfaces, rather than the old image of thought penetrating through into
a truth core, that can help us understand our physical, psychical and
intellectual worlds in a different way,” he wrote. 29 He developed the
skin-ego in response to the question, “What if thought were as much an
affair of the skin as of the brain and what if the ego had the structure of
an envelope?”30 He describes the skin-ego as a series of interpenetrat-
ing envelopes in which part and whole are interwoven, complemen-
tary, nested and subsumed within one another.
An Epistemology of Relationship: Thinking Through the Skin
Anzieu’s skin-ego developed out of his clinical experience. Most of the
chapters in Le Moi-peau are case-studies, detailed narratives of actual
patients. His metaphor was not merely a linguistic device or a literary
flourish, it was a pragmatically generated set of operational concepts
subject to factual verification. The skin-ego provided psychoanalysts
with new tools for thinking beyond dualism and determinism. We ar-
chitects have never been more urgently in need of the new approaches
that a fresh way of thinking can provide. Fed up with the intellectual
excesses of architectural theory in recent decades, we have been swept
into the mandate for sustainability without a coherent philosophical
framework. True sustainability demands more than merely techno-
logical solutions—it must be founded on an understanding of human
nature that recognizes, affirms and supports our nascent vulner-
ability and interdependence. The tired dichotomies separating mind
from body and the individual from social and natural worlds must be
overcome with metaphors that are capable of containing, bridging or
weaving together opposing sides.
The body is the nexus between separate worlds. To tap the genera-
tive potential that exists at this interface, we must shift our attention
away from the illusive center to the boundary that skirts its edge.
Dewey’s conception of emotions and empathy reoriented epistemology
in this very way; the internal private world of the individual shifted to
the periphery, the site of relationship. Here, at the interface between,
emotions are antennae that sound out circumstances, and inform our
possible actions. And, what we pay attention to determines what we
will find. In our obsession with penetrating the core, we forgot about
the shell—when in fact the two hold each other, they interdepend—
“the shell itself is marked by what it shelters,” wrote the psychoanalyst
Nicholas Abraham.31 The intellectual tendency that reduces all human
activity to the brain also contributed to our preoccupation with empty
formal games. One of modernism’s breakthroughs was to find meaning
in form by restoring its original function. The implications of this ideal
have only been rarely understood because we persist in thinking of
form and substance as two completely separate categories. Detaching
the container from the contained, as if each could withstand a sepa-
rate existence, is thinking about architecture in the way that Dewey
described a particular kind of art. He said that, “Insincerity in art has
an aesthetic, not just a moral source; it is found wherever form and
substance fall apart.”32 Thinking through the skin, which is periphery
and center at once, can begin to heal this persistent divide.
Merleau-Ponty, Anzieu’s contemporary, was similarly convinced
that the fold—the interface where the outside and the inside meet—is
the turning point.33 Architecture is quite literally situated at the fold,
shifting our attention to that juncture forces us to consider the agency
and meaning of architecture in a new light. This is where neurosci-
ence can fertilize architectural thinking, by revealing the complex and
intricate functioning of our sensorimotor systems, by deepening our
understanding of how our nervous system binds us to our world, and
showing how that world doubles back to shape us.
The Primacy of Touch
Neuroscientists, for example, have linked the sense of touch, or somato-
sensory cortex function to empathic ability.34 Given our furless origins,
the fact that skin is the largest organ, our earliest site of communication
and a crucial part of the exterogestation of human infants, the correla-
tion between empathy and touch should come as no great surprise.

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Architecture and Empathy
Indeed, Maine de Biran intuited that touch is the “feeding ground for
the intellect, furnishing it with its more substantial nourishment.”35
The wealth of colloquial and scientific terms related to touching and
the skin make the word ‘touch’ the longest entry in the Oxford English
dictionary. Juhani Pallasmaa uses the evocative image of the moebius
strip to illustrate the way that the exterior world slides into our interior.
The skin is this moebius strip—on the same surface we touch and are
touched. The skin functions in a paradoxical manner, as an in-between,
internal and external in all of its functions. Anzieu remarked on the in-
exhaustibility of skin in its potential associations and poetic evocations:
The skin is permeable and impermeable. It is superficial
and profound. It is truthful and deceptive. It regenerates,
yet is permanently drying out […] It is the seat of well-
being and seduction. It supplies as much with pain as
pleasure […] in its thinness and vulnerability it stands for
our native helplessness, greater than that of other spe-
cies, but at the same time our evolutionary adaptiveness.
It separates and unites the various senses.36
The earliest shelters were made of skin and porous materials. For
Black Elk, the teepee was the nest of nests while Arab tents were woven
from goat hair and sheep’s wool.37 Houses in Japan were originally
made of paper, grass, and wood—porous materials that filtered light
and air. Our walls have necessarily hardened since their humble begin-
nings, but we have rendered our buildings inert by ignoring that the
skin, and the boundary it creates, always serve a dual function: that of
protecting and that of sensing. The best architects are marked by their
keen awareness of this multifold task.
Sensitizing Matter
Alvar Aalto sensitized matter with his meticulous attention to materials
that touch the body. He wrapped handrails and doors with leather to
allow contact between skin and skin, our body heat is conserved in the
transfer. Whereas every time we touch metal, heat conducts away from
the skin, diminishing some measure of our energy in the exchange. He
similarly wrapped concrete columns, an otherwise cold material, in rat-
tan at body level; fully aware that in the presence of materials that were
once living—that once breathed themselves—our bodies can loosen
and relax.
Steven Holl lined the formwork of the Herning Museum of Art in
Denmark with fabric sacks in order to evoke the aging and vulnerabil-
ity of skin. Peter Zumthor wrapped the surfaces of his Serpentine Pavil-
ion in London with burlap coated in black paste.38 He chose the mate-
rial for its texture, which would permit micro-shadows, deepening the
darkness of the black. And also because he hoped that the familiarity
of the material would trigger memories—dignifying the humble and
capturing the mind of the perceiver in the interchange. Andrew Kud-
less made his ‘p_wall’ by pouring plaster into fabric that was allowed
to sag. The result is a wall that evokes the contours of human bodies. It
is no wonder that the viewers at the San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, where it was displayed, could not keep their hands off of it. Later,
when the work was removed from the museum and left outside, birds
built their nests within the shelter of its curves.
Above: Andrew Kudless, Wall, 2009. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Photo
courtesy of the artist.

