Attunement: Architecture After the Crisis of Modern Science
June 22nd, 2021
Zoom Meeting
Alberto Pérez-Gómez, professor emeritus of McGill University, discusses his book Attunement: Architecture After the Crisis of Modern Science, accompanied by David Gersten, founding director of Arts Letters & Numbers. This public talk is presented as part of “SunShip: The Arc That Makes The Flood Possible,” Arts Letters & Numbers’ exhibition in the CITYX Venice Italian Virtual Pavilion of the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale.
Architecture remains in crisis, its social relevance lost between the two poles of formal innovation and technical sustainability. This lecture discusses possibilities for an architecture that can enhance our human values and capacities, an architecture that is connected--attuned--to its location and its inhabitants. Architecture, a multisensory--not pictorial--experience, operates as a communicative setting for societies; its beauty and its meaning lie in its connection to human health and self-understanding.
Drawing on recent work in embodied cognition, the lecture argues that the environment, including the built environment, matters not only as a material ecology but because it is nothing less than a constituent part of our consciousness. Our physical places are of utmost importance for our wellbeing. Architecture is seen through the lens of mood and atmosphere, linking these ideas to the key German concept of Stimmung--attunement--with roots in Pythagorean harmony and Vitruvian temperance (or proportion), and its modern reliance of the linguistic nature of the human imagination.