Definitions of space are as diverse as the disciplines in which it plays a fundamental role; from science and philosophy to art and architecture, each field’s perception of space is often simplified or reduced. This consequently denies access to ‘new spaces’, whose definitions and perspectives, strategies and impacts on human perception are rarely considered in any cohesive manner. This is where the Aedes Network Campus Berlin (ANCB) programme ‘No Space Without Traits’ came in: particularly through artistic approaches, it aimed to open doors into spatial worlds that until now have remained closed. The symposium ‘PERCEPTION in Architecture. HERE and NOW’ was part of this programme and invited critical and comprehensive contributions by academics, artists, architects, designers and curators. These presentations are brought together in this volume to reflect upon new spatial concepts and thus access ‘new spaces’ of perception in architecture. The symposium stimulated a discourse focused on spaces as a collective entity, notions of spatial truth, the multiplicity of experience, and Wahrnehmnungsapparate, as well as physical, visual, acoustic and virtual manifestations of space in relation to social, cultural, historical and political forces.

Certain aspects and contexts of the perception of architecture can best be explained by means of images - that is the idea upon which this book is based. The author has divided selected structural details into individual chapters, including such subjects as space, color, dynamics and surface. The reader can discover analogies as well as contradictions and view the photos completely independent of the texts. In the back of the book all the information about the structures depicted in the front can be found, as well as a complete view of the buildings and texts about architecture and perception. The photographs were taken in foreign countries on every continent and depict a great number of famous and representative structures from different ages and cultures.

This book makes the extremely complex process of architectural perception far more transparent and thus contributes to a better understanding of our built environment. Why is there so much debate about the appearance of our built environment, about the aesthetics of architecture today? Why do opinions about the aesthetic quality of buildings often diverge extremely even among experts? Why can’t we agree on architecture, on what is beautiful and what is not? Most areas of construction, such as statics and building physics, are measurable and can therefore be substantiated with objective arguments. Yet this does not apply to the unquantifiable aesthetics of architecture. Accordingly, judgments on aesthetics are always subject-specific, and strongly dependent on the viewer. Nevertheless, the aesthetics of architecture is not just a matter of taste. Many relationships between buildings as objects and viewers as subjects can be determined objectively with the help of perceptual psychology and information theory, as this book demonstrates.

This book discusses the design of comfortable buildings and shows that design perception and, as a result, comfort should be an intentional feature of architectural design. Modern buildings are often sealed boxes without operable windows or daylighting design. However, contemporary designers increasingly find themselves faced with the task of creating spaces that are comfortable in terms of thermal and visual aspects.

A highly interdisciplinary work, The Black Skyscraper reclaims the influence of race on modern architectural design as well as the less-well-understood effects these designs had on the experience and perception of race.

Scale is a word which underlies much of architectural and urban design practice, its history and theory, and its technology. Its connotations have traditionally been linked with the humanities, in the sense of relating to human societies and to human form. ‘To build in scale’ is an aspiration that is usually taken for granted by most of those involved in architectural production, as well as by members of the public; yet in a world where value systems of all kinds are being questioned, the term has come under renewed scrutiny. The older, more particular, meanings in the humanities, pertaining to classical Western culture, are where the sense of scale often resides in cultural production. Scale may be traced back, ultimately, to the discovery of musical harmonies, and in the arithmetic proportional relationship of the building to its parts. One might question the continued relevance of this understanding of scale in the global world of today. What, in other words, is culturally specific about scale? And what does scale mean in a world where an intuitive, visual understanding is often undermined or superseded by other senses, or by hyper-reality? Structured thematically in three parts, this book addresses various issues of scale. The book includes an introduction which sets the scene in terms of current architectural discourse and also contains a visual essay in each section. It is of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, academics and practitioners in architecture and architectural theory as well as to students in a range of other disciplines including art history and theory, geography, anthropology and landscape architecture.