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Architecture and Empathy
At L’Institute du Monde Arabe, the architect Jean Nouvel was among
the first to introduce movement into the skin of ubiquitous glass curtain
wall. In a pattern evocative of Arabic latticework, metal diaphragms
dilate like eyes in response to light, dramatically altering the interior
atmosphere while regulating its temperature. Unlike Nouvel, whose
brise soleil move mechanically (and unfortunately no longer function),
the architect Doris Kim Sung is experimenting with thermal bi-metals
that respond to environmental conditions biologically. Her installation
in Los Angeles entitled Bloom, is a bimetal structure that resembles a
gigantic orchid. The work is composed of 44,000 tessellated tiles, each
of which is slightly different in size, shape, and position, allowing the
whole structure to respond optimally to temperature fluctuations.
She modeled her design on the skin of a fish. “A brick wall is the same
shape over and over again,” Sung says, “but if you look at a fish, each
scale is a unique size and conforms to its specific location.”39 Her early
training as a biology major is evident in the sophistication of her design.
The artist Ned Kahn, who trained formally in botany and environ-
mental science, creates Wind Veils that grace the facades of parking ga-
rages. More than a strategy to mask the banality of the structure, when
the veils shiver in the wind they create sound, shelter the interior by
regulating light and air flow and render invisible air currents visible.
In his work, Firefly, in San Francisco, the wind ennervates an array of
panels that pivot in the wind, switching on a light within the panels. By
day the large scale sculpture is a cascade of rippling glass, by night it is
a field of glowing fireflies. The Nervous Ether installation at the Califor-
nia Institute of the Arts breathes according to atmospheric conditions.
The architect Philip Beesley’s Radiant Soil project responds not only
to environmental conditions, but to human factors as well. Plant-like
arrays of glass, polymers, metal and bags of water move, illuminate
and emit odors in response to human movement and touch. The instal-
lation resonates with and envelopes those who draw near it, turning
the spectator into a genuine participant and transforming the museum
space where it resides into a living, breathing, feeling organism.
These projects offer a glimpse of the possibilities of applying the
wealth of our scientific knowledge—in practical, poetic and meta-
phoric terms. They admirably apply technologies and materials that
we already possess in novel ways. We must also not forget that the way
forward requires more than novel solutions. Responsibly orienting
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58
Right: Andrew Kudless, Wall, 2009. Detail. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Photo courtesy of the artist.

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Architecture and Empathy
ourselves to the future, means being firmly grounded in the past. The
work left by the architects who have pulled us forward—Alvar Aalto,
Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Kahn, for example—was rooted in a
deep understanding of human nature and longing. The work that en-
dures has this Janus face, facing forward and facing back, it is situated
at the boundary between. The root of the word innovation suggests
this dialectic—it really means to renew, to restore. Our technology has
outpaced our epistemology. We are applying new materials and tech-
nologies with outmoded ways of thinking. Too often, our renewals rely
on high-tech add-ons; we fail to recognize that no amount of mechani-
zation can resuscitate what is already dead. Buildings have only been
rendered thus because their ties, and mutual obligations to the natural
and human worlds have been sundered. The line between the animate
and the inanimate is not so cleanly drawn. Until we come to terms with
our utter interdependence with our environment and with each other,
our technological solutions will be only be half-measures.
Technology is necessary but not sufficient—reordering our world,
involves reorienting our thinking. To an epistemology of duality, this
Mayan pyramid appears to be impressive pile of stone. When in fact,
we now know that the Mayans of ancient Mexico may have built their
pyramids to function as gigantic musical instruments.40 The temples
were considered to be sacred mountains where clouds gathered and
condensed rain. The sound of footsteps on the massive stairs that sur-
round pyramids such as Chichen Itza sound curiously like echoing
raindrops. Research suggests that the pyramids could have been built
deliberately for the purpose of playing rain music.41
The pyramids are designed with varying configurations of stairs
and landings, some are even, while some are punctuated with plat-
forms. When acoustic engineers compared the frequency of sounds
produced by people walking up El Castillo, a hollow pyramid in
the Yucatan, with those generated at the solid, unevenly distributed
staircase of the Moon Pyramid at Teotihuacan in central Mexico, they
discovered a striking similarity between the sound frequency at both
sites, suggesting that the rain music resulted from the sound waves
that propagate along the stairs.
Propitiation of the gods occurred through bodily participation with
the medium of the temple. The temples were not objects, but instru-
ments brought to life by the bodily movements of the supplicants. The
Sarah Robinson
music of skin on stone delivered the quenching rain. The skin of the
foot and the ear not only functioned in harmony with each other—the
design of the temple enlisted them in unison to effect changes in the
larger environment. John Dewey said that, “In itself, the ear is the emo-
tional sense.”42 He meant by this that unlike vision, sound is emotional,
sound reverberates through our being, moving us directly. These
temples were built with a profound sense of the interconnectedness of
the whole of natural, human and spiritual realms and a respect for the
imperatives of the body. It must also be recognized that the configu-
ration of the temples between each other was considered in acoustic
and physiological terms. On some level, their builders were aware of
human perceptual sensitivities that the methods of science are finally
allowing us to rediscover.
These temples illustrate too, that when we consider the edges, we
refine design. We now know, for example, that the foot is a very sensi-
tive organ—each square centimeter has almost 1,000 nerve endings.43
Above: Stone remembers every footstep. Paving at the Hagia Sophia. Photograph by the author.

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Architecture and Empathy
We orient ourselves in the world not only through our brain, but also
through the mind of our feet. Each step we take sends an electrochemi-
cal symphony through our body, and the signature of the piece de-
pends on the nature of surface with which the foot makes contact. Ev-
ery step we take in some way alters our body as it alters the path—even
though the consequences of our actions may not be readily apparent.
Ancient places, such as the floor of the Hagia Sophia, extend our hori-
zon of time and remind us that stone also has a memory. What looks
like cold stone could be an inchoate instrument waiting to be brought
to life. A building can give and receive, change and be changed, and
allow us to experience the world as an empathy of a kind.44
Sarah Robinson
NOTES
1 Ashley Montagu, Touching: The Hu-
man Significance of the Skin (New
York: Harper Collins, 1986). Montagu
coined the term exterogestation and
introduced the notion of a fourth tri-
mester of gestation. Some research-
ers have suggested that this period
of exterogestation is completed
when the infant begins to crawl on
all fours, a time which interestingly
enough lasts for 266 1/2 days, the
exact amount of time that newborns
gestate inside the womb.
7 John Dewey, The Early Works, Vol. 2,
edited by Jo Ann Boydston (Carbon-
dale: southern Illinois Press, 1967),
239 (emphasis added).
8 Ibid.
9 Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecol-
ogy of Mind: Collected Essays in An-
thropology, Psychiatry, Evolution and
Epistemology, (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1972, 1999),113.
10 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New
York: Perigee, 1980), 30.
11 Seigel, The Developing Mind, 147.
12 Giovanna Colombetti, The Feeling
Body (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014), 98.
13 Ibid., 99.
14 As cited in Daniel J. Siegel, The De-
veloping Mind, Second Edition (New
York, The Guilford Press, 2012) 147-8.
15 Colombetti, 19.
16 As cited in Steven Fesmire, Dewey
and the Moral Imagination (Abington:
Routledge, 2015), 65.
17 Ibid., 133.
18 Dewey, Art as Experience, 359.
19 Dewey, Art as Experience, 359.
20 As cited in Fesmire, Dewey and the
Moral Imagination, 19.
21 Jan Patočka, Body, Community, Lan-
guage, World, translated by Erazim
Kohák (Chicago: Carus, 1998), 133.
22 Vittorio Gallese and Sjoerd Ebisch,
“Embodied simulation and touch: The
sense of touch in social cognition,”
Phenomenology & Mind (2013), 274.
23 Gallese and Ebisch, 275.
24 I owe thanks to Vittorio Gallese for
introducing me to Didier Anzieu, Le
Moi-peau (Paris: Dunod, 1985).
25 John Dewey, “The New Psychology,”
Andover Review (1896),2, 278-289.
26 Didier Anzieu, Le Moi-peau (Paris:
Dunod). 1985).
27 Author’s conversation with Iain Mc-
Gilchrist.
2 Ibid., 32.
3 Harry Harlow’s experiments with
monkeys in 1958, 1959 and 1961 at
the University of Wisconsin - Madi-
son, had profound implications for
attachment theory and subsequent
research.
4 Daniel Seigel, The Developing Mind,
Second edition (New York: The Guil-
ford Press, 2012).
5 Ibid., 15.
6 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to
Arras, translated by Lewis Galan-
tière (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock,
1942), 23.
28 Paul Valéry, Oeuvres Complètes
(Paris: Gallimard,1957), II. 215-16.
29 Naomi Segal, Consensuality: Didier
Anzieu, Gender and the Sense of Touch
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), 44.
30 Anzieu, Le Moi-peau, 9.
31 Ibid., 81.
32 Dewey, Art as Experience, 127.
33 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible
and the Invisible (Evanston: North-
western, 1964), 264. Merleau-Ponty
described the fold as the, “the ap-
plication of the outside to the inside,
the turning point.”
34 Jamil Zaki et. al., “The Neural Basis of
Aesthetic Accuracy,” Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences,
vol. 106 no. 27, 11382–11387,2009.
35 As quoted in Gallese and Ebisch, 270.
36 Anzieu, Le Moi-peau, 39.
37 John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks,
(New York: William Morrow & Com-
pany, 1932), 121.
38 Peter Zumthor used a combination of
black idenden—a polymer emulsion
often used as a vapor barrier coating
for pipework and rolls of hessian
scrim for the entire pavilion.
39 “Doris Kim Sung ’86: Breathable
Buildings,” Princeton Alumni Journal,
March 2014.
40 Linda Geddes, “New Scientist,” Sep-
tember 22, 2009.
41 Philip Ball, “Mystery of ‘chirp-
ing’ pyramid decoded,” Nature 12
(2004):, accessed August 24, 2015,
doi:10.1038/news041213-5.
42 Dewey, Art as Experience, 237.
43 As cited in Tim Ingold, Being Alive:
Essays on Movement, Knowledge
and Description (Abington: Rout-
ledge, 2011), 246.
44 Patočka, Body, Community, Lan-
guage, World, 133.

