Sensory architecture

ARC605 | Fall 2008
Professor Beth Tauke

While our experience of the world is based on our combined sensory systems, Western culture and its architectural production historically has favored sight. The “ocular bias of our culture” has suppressed other sensory realms, and this has shifted our understanding of the role of architecture. Because of technological advances, often our first exposure to architecture today is through visual media. As a result, our understanding of architecture is an understanding of its representation rather than its actuality (or, at the very least, representation and actuality become ambiguated in the process).

This studio explored several realms of sensory experience including those described by J.J. Gibson as the visual system, auditory system, taste-smell system, the basic-orienting system, and the haptic system.