Yanni Wang: April 2019

Sources:

This Is Your Brain on Architecture

Not just conscious thoughts, but non-conscious impressions, feedback from our senses, physical movement, and even split-second mental simulations of that movement shape how we respond to a place, Goldhagen argues. And in turn, the place nudges us to think or behave in certain ways.

Their individual psychology mattered a lot less in terms of their experience and behavior than the environments they were in. So there isn’t this opposition between looking at it as a social construct versus experiential construct. It’s all the same thing. It’s a continuum.

“Architecture Should be About What It Can Do, Not What it Can Look Like”: In Conversation with Michel Rojkind

It is true that both music and architecture have such common qualities as rhythm and repetition. But to me, the essence is somewhere else. I see all disciplines as boundless and interconnected.

I want to activate and interconnect spaces...Also, we, as architects, should not worry about designing everything 100%. We need to leave space for things to happen and let people take over.

"The Future is a Spreading Matrix": In Conversation with Sou Fujimoto

Creating spaces where people can feel as if they’re in a forest or can feel the openness to the sky. In a natural environment, you can choose your own path

That was when I realized that nature and artifacts, though different, can still create similar spatial experiences. And within the artificial spaces of the city, there are always natural elements.

Design Theory: Boundless

The concept is boundless, through blurred separation lines between indoor studying areas and outdoor environment, the spaces in between communicate and are interrelated with each other. This can activate the learning environment by providing an environment that maximizes interaction between functions and human activities.

Moreover, the blurred walls and moving elements create different and ever-changing special experiences for users(by shadows, openness, natural light, etc.), that students can have individual preferences for various activities.

The concept of boundlessness also represents UNSW as a welcoming cultural-diverse and multidisciplinary learning environment.

Keywords from source: boundless, interconnect, choose, openness, spatial

Sarah Williams Goldhagen stated that the built environments would influence our behaviors and shape our life drastically more significant than we assumed. Colin Ellard's experiment further demonstrated that the stress level for human beings was dramatically lowered when people walking past something more visually diverse than generic boring buildings. However, these findings were difficult to apply to the design of educational institutions since the individual perception of the world was very subjective and cannot be defined.

Michel Rojkind and Sou Fujimoto also supported the significance of individual preferences based on either interconnected spaces or freedom of choice of path in nature in the conversations.

These theories and ideas lead us to rethink about the purposes of architectures schools: how to impact students positively and facilitate their learning processes through the nature of architecture. The answer given by this design is blurring the boundary of spaces (indoor, outdoor and the environment) to achieve the free learning environment.

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