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Architecture and Empathy
Vittorio Gallese
Architectural Space from Within:
The Body, Space and the Brain
Good afternoon. It’s a real pleasure to be here in Helsinki for a short
time, in the company of people who are not only friends, but also
colleagues that have inspired me a great deal. I don’t say that only to
reciprocate the kind words of Professor Pallasmaa, I absolutely mean
it. What I learned about empathy in the first place came mostly from
the famous anthology published by Professor Mallgrave, together with
Eleftherios Ikonomou in the early 1990’s, and the writings of Sarah
Robinson and Juhani Pallasmaa were important in convincing me that
architecture could be a field of mutual interest—a place for cross fertil-
ization and eventually a subject for empirical research.
I’d like to start by framing my approach with respect to the notions
of art and aesthetics as they can be addressed empirically, from the
point of view of a cognitive neuroscientist. Then, I will briefly discuss
the notion of empathy and the role that it plays in aesthetic experience.
Next, I will move on to challenge what has been so far accepted as
common wisdom in cognitive neuroscience—and not only in cognitive
neuroscience. Namely, I would like to challenge the idea that every-
thing we see has to do specifically with the working of the visual part
of our brain—the visual system. Unfortunately, this view falls short
of capturing the real essence of our vision, which is a multi-modal en-
terprise. Then I will quickly review some of our research dealing with
the way in which we perceive space, objects and the actions of other
individuals in order to reach some tentative conclusions.
To begin, it is a highly debated issue whether or not we, as neu-
robiologists, are entitled to talk about art and aesthetic experience.
Vittorio Gallese

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Architecture and Empathy Vittorio Gallese
According to most people who identify with the cultural approach, the
answer is no. These opponents insist that we should stay away from
this area, because these subjects are culture ‘all the way down’. From
this point of view we could not have anything interesting to say about
them. However, there is an alternative to this rather narrow view, and
we could loosely define this alternative perspective as a bio-cultural
approach. Basically, this bio-cultural approach recognizes that hu-
man nature is at the center of art, aesthetics, language and anything
that distinguishes us from other living creatures. This is because these
activities involve perceptual and emotional bases that are shared across
cultures. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, the German scholar who has been
at Stanford University for many years, presents a rather balanced view
of this issue in his book Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot
Convey. He writes, “Every human contact with the things of the world
contains both a meaning and presence component … The situation of
aesthetic experience is specific inasmuch as it allows us to live both of
these components in their tension.”1 This view seems to acknowledge
that there is room, perhaps, for a naturalization of aesthetic experience.
But what about Art? I must admit that I am becoming reluctant to
use this notion at all. Tim Ingold, a British anthropologist who is very
well known here in Finland since he did much of his fieldwork in Lap-
land, writes in his book The Perception of the Environment:
We can see how, by adopting a dwelling perspective—that
is by taking the animal-in-its-environment rather than the
self-contained individual as our point of departure—it is
possible to dissolve the orthodox dichotomies between
evolution and history, and between biology and culture.2
I think this moves us forward even a bit further than the position we
reached with (John) Dewey in some of the last slides shown by Sarah
Robinson. He goes on to add,
Hunters and gatherers of the past were painting and
carving, but they were not producing art. We must cease
thinking of painting and carving as modalities of the pro-
duction of art, and view art instead as one rather peculiar
and historically specific objectification of the activities of
painting and carving.3
I like this quote very much because I am a cognitive neuroscience who
started working in this field by exploring the functional organization
of the motor system. So anyone in the humanities who even remotely
brings up the performative qualities of cultural life contributes to the
effort to bring together the work of people in the humanities and in
neurobiology.
Another interesting perspective is offered by Ellen Dissanayake,
who argues that “A comprehensive scientific understanding of art
must include each manifestation in all human culture.”4 A big limita-
tion of cognitive neuroscience is the fact that we practically presume to
give a picture of the human brain—and the relationship between the
human brain and human mind—mainly by focusing on the brains of
our volunteers, who in 99% of cases are undergraduate students of the
first, western world. This probably falls short of being a comprehensive
account of what a human being, as such, is all about. But a further ele-
ment of interest from Dissanayake’s contribution to this discussion is
her comment that “This forces us to consider the arts as behaviors that
may have no necessary connection with beauty.”5 Most of the efforts of
cognitive neuroscience to address art and aesthetics have been focused
on the search for a house in the brain that would contain our sense of
beauty. But our sense of beauty is incredibly determined by culture, so
if we would like to reach some universal conclusions about our sense
of beauty in the brain, we should promote this sort of investigation
well beyond the limits of the first, western world.
I don’t doubt that this is an interesting enterprise, but my take on
this issue is rather different. I am more interested in unpacking the no-
tion of experience, and in particular the experience of specific objects of
perception that we refer to as objects of design, architecture, visual art-
works, film and the like. So I don’t speak of ‘neuroaesthetics’, but this
not because I disagree with Semir Zeki, the pioneer and first promoter
of neuroaesthetics. In fact I think Zeki is one of the best neuroscientists
of vision that we have. Much of what we know about the visual part of
the brain comes from his research, perhaps even more than from the
contributions of David H. Hubel and Torsten Wiesel. Semir Zeki decid-
ed to study aesthetics in that particular sense, but I have started with a
definition of aesthetics taken mainly from its etymological relation to
the Greek aisthesthai, which relates it to the sensitivity of our body. I am
referring to the sensory, motor and affective features of our experience

