Course Syllabus

Nervous Systems

See Nervous Systems syllabus here:

roy_nervous systems syllabus.pdf

Course Description

Architecture borrowed the idea of the cognitive map from neuroscience in the 1960s and got it wrong. Today, as cognitive, biology-based technologies – artificial intelligence, robotics, virtual, mixed, and augmented reality - infiltrate life and reshape architectural thought and production, the expanding view of cognitive maps now emerging in neuroscience could provide insight to designers negotiating the socio-political, ecological, cultural, and technological into melded assemblies of matter and data in which human and more-than-human intelligence commingle.

In weekly readings and media viewing in the first half of the semester, we will explore the worlds of sensing, motion, adapting and decision-making inherent to neuroscience through the lens of design. Students will develop specific areas of interest for in-class presentation and discussion during the remaining weeks. We will see that ideas may in fact be inscribed in space, only not in the way architects imagine. Nervous systems situate thought and ideas along a gradient of abstraction, from physical to purely conceptual. As a discipline that operates at the confluence of space and thought, what new relationships could architecture activate? What new behaviors?

Similarly, while architects engage in an energy economy usually confined to the thermodynamics of materials and bodies in space, bio-electrical events - encryptions of the outside world inside our brains - encompass the broader reality that every encounter between brain and environment, every thought, action, or decision, is a transformation of one form of energy into another - we are in fact continuous with our world.  

The cognitive map was used by architects and urban designers as a metaphor decades ago, but it is not a metaphor. It is a model for dealing with uncertainty, risk, and change. Today when new models for architectural thought and action are urgently needed, it is a useful one.