Featured Article | Gaining Insights into the Spatial Revolution from Architecture and Neuroscience

To our Korean readers,
preface

Introduction | The Next Environmental Revolution

Chapter 1 | The Boring Buildings and Regrettable Places We Live In
Four Types of Regrettable Spaces
We are paying the price for a poor built environment.
The minimum infrastructure necessary for urban life
The same goes for suburban life and suburban scenery.
The process by which the environment in which we live is determined
Why are these regrettable scenes endlessly reproduced?

Chapter 2 | You Are Where You Live
Cognitive Architecture: A New Paradigm for Understanding Experience in the Built Environment
Experiencing Unconscious Cognition in the Built Environment: A Walk Through the Village
Finding Your Way Through Prime and Space: Rectangular and Hexagonal Grids
Two Ways of Understanding the Environment: Direct Response and Metaphorical Schema
Intentional and Unintentional Experiences: The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin
At the Center of Autobiographical Memory: Places Become Us

Chapter 3 | Mind and Body Are Connected
embodied mind
The body that fills the world
The Body and 'The Bean': Peripheral and Extrinsic Spaces and Affordances in Chicago
The Workings of the Embodied Mind: Texture, Surface, and Metaphor in Antwerp's Stream Museum
The Sensational Orchestra of Amiens Cathedral: 'Feeling' the Presence of a Higher Being

Chapter 4 | Nature Determines How We Experience Our Environment
Humans who need nature
Manipulating Human Experience through Form: Louis Kahn's 'Profound Reverence for the Essence of Nature'
Manipulating human experience through materials, textures, and details
Perception for Action: Surfaces Activate Imagination
A Human Bureaucracy: Alvar Aalto's "Integration of Nature and Culture"
21st Century: Integrating the Built Environment into Nature

Chapter 5 | Are We Happy in 'Space'?
The city as a social world
The social world is a stage for activity.
Home as Shelter: Place Attachment in the Arena
A stage of activity in the social world
GSD: A look at the educational activity stage
Future tasks

Chapter 6 | Design for Humans
Patterns of Order: Embodied Mathematics, Embodied Physics
Complementing Patterns with Complexity
Incorporating design into the built environment
Personality: A Puzzle of Well-Chosen Metaphors
Formality and Freedom: A Broad Aesthetics of Experience

Chapter 7 | Design for Quality of Life and the Environment
Design that enhances human capabilities
A rich environment that enhances human capabilities
Enriched Environment × Facilitating Conscious Cognition: Conscious Cognition That Increases a Sense of Control
Moving forward

Acknowledgments | And a Word About Photography

List of illustrations
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“An insightful guide that will broaden our understanding of happy spaces!”
_Highly recommended by neuroscientist Professor Jaeseung Jeong!

A masterpiece born from seven years of research after stepping down from his position as a professor at Harvard Design School!

If you look back at the memories of people who had happy childhoods, they say that there was always a nature-friendly space in the place where they lived as children.
This is a new finding from research on the human brain: the memories that shape an individual's self are all deeply connected to place.
It is only recently that research has begun to explore how deeply the environments we build influence our emotions, memories, and the formation of healthy emotions and well-being.


Sarah Williams Goldhagen, a leading American architectural critic, guides readers around the world and even into their own minds through her book, "The Spatial Revolution."
The author argues that the groundbreaking technological advances in neuroscience over the past few decades have shed new light on how the human brain influences our experience of the built environment, and that a new conceptual framework is now needed for how we think about and experience the built world.


This book is a masterpiece that the author dedicated seven years to completing after stepping down from his position as a professor at Harvard University.
Drawing on cutting-edge research in cognitive neuroscience and environmental psychology, the author details how rooms, buildings, and city squares influence us and our responses to shapes, patterns, light, color, sound, and texture.
Afterwards, we turn our gaze outside the buildings and guide you through some of the world's best and worst buildings, landscapes, and cityscapes, including the Parthenon in Athens, the World Trade Center in Manhattan, Amiens Cathedral in France, the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, and the 798 Art District in Beijing.
All this is accompanied by over 150 stunning photographs, carefully selected from human eye level.

Embodied cognition and metaphorical schemas,
Interactions between humans and the environment that occur in areas that cannot be expressed in words

The inspiration for this book dates back to an experience the author had in Florence with his family about 40 years ago.
The author, feeling extremely upset after wandering around for a long time unable to find the hotel, leaves the hotel and walks aimlessly.
Then, suddenly, the scenery I saw made me feel like I was in a completely new place, as the negative emotions that had been weighing me down were relieved.


We have the same experiences as the author every day.
Although we often dismiss these experiences as coincidences, they are precisely the kind of experiences that occur unintentionally and are exemplars of the embodied mind and non-cognitive cognition that this book is about.
Why do people choose eco-friendly vacation destinations? Is it true that children raised in the countryside have better emotional well-being? Does creativity truly flourish in places with high ceilings? Why do tests performed better in the same classroom where they received their classes? It's a fascinating and novel process to discover what we've long subconsciously believed to be true.


This book goes beyond questioning what it means to live in an architectural space that ignores human needs, revealing that the built environment and its design are far more important to everyone, even architects, than they once thought.
By providing examples of good and bad architectural design in the buildings already built around us and detailing how humans react to them, it presents a cognitive neurological basis for what design for humans is.
The book's numerous examples, accompanied by stunning photographs, clearly demonstrate how a person's experiences in the built environment shape their personality, emotions, and even their self-esteem and capabilities.


Things that affect the capacity of an individual or society and increase or decrease stress levels
Now we can talk about good design!

In the past, it was considered too difficult to explain design and architecture in universal terms other than intuition or taste, but recent technological advancements have made it possible to measure and explain how humans experience and feel about their environment.
Thanks to this, it is becoming increasingly common to reflect research results from cognitive science, such as user-centered design (UX design) and the 'haptic' theory that touch influences human judgment, even in the design of palm-sized mobile phones.


The importance of reflecting human experience-centered design in the built environments we will experience for decades goes without saying.
Construction is slow, but that's why it has to be faster.
Spatial design that enhances human capacity and reduces stress will help us live happier and more humane lives amidst complex and chaotically developed buildings.
Through this book, the author presents a new paradigm for how we should understand the relationship between humans and the built environment, and clearly explains what constitutes good spatial design.


The built environment shapes not only our external world but also our internal world.
In other words, the places we live create us.
If so, then by resetting the relationship between the built environment and humans, we can actively change many aspects of our lives.
We now have countless buildings before us, and this represents an endless opportunity to make the world a better place.
Built on a logical analysis of space and life, coupled with optimistic hope, this book is sure to resonate deeply with readers who want to contemplate a new future for the built environment.