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Architecture and Empathy Vittorio Gallese
of these perceptual objects. My goal, along with my colleagues is to
use cognitive neuroscience to study the functional relation between the
brain-body system and aesthetic experience. Why am I not happy to
say only the brain? I believe that if we consider the brain in isolation
from the body, we start with false assumptions. I am a medical doctor
and I am a trained neurologist, and I think that this background forces
me to empirically address the investigation of the brain from a differ-
ent point of view than someone with another background. For me, the
brain and the body should never be torn apart.
We can look at the aesthetic-symbolic dimension of human existence
not only from the hermeneutic or semiotic perspectives, but also from
the perspective of bodily processes. And here today we have some of
the pioneers in that investigation applied to architecture. The contribu-
tion of the cognitive neuroscience is meant to be complimentary to the
humanistic approach, by enriching our perspective with a new level of
description. To be very clear, I think that whenever we want to better
understand who we are, to shed new light on human culture, a level of
description of the brain-body interaction is a necessary, but not suffi-
cient condition. I don’t think we can say anything interesting if what we
say contradicts what we know about the function of the brain. But the
brain, in itself, falls short of accounting for our diverse range of social
and cultural activities. So we need to carry out this work in close col-
laboration with people who are experts in philosophy, aesthetics, archi-
tecture, film theory and so on. This is what I have been doing over the
last twenty years and I can say it is very rewarding not only because it
helps you in framing new empirical approaches, but also because even
if you are not investigating art and aesthetics it enormously enriches
your perspective when confronting more trivial matters such as how the
hand knows how to reach a glass in order to have a sip of beer or vodka.
The level of description provided by cognitive neuroscience can
help in analyzing and revising several concepts that we use all the
time in referring to intersubjectivity, aesthetics, art and architecture, as
well as the experience that we make of these. From Harry Mallgrave,
I learned of a famous question that comes from Heinrich Wölfflin’s
doctoral dissertation in 1886. Wölfflin asks, “How is it possible that
architectural forms are able to express an emotion or a mood?”6 The
answer that comes from Wölfflin sounds incredibly modern to me in
light of what we now know about the brain.
Physical form possess a character only because we
ourselves possess a body. If we were purely visual beings
we would always be denied an aesthetic judgement of
the physical world, but as human beings with a body that
teaches us the nature of gravity, contraction, strength
and so on, we gather the experience that enables us to
identify with the conditions of other forms.7
This was written one-hundred years before George Lakoff and Mark
Johnson published their most influential book, Metaphors We Live By,
in which they started a theoretical investigation into the relationship
between the body and the most abstract uses of language.
My approach to experimental aesthetics in a few words is this: the
notion of empathy recently explored by cognitive neuroscience can
reframe the problem of how works of art and architecture are experi-
enced, revitalizing and eventually empirically validating old intuitions
about the relationship between body, empathy and aesthetic experi-
ence. Empathy is an almost unusable word now, because it has become
polysemic. Some colleagues of mine, Frederic De Vignemont and Tania
Singer published a review in 2006 in which they wrote that there are
probably as many definitions of empathy as there are people using the
concept.8 These are only some of the concepts that people refer to when
using the word empathy: theory of mind, perspective taking, cognitive
empathy, true empathy, emotional contagion (which has nothing to
do with empathy at all), identification and one could continue on and
on. But if we go to the root of the word we come to the German word
einfühlung, which was later translated by Edward B. Titchener as em-
pathy. The use of the notion of empathy in psychology occurred much
later, and it was mainly Robert Vischer who applied this notion to
social relationships. Here we are dealing with what happens when we
stand in front of a three dimensional object such as a painting, a face or
a sculpture. Of this condition Vischer wrote,
I transpose myself into the inner being of the object and
then explore its formal character from within as it were.
This kind of transposition can take a motor or sensitive
form even when it is concerned with lifeless and motion-
less forms.9

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Architecture and Empathy Vittorio Gallese
Edmund Husserl’s pupil, Edith Stein, wrote her own dissertation on
the problem of empathy and tried to challenge a common misconcep-
tion. People normally tend to confuse empathy with sympathy, but
it is important to keep the two separate. One cannot be sympathetic
without being empathetic, but one can be empathetic without being
sympathetic. To be empathic is to feel with someone, to be sympathetic
is to feel for someone, each deals with different aspects of our sociality.
Another interesting element of Edith Stein’s take on empathy is the
notion that empathy is by no means confined to emotion and feelings,
but also incorporates action. The other is experienced as another human
being, like us, through the perception of a similarity relation, and Stein
systematically refers to action as a way of establishing that similarity.
We find a similar observation from the Vienesse psychoanalyst Otto
Fenichel, who concluded from Freud’s analysis of narcissism that “[…]
it is only by empathy that we know of the existence of psychic life other
than our own.”10
So why should someone like me, a reductionist who has mostly
dealt with intersubjectivity for the last 10 to 15 years, be interested in
investigating aesthetic experience? Because we can consider aesthetic
experience as a mediated form of intersubjectivity. The Norwegian
writer Siri Hustvedt, a novelist and also an excellent essayist, writes
in her beautiful book on painting, Mysteries of the Rectangle, “In art, the
meeting between viewer and thing implies intersubjectivity. [...] The
intersubjectivity inherent in looking at art means that it is a personal,
not an impersonal act.”11 Thus we can consider aesthetic experience as
a mediated form of intersubjectivity.
So let me get quickly to the brain. I have earlier discussed “visual
brain imperialism” so I would like to explain what I mean by that. Ob-
serving the world of others implies a multi-nodal notion of vision and
cannot be reduced to the mere activation of the so-called “visual brain”.
Observing the world encompasses the activation of motor, somatosen-
sory and emotion-related components within the larger frame of the
intrinsic intention or pragmatic nature of our relation with the world.
When I first became interested in the brain as an undergraduate
student in medicine, there was no image of this kind. Back then the cor-
tical motor system was considered to be mainly composed by M1 (the
primary motor cortex) and—in front of it—by an homogeneous grey
area called Brodmann area 6, which was considered to be a mere exten-
sion of the primary motor cortex, responsible for controlling the less
interesting (from a cognitive point of view) muscles of our body—the
axial and proximal muscles—not the mouth or hand. But this picture
changed, mostly thanks to the work done at our department under the
guidance of Giacomo Rizzolatti. The motor cortex is no longer under-
stood as a uniform field, but is considered now as a mosaic of function-
ally specific areas. Each of these premotor areas is reciprocally connect-
ed with a corresponding region in the parietal cortex and the premotor
cortex is therefore a series of parallel functioning networks. What is
even more interesting from a functional point of view, is that cortical
motor areas are not purely motor, but are also endowed with sensory
properties. They contain motor neurons (motor because their activation
produces movement) and if we micro-stimulate those neurons using
electricity we can evoke movement, but we now know that they also
respond to visual, tactile and auditory stimuli. On the other hand, pos-
terior parietal areas that are reciprocally connected with these premo-
tor areas traditionally considered to be associative areas, in charge of
associating within a more coherent perceptual frame, the data coming
from the individual sensory modalities, we now know that these play a
major role in motor control.
Above: The Brodmann areas of the human brain. Lateral view of the left hemisphere.

