Perception

 

What does one mean to convert an experience into an architectural one?

I find my bedroom comfortable in winter, but not in summer.

Bedroom indicates some scale and proportion of space. The question is how do I realize that it is a bedroom? This deals with the experience of how perception works for a human mind and by analysis or observation (both terms being inclusive) one realizes that the perception depends on ALL known senses, nervous system, brain power and our mind (social constructs). In our daily experience that means a ‘space’ is NOT JUST visual, but also tactile, olfactory, acoustic, gustatory. Logically this means that Space gets perceived depending on the quality or the nature of our senses. Same space may mean different things to different life forms. In above sentence, a particular mixture of external stimuli (air, temperature, light, colours, odour, sound) and its interpretation by ‘myself’ gives the space a definition of a ‘bedroom’.

How does space become ‘comfortable’ to someone or to a human being? Is the sense of comfort a universal feeling or is it contextual? Does it depend on space-time phenomenon or not?

Enlightened Souls mention that the idea of ‘comfort’ is a universal idea (existing in all people) and a particular arrangement of external stimuli can assist in generating that feeling. Now the challenge is in discovering this arrangement in a given situation! Architectural response to this feeling includes connections to outside environment by strategic arrangement of elements to filter external stimuli in appropriate doses, reverence to values of climate and construction processes, multiuse of spaces, a feeling of community that the space may assist in generating, a process of self doing, self maintaining and sharing. Architectural processes that somehow include these factors may develop feelings of comfort in us. This feeling can also be generated in form of language, expressions, art, any given technology. So feelings and ‘us’ are not separate, rather they exist with us.

The above knowledge also includes the importance of local/traditional wisdom of perceiving connections of environment with us and the appropriate response to create a built environment. Several books such as ‘A Pattern Language’, ‘Timeless way of Building’, ‘House, Form and Culture’, ‘Contemporary Treatise in Architecture’, ‘Architecture without Architects’ express this wisdom.

On earth, there are several situations and several ways of perceiving those situations and creating habitats – ALL are valid. It is upto us to acknowledge them, to give them a chance to continue nourishing and enriching other value systems. If not done so, other parallel value systems will be lost forever and what will remain is an extremely flat way of perceiving a situation – in fact, that means no collective memory of humanity at all (since memory means continuation of different processes and changes), equivalent to psychological/cultural murder!