Buildings shape our identity and sense of self in profound ways that are not always evident to architects and town planners, or even to those who think they are intimately familiar with the buildings they inhabit. Architecture and the Mimetic Self provides a useful theoretical guide to our unconscious behaviour in relation to buildings, and explains both how and why we are drawn to specific elements and features of architectural design. It reveals how even the most uninspiring of buildings can be modified to meet our unconscious expectations and requirements of them—and, by the same token, it explores the repercussions for our wellbeing when buildings fail to do so. Criteria for effective architectural design have for a long time been grounded in utilitarian and aesthetic principles of function, efficiency, cost, and visual impact. Although these are important considerations, they often fail to meet the fundamental needs of those who inhabit and use buildings. Misconceptions are rife, not least because our responses to architecture are often difficult to measure, and are in large part unconscious. By bridging psychoanalytic thought and architectural theory, Architecture and the Mimetic Self frees the former from its preoccupations with interpersonal human relations to address the vital relationships that we establish with our nonhuman environments. In addition to providing a guide to the unconscious behaviours that are most relevant for evaluating architectural design, this book explains how our relationships with the built environment inform a more expansive and useful psychoanalytic theory of human relationship and identity. It will appeal to psychoanalysts and analytical psychologists, architects, and all who are interested in the overlaps of psychology, architecture, and the built environment.

Humans are imitative beings. The imitation of preferred masters and forms is natural to artists and architects but also the root cause of their conflicts and rivalries, leading to what Ren Girard has called mimetic rivalry. Architects & Mimetic Rivalry is a discussion of the effects of this broad yet unrecognized phenomenon on the architects and architecture of today.

This engaging study discusses ways in which architectural forms emulate some archetypal settings that humans have found appealing--and useful for survival--from ancient times to the present. 119 photos. 6 line figures.

Draw In Order to See is the first book to survey the history of architectural design using the latest research in cognitive science and embodied cognition. Beginning with a primer on visual perception, cognitive science, design thinking, and modes of conception used by groups of architects in their practices, Mark Alan Hewitt surveys a 12,000-year period for specific information about the cognitive schemata used by Homo sapiens to make their buildings and habitats. The resulting history divides these modes of thinking into three large cognitive arcs: crafting, depicting, and assembling, within specific temporal frames. His analysis borrows from Merlin Donald's thesis about mimetic and symbolic cognition as critical to the emergence of the modern mind, and further employs theories of enactment and embodiment to clarify their relationship to architecture. Individual chapters treat the emergence of depiction during the Renaissance, the education of architects in the modern era, Baroque illusionism and scenography, the breakdown of artisanal literacy during the Enlightenment, and modern experiments with models, montage, and illusions of movement. The author concludes with a critique of contemporary design and education, and promotes design with embodiment as a tonic for a profession in crisis, facing the challenges of climate change, energy shortages, inequality, and housing a population of over seven billion in the coming decades. This groundbreaking and valuable study presents a clear view of current research in two related fields that have not heretofore been compared, and outlines a strategy for future research. An extensive bibliography offers readers an up-to-date reference to both the science and the architectural history behind the text.

A historical and theoretical analysis of corporate architecture in the United States after the Second World War. The Organizational Complex is a historical and theoretical analysis of corporate architecture in the United States after the Second World War. Its title refers to the aesthetic and technological extension of the military-industrial complex, in which architecture, computers, and corporations formed a network of objects, images, and discourses that realigned social relations and transformed the postwar landscape. In-depth case studies of architect Eero Saarinen's work for General Motors, IBM, and Bell Laboratories and analyses of office buildings designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill trace the emergence of a systems-based model of organization in architecture, in which the modular curtain wall acts as both an organizational device and a carrier of the corporate image. Such an image—of the corporation as a flexible, integrated system—is seen to correspond with a "humanization" of corporate life, as corporations decentralize both spatially and administratively. Parallel analyses follow the assimilation of cybernetics into aesthetics in the writings of artist and visual theorist Gyorgy Kepes, as art merges with techno-science in the service of a dynamic new "pattern-seeing." Image and system thus converge in the organizational complex, while top-down power dissolves into networked, pattern-based control. Architecture, as one among many media technologies, supplies the patterns—images of organic integration designed to regulate new and unstable human-machine assemblages.

The first book to address the relationship between inner architecture and properties of natural materials, essential reading for anyone in materials research.