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Architecture and Empathy
So let me quickly go through some of the properties of these premo-
tor neurons. Premotor area F4 contains neurons controlling arm reach-
ing and orienting or avoiding movements of the hand. But interestingly
enough, the very same neurons that control the reaching movement of
the macaque monkey also respond to tactile stimuli applied to the same
arm. They also respond to visual stimuli provided that they are present-
ed within the space surrounding that same body part. When the neuron
fires, it produces a reaching movement but when the monkey is still, if
you touch the arm or if you move something toward the arm you still
see a response in the very same neuron. So how do these neurons work
perceptually? My interpretation is that they do it by means of embodied
motor simulation. A group at Yale University lead by Charlie Gross and
Michael Graziano demonstrated that even in the dark, auditory stimuli
can provoke the discharge of the very same F4 neurons, provided that
they come from portions of the peri-personal space anchored to the
body part whose movement is controlled by the same neurons. Seeing
or hearing an object or an event at a given location within peri-personal
space evokes the motor simulation of the most appropriate acts towards
that very same spatial location. In a way, we are selling an old wine in a
new bottle, but I’ll tell you why in a minute.
This is not just monkey business, we have the very same neurons in
our brain. Indeed it has been demonstrated that a similar network link-
ing parietal (VIP and S2) and premotor areas responding to auditory,
tactile and visual stimuli that occur in the area of the body that these
neurons are responsible for the movement of.
Why did I say an old wine in a new bottle? In 1945 Maurice Merleau-
Ponty writing in Phenomenology of Perception already observed that space
[...] is not a sort of ether in which all things float. [...] The
points in space do not stand out as objective positions in
relation to the objective position occupied by our body;
they mark, in our vicinity, the varying range of our aims
and our gestures.12
This is a way of thinking about the brain-body system and the way that
we map the space around us in pragmatic motor terms.
If we move forward a little we find another premotor area, area F5,
in which there are neurons—canonical neurons—that are selective for
a particular kind of grasping. Interestingly enough, when the monkey
is explicitly instructed not to move, but to simply look at the object, still
its mere sight activates the very same neuron that controls the grasp-
ing of that object. So how do F5 canonical neurons work perceptually?
Again we can say, by means of embodied simulation. Seeing a manipu-
lable object evokes the motor simulation of grasping—or of whatever
action that specific object affords. In a way, we are dealing here with
the neurological correlate of the notion of ‘affordance’, which was al-
ready proposed in 1977 by the psychologist James J. Gibson. Seeing the
object invokes an object-related motor potentiality. Finally in the very
same premotor area F5, while studying canonical neurons, we discov-
ered ‘mirror’ neurons. From a motor point of view these are identical
to canonical neurons, but the perceptual stimulus that leads these neu-
rons to fire is not the observation of an object, it is the observation of an
action. That is to say that the observation of an action that is similar to
the one controlled by the neuron when executed will lead it to fire.
A more recent experiment demonstrates the social relevance of the
mirror mechanism. My colleagues were interested to test whether and
how the distance between the observer (the monkey) and the agent
(the experimenter) modulates the discharge of mirror neurons. So they
evaluated this by first having the monkey perform the grasp—to be
sure that they were looking at motor neurons—and then by having the
monkey observe the experimenter performing the action either within
or outside of the monkey’s own peri-personal space. Does the distance
between observer and agent make a difference? For 50% of the neurons
tested it does not, but for the remaining 50% it does. Of these neurons,
half respond only when the action is performed away from the monkey
while the other half respond when the action is performed close to
the monkey. What is interesting about this is that the neurons do not
map the distance between the observer and the agent. Half of them
fire when the action is near, and half of them fire when the action is
farther away. However, if a transparent barrier is inserted between the
observer and the agent so that the action occurs in close proximity but
the possibility for the monkey to interact with the experimenter is fore-
closed, then only the neurons associated with the distant observation
are activated. These neurons do not seem to track physical distance so
much as they chart the possibility of interaction between the agent and
the observer.
Vittorio Gallese

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Architecture and Empathy
Mirror neurons for action are modulated by proxemics. The po-
tential for interaction between the observer and the agent—measured
by the distance separating them—does affect the intensity of neural
discharges in the mirror neurons of the observer’s brain. Frontal and
parietal motor areas are neurally integrated not only to control action,
but also to serve the function of building an integrated, bodily-format-
ted representation of the body and of its interactions with the world.
We are dealing here with a type of representation that does not require
the use of language: one that consists of locations to which actions are
directed, objects being acted upon or the actions of others.
Also the human brain contains frontal and parietal motor areas
activated when a subject performs or observes the performance of
object directed actions, communicative actions or body movements. I
don’t have time now to address the differences between the macaque
and the human brain but if you are interested I can discuss it during
the question time.
The prolonged activation of the neural representation of motor con-
tent in the absence of movement likely defines the experiential back-
bone of what we perceive or imagine ourselves to perceive. This allows
a direct apprehension of the relational quality linking space, objects
and others actions to our body. The primordial quality turning space,
objects and behavior into intentional objects, that is, into the objects
of our perceptions and thoughts, is their constitution as the potential
targets of the motor potentialities that our body expresses.
I did not want to deal too much with touch, since I assumed that
Sarah Robinson would have covered that subject, but I would like to
present you the first two experiments that we did with Bruno Wicker,
Christian Keysers, Leonardo Fogassi and others on emotion and sensa-
tion. The first experiment demonstrated for the first time that the re-
gion of your brain which is activated when you subjectively experience
an emotion such as disgust, is also activated by observing that emotion
in the facial expression of another person. This region is the anterior
insula. In 2004 we published a study addressing visuo-tactile mirror-
ing, which demonstrated that one tactile area of the brain, the second
somatosensory area, buried within the operculur part of the parietal
cortex, is activated not only when our body is touched, but also when
we see someone’s body being touched.
So I don’t speak anymore of ‘mirror neurons’, because speaking
of mirror neurons induces people to think of these neurons as spe-
cial cells or some sort of magic cells. In fact what is special is not the
neurons themselves. They don’t look smarter, or bigger, or stronger, or
more colorful than other neurons. What distinguishes these neurons
from all other neurons is the mechanism that they instantiate. That
mechanism is in turn the outcome of the specific connectivity that
they entertain. No man is an island and no neuron is an island. The
property of each neuron is the outcome of the integration that specific
neuron performs based on all the input that it receives. So I prefer to
speak of a mechanism. This mechanism maps the sensory representa-
tion of the action, emotion or sensation of another onto the perceiver’s
own motor, viscero-motor or somatosensory bodily formatted repre-
sentation of that action, emotion or sensation. This mapping enables
one to perceive the action, emotion or sensation of another in a certain
sense—the distinction here is pretty complex—as if she were perform-
ing that action or experiencing that emotion or sensation herself, up to
a certain limit of course.
So what do we want to explain with this model? We want to explain
not only the mirror mechanism but also related phenomena such as F4
neurons, canonical neurons, manipulable object vision, mental imag-
ery, the representation of peripersonal space and various aspects of
language that I won’t deal with here for the sake of concision. Em-
bodied simulation is also triggered during the experience of spatiality
around our body and during the contemplation of objects. The func-
tional architecture of embodied simulation seems to constitute a basic
characteristic of our brain, making possible our rich and diversified
experiences of space, objects and other individuals, which are the basis
of our capacity to empathize with them. Embodied simulation not only
connects us to others, it connects us to our world—a world inhabited
by natural and manmade objects (with or without symbolic nature) as
well as other individuals. Most of the time, if things go smoothly, we
feel at home in this world, though not necessarily.
The experience of architecture, from the contemplative observation
of decoration on a Greek temple to the physical experience of living
and working within a specific architectonic space can be unpacked or
deconstructed into its bodily-grounded elements, or at least that is our
hope. The constant weighting of architectonic and peri-personal space
is mainly processed by premotor neurons which map visual space on
Vittorio Gallese

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Architecture and Empathy
potential action or motor schemata. Cognitive neuroscience can investi-
gate what the sense of presence of a building is made of. This approach
can also contribute a fresher empirical take on the evolution of archi-
tectonic style and its cultural diversity, viewing it as a particular case of
symbolic expression.
Again, people have had similar ideas before. Adolf von Hildebrand,
not a very good sculptor in my humble opinion but a great theoretician,
proposed that our response to art directly relates space to movement.
According to him, to understand an artistic image means to intrinsically
grasp its creative process. Space does not constitute an a priori experi-
ence, as suggested by Kant, but is itself a product of that experience.
Artistic images are effectual, which means they are the outcome of both
the artist’s creative production and the effects that images produce on
beholders. We have demonstrated this empirically using the Lucio Fon-
tana’s cuts on canvas and Franz Klein’s brushstrokes, but perhaps I do
not have space here to discuss those experiments in depth.
Through movement, the available elements in space can be con-
nected. Objects can be carved out of their background and perceived as
such. Through movement, representations and meaning can be formed
and articulated. We can provide an empirical backup to this theoretical
statement by looking at the function of the brain. The role of embodied
simulation in architectural experience becomes even more interesting if
one considers emotions and sensations, colors for example or the haptic
quality of materials.
As I am running out of time I will try to end with a few conclusions.
Embodied simulation can shed light on human symbolic expression,
both from the point of few of its making and of its experience. In so
doing, it reveals the intersubjective nature of any creative act, leaving
behind any idea of a solipsistic, cogitating mind. More relevant than
cogito—and here phenomenology got it exactly right—more relevant
than I think is I can. The physical object, the outcome of symbolic expres-
sion, becomes the mediator of an intersubjective relationship between
creator and beholder. Embodied simulation generates the peculiar qual-
ity of the body seen as a significant part of aesthetic experience. That is
my hypothesis. It is therefore one important ingredient of our apprecia-
tion of human symbolic expression, in all its multifarious declinations.
I’ll end by quoting August Schmarsow, who reminded us that, “Every
spatial creation is first and foremost the enclosing of a subject.”13 In order
to understand that subject, we cannot leave the body out of the picture.
Vittorio Gallese
NOTES
1 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, The Produc-
tion of Presence (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2004), 109.
2 Tim Ingold, The Perception of the
Environment: Essays on Livelihood,
Dwelling and Skill (London: Rout-
ledge, 2000), 186.
3 Ibid., 131.
4 Steven Brown and Ellen Dissanayake,
“The Arts are More than Aesthetics:
Neuroaesthetics as Narrow Aesthet-
ics,” in Neuroaesthetics, ed. Martin
Skov and Oshin Vartanian (Amityville,
NY: Baywood, 2009), 47.
5 Ibid., 47.
6 Heinrich Wölfflin, “Prolegomena zu
einer Psychologie der Architektur”
(Ph.D. diss., Universität München,
1886); translated as “Prolegomena
to a Psychology of Architecture,” in
Harry Francis Mallgrave and Elefthe-
rios Ikonomou, eds. and trans., Em-
pathy, Form, and Space: Problems in
German Aesthetics, 1873-1893 (Santa
Monica: Getty Center for the History
of Art and the Humanities, 1994),
149-87.
7 Ibid., 149-87.
8 Frédérique de Vignemont and Tania
Singer, “The empathic brain: how,
when and why?” Trends in Cognitive
Science 10 (October, 2006), 435-41.
9 Robert Vischer, “The Aesthetic Act
and Pure Form,” in Charles Harrison,
Paul J. Wood and Jason Gaiger, Art in
Theory, 1815-1900 (Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 1998), 692.
10 Otto Fenichel, The Collected Papers
of Otto Fenichel, eds. Hanna Fenichel
and David Rapaport (New York, Nor-
ton, 1953), 104.
11 Siri Hustvedt. Mysteries of the Rect-
angle: Essays on Painting (New York:
Princeton Arch. Press, 2007), xix.
12 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenom-
enology of Perception (London:
Routledge, 1958), 166.
13 August Schmarsow, “Das Wesen
der architektonischen Schöpfung”
(Universität Leipzig, 1893) translated
as “The Essence of Architectural
Creation,” in Harry Francis Mallgrave
and Eleftherios Ikonomou, eds. and
trans., Empathy, Form, and Space:
Problems in German Aesthetics,
1873-1893 (Santa Monica: Getty
Center for the History of Art and the
Humanities, 1994), 288.

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Juhani Pallasmaa, Harry Francis Mallgrave,
Sarah Robinson and Vittorio Gallese
A Conversation on Empathy
Pallasmaa - Edward O. Wilson, the promoter of ‘biofilia’ (the love of
life) as a new approach to nature and to the world once wrote, “The
greatest problems of man arise from the fact that we do not know who
we are and we do not agree on what we want to be.” That is a stunning
suggestion indeed. The subject that we have been discussing today
seems to somehow unwrap—or begins to unwrap—the question of who
we are. I am interested in the fact that we have lived the entire last cen-
tury in a state of utopian optimism, with a belief that human rationality
could resolve everything, but during that century we have forgotten
both what we are and what we want to become. Today there is more
and more interest in understanding our evolutionary past and in com-
ing to terms with the fact that we are fundamentally animals that exist
as part of the biological world. My first question to the panelists then is
what is your take on this turn in perspective from the future to the past?
As has been suggested by some writers, our position with respect to
time seems to have changed, by which I mean our bodily position. The
greeks were looking toward the past, with the future at their back. Mod-
ern man clearly faces the future with time receding at his back. What
is your take on this rather unexpected turn toward the past—not only
the recent past, but also the origins of man, as seems to be suggested by
Vittorio’s studies of monkeys?
Gallese - As you were asking your question, I was thinking about
the way that I looked at the future when I was ten years old. A few
years ago, I was sitting in the car with the kids and we were listening
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Architecture and Empathy Pallasmaa, Mallgrave, Robinson and Gallese
to a song that I remembered listening to as a child, “Nel duemila chissà
come saremo,” (who knows what we will be like in 2000). I remembered
listening to the song in 1969, because it was the year that my father
chose to return early from our summer holiday in order to be at home
in front of the television when men landed on the moon. There was this
idea that we would colonize the universe, which for a child was very
exciting. I remember calculating how old I would be when we finally
reached this threshold of 2000. Looking back at that memory I began to
think about how my kids look at the future, and although I would not
like to fuel some sense of continual progress, I do think that we should
be looking as much to the future as to the past. I don’t see it as entirely
positive that we turn our back to the future. I think that we must con-
tinue in our consideration of the future. This can happen on a different
level of course, but it is consubstantial to the human dimension.
I am totally with the homo faber perspective. I never understood the
mountain speech saying, ‘blessed are those who do not ask anything
and are happy to accept.’ That doesn’t portray what is essential of our
species. It is the more Promethean aspect which fascinates me, other-
wise I would not be a scientist.
To respond to your question in a less existential way, I think that
this turn to the past is very well deserved. Giuseppe Verdi once wrote
a letter to the director of the conservatory of music in Naples because
the school was reforming its curriculum and abandoning the study of
polyphony and palestrina music amongst many others. Verdi wrote
“Tornate all’antico e sarà un progresso” which translates as, “Let us turn
back to the past and progress will ensue.” Unframed and understood
generally, this notion can be dangerous, but I believe it can also be use-
ful. In our case, to turn back to the past means to look at this huge tra-
dition of thought, which we know to a great extent because of the work
of Harry Malgrave. These people got it right from the very beginning!
They were focusing on the bodily dimension of culture and on the
bodily dimension of the human mind. Now, after almost a century of
conceptualizing a logo-centric study of every aspect of human nature, I
think that we should start to ask the body questions once more.
Pallasmaa - You mentioned Harry’s work, and particularly his stud-
ies and translations of 19th century research, so I would like to direct
the next question to him. Harry, do you have any explanation for why
in the late 1800’s so many things were seen in precisely the same terms
that we them see today with the support of new science, but then seem
to have been forgotten for a century? I am thinking not only of the 19th
century German scholars, but also of figures like William James and of
course John Dewey, who is a later writer on a different continent but
who still wrote his most important books before I was born. What hap-
pened to human thinking?
Mallgrave - Well, it’s not a particularly happy explanation, but I think
that what happened was 1914. It’s incredible when you look at all of
this material that begins in the 1860’s, it almost ends overnight in 1914
with the beginning of World War I. Of course there was the collapse
of German academic culture, but it was not only in Germany, it was
everywhere, and Europe never truly recovered before it entered the
processes that lead to the Second World War.
I am always somewhat pessimistic when I look at this history and
see what was initiated by a few simple events that could quite plau-
sibly happen again today if we are not careful. At the same time, I see
in the neurological and biological sciences so much potential for us
to realize, for the first time with a solid scientific foundation, who we
are and what we could be again. Maybe that would lead to a sort of
homo faber situation in which a younger generation picks up Vittorio’s
research and moves forward with it.
Juhani, I would follow up by posing a question back to you. Taking
something like an architectural curriculum, how would you change it
to address some of the work that Vittorio is doing? How would you
arrange the studies if you were a Dean again today?
Pallasmaa - I have talked about that a number of times in various
schools, and I must say first that there has been a catastrophic decline
in the general understanding of European culture and the history of
culture in general. As I see it, if there is no shared understanding of
the history of our culture it could be the end of university education
altogether. I don’t mean only political, economic and social history,
but also history of the various realms of art. Today students in most
countries do not know who Dostoyevsky was! For me it is impossible
to be a human being without having read Crime and Punishment. So I
would radically alter the curriculum to re-establish this foundation for

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higher learning. Universities are not institutions for the dissemination
of information, they are institutions where pieces of information can be
newly connected, so that new ideas and new visions can emerge. That
would be the core of my curriculum. But I would add that bodily en-
gagement—physical engagement with the materials—is fundamental.
Drawing is fundamental. I think that the prevailing curricula should be
turned upside-down entirely.
Audience - As a member of a university currently working in the area
of neuro-cinematics, I am particularly interested in this discussion of
curriculum. I would like to ask if you would also add, as Sergei Eisen-
stein did in the 1930’s at the film school in Moscow, brain research and
psycho-physiological studies in addition to the cultural, historical and
art studies that you mentioned?
Pallasmaa - I would absolutely require studies in the arts, literature,
poetry and music from everyone, but I would not say that neuroscience
and the specialized sciences are necessary to a curriculum in architec-
ture. I believe very strongly in the culture of architecture, or for that
matter in the culture of any discipline or art. It’s very good that there
are individual architects who study philosophy for instance, and to
have a few philosophically oriented architects in the culture of architec-
ture. It might also be good now to have a few architects that are inter-
ested in mirror neurons, and the neurological dimensions of architec-
ture. I don’t believe in overloading a curriculum, but I do believe that it
is good to allow individuals to specialize because that specialization in
turn contributes to the culture of the discipline.
Maybe this question could be taken up by some of the other panel-
ists. Sarah, you have been chair at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of
Architecture, what do you say to this question of curriculum?
Robinson - I’m inspired to learn more about the Bauhaus, where
sensory perception was a part of the agenda, sensitizing artists to
tactile experiences. Recently in Berlin, there was an exhibition of
Moholy-Nagy’s work and I was fascinated by his experiment in which
a person could be blindfolded and then run their hands over a pattern
of textures, as a sort of symphony of touch. I think that what neuro-
science can offer to architecture is a way of moving deeper into those
sensitivities and the ways in which they are interconnected. We are all
here trying to dismantle the hegemony of vision, but if we accept that
vision is isolated from the other senses then it becomes harder to make
the case against it. In fact it is not isolated, vision is deeply interwoven
with our other sensory modalities. So I would try and integrate an
approach to neuroscience that is practical, applied and experiential.
That would require going back to other experiments like those done
at the Bauhaus or at Taliesin to reinvent architectural education via
craft. Because without those sensitivities how could we ever be good
designers, artists or even thinkers?
Pallasmaa - Harry, as a historian, can I ask you about the role of his-
tory in your idea of architectural curricula? We know that the Bauhaus
for instance did not teach history, which is a rather surprising choice.
Mallgrave - I’ve always looked at history really as a history of theory.
As a teacher I had certain requirements in terms of periods or phases,
but I’ve always tried to teach a history of ideas and to show how those
ideas were formed and what products they informed. Today history
is also disappearing from curricula. A generation ago a student would
take four or five courses in history. Now that is down to around two
required courses in most universities, which focus primarily on the 20th
century.
However, it’s not just about history in and of itself. To really know
the experience of the Chartres Cathedral for instance, one must go and
walk through it, and I think that we have actually replaced what used to
be coursework and lectures with things like summers abroad in which
students get out and physically see the work. I think this is the best way
to learn, and an easy way to learn. So I would place the emphasis more
on theory than on history, which seems already through travel to be
part of the normal understanding of what an architect should be.
Audience - Someone today mentioned that we are currently striving
for sustainability without a coherent philosophical framework. I think
that is where the combination of architecture and neuroscience can
provide a framework which significantly empowers architecture as a
solver of social problems as well as an enabler of intellectual develop-
ment. Could you maybe elaborate on that point?

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Robinson - Certainly there is a vacuum left by the intellectual excess-
es of the last three decades, and I agree with you about neuroscience.
But it is a tricky proposition because there aren’t enough neuroscien-
tists like Vittorio Gallese. There are some neuroscientists still locked
into the mechanistic world view. Vittorio, maybe you could talk more
about that?
Gallese - Recently at a meeting that I attended, someone used the
term neurohubris. This might be what you are referring to, but I would
say that it depends very much on your topic of investigation. I started
studying the brain in order to acquire a better understanding of how
we map spatial relationships between our body and the body of
someone else, or between our body and objects. So I was dealing with
the relationship between space and body, and quite soon I discovered
that reading Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception could be
enormously enriching for our perspective. So I didn’t use neuroscience
to prove that phenomenology was right but the other way around.
If anything my first readings and the philosophy affecting my work
were definitely in the analytical camp. One of the earliest books that I
read on this subject was Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the
Mind-Brain by Patricia Churchland and that led me to Daniel Dennett’s
work as well. Dealing with space and coming closer and closer to the
idea that the mapping of space was heavily dependent on the mo-
tor capabilities of the individual, I discovered that these things were
pretty well discussed within this tradition of thought. But for many
years my colleagues were blaming these philosophical readings and
when people in your field start calling you a ‘dead philosopher’ it’s not
exactly a compliment. They think you are diluting your scientific cred-
ibility with some blah, blah. So it can be dangerous, but it depends in
part on the topic that you’re dealing with. It’s better to do one job, than
to do two jobs at the same time because you have to study and become
acquainted with the different literature, attend a different set of meet-
ings and so on. It’s like leading a double life, which is interesting but
also brings up problems.
So what you say is true. Too much cognitive neuroscience is de-
terministic. Too much cognitive neuroscience is still—unknowingly
or knowingly—based on a model of cognition that empirical data has
disproved or at least greatly reduced in heuristic value. So I think we
need to build more opportunities for people—particularly for young
people—to become mutually acquainted with the approaches and
the problems. This begins by selecting people who are interested in
the first place, and believe me there are more and more people in my
field who are interested in investigating what makes us human. Until
recently it was only language. Now people have discovered that before
language, you can recognize other activities that are uniquely hu-
man including art and architecture. Duke University for instance, has
launched a program in ‘neurohumanities’ which is chaired jointly by a
neuroscientist and a scholar in French philology. At the Salk Institute
they have initiated an Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture. The
problem I think is that when you want to do research you must fund
it, and in order to fund your research you must apply for grants. Most
of the grants in Europe today ask you to invent some novel machine
that will allow paralyzed people to fly or something of that sort. There
is less and less money for basic research. That is a big drawback, and
we need to convince our politicians that while betting one billion euros
in ten years to reproduce the human mind on a computer is ok, they
should also give money (much less money, but still some money) to
people like us who are interested in learning more about basic ques-
tions. Before reproducing the human mind on a computer, I am inter-
ested in figuring out what the human mind is all about! It seems that
this should be the strategy to start, but many people believe they know
this already and that is the problem.
Pallasmaa - Vittorio mentioned this dual attention or dual position.
Sarah, since I introduced you as both a philosopher and an architect,
how do you address that interaction? I know that we have many
pragmatic colleagues here and elsewhere who think philosophy has
nothing to offer to architecture.
Robinson - I think that each person’s mind works the way that
it works and there is no getting around that. You do what comes
naturally to you, and I naturally drifted into philosophy because
that’s what I was interested in. Then I became frustrated with how
ungrounded it was, and I thought architecture might be a compliment
to that. I am person that needs to do more than one thing and that is a
limitation, but it’s also not a choice. You are who you are.

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Architecture and Empathy Pallasmaa, Mallgrave, Robinson and Gallese
I want to go back to something you said earlier. You opened with
Edward O. Wilson, and in his recent book The Social Conquest of Earth
he says that when the nest—in his terms a human nest is created by
gathering around a fire and building a shelter, as Harry described—
came into existence, the size of the human brain skyrocketed. I think
that in this world of connectivity that we live in, where disciplines start
to grow together, what we have to realize is that we are coextensive
with our environment. Our nest, all our many nests, are fundamental in
shaping our experience and I think this is what you all said in various
ways. Having a philosophy of the nest seems to be a necessary thing.
Contributor Biographies
Juhani Pallasmaa
Finnish architect, educator, and critic Juhani Pallasmaa, SAFA, Hon.
FAIA, Int FRIBA, is a leading international figure in contemporary
architecture, design, and art culture. His numerous books include
Encounters 1 and 2 (2006 and 2012), Understanding Architecture (2012, in
collaboration with Robert McCarter), The Embodied Image (2011), and
The Thinking Hand (2009) and many others. From 2008 to 2013 he served
on the jury for the Pritzker Prize for Architecture.
Harry Francis Mallgrave
For more than 30 years Harry Francis Mallgrave has worked as an
architect, editor, translator, teacher, and historian. In the last capacity
he has authored more than a dozen books, and his current one, in the
final stages of completion, is entitled Theory and Design in the Age of
Biology: Reflections on the ‘Art’ of Building. Currently he is a professor
of history and theory at Illinois Institute of Technology, at which he is
also the director of International Center for Sustainable New Cities.
Sarah Robinson
Sarah Robinson is a practicing architect who studied Philosophy at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Fribourg in
Switzerland before attending the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Archi-
tecture, where she earned her M.Arch and later served as the founding
chair of the Board of Governors. She is the author of Nesting: Body,
Dwelling, Mind and Mind in Architecture: Neuroscience, Embodiment and
the Future of Design, with Juhani Pallasmaa, (MIT press 2015), as well as
numerous literary and academic essays. She lives in Pavia, Italy.
Vittorio Gallese
Vittorio Gallese, MD, PhD, is a Professor of Physiology at the
Department of Neuroscience at the University of Parma, Italy. His
research interests focus on the cognitive role of the motor system
and on an embodied account of social cognition. Among his most
important contributions to the field is his identification, together with
his colleagues at Parma, of mirror neurons and the elaboration of a
theoretical model of social cognition—embodied simulation theory.

Architecture and Empathy
About the TWRB Foundation
The Tapio Wirkkala – Rut Bryk Foundation was established in 2003 to
carry on the legacy of the artist-designer couple Tapio Wirkkala and
Rut Bryk. Both were enthusiastic designers and tireless experimenters
who embraced new developments in technology and craft. Working
across disciplines, they expanded the range of design possibilities
through material and technical innovation.
Today the TWRB Foundation maintains the Wirkkala-Bryk archive
to support research on the work of the designers, and maintains their
spirit and passionate commitment to design education. In collaboration
with universities and educational institutions around the world the
foundation supports discussions, seminars, conferences, master classes
and scholarly projects as well as publications, awards and scholarships
related to design. In addition, it collaborates with museums and other
institutions to produce exhibitions and publications on the work of
Tapio Wirkkala and Rut Bryk.
As part of the centennial celebration of the couple, the TWRB foundation
hosts a series of public events that consider design across a range of
disciplinary boundaries. The Design Reader series documents these
events and the ideas that they generate.
Current Members of the TWRB Foundation Board
Mikko Heikkinen
Esa Laaksonen
Juhani Pallasmaa
Laura Sarvilinna
Petra Wirkkala-Vaarne
Maaria Wirkkala
Markku Valkonen

The Tapio Wirkkala - Rut Bryk Design Reader
series documents seminars, symposia and
other public events that consider design
across a range of disciplinary boundaries.
ISBN-10 0692539194
9 780692 539194