Attunement

<b>How architecture can move beyond the contemporary enthusiasms for the technically sustainable and the formally dazzling to enhance our human values and capacities.</b><p>Architecture remains in crisis its social relevance lost between the two poles of formal innovation and technical sustainability. In <i>Attunement</i> Alberto Pérez-Gómez calls for an architecture that can enhance our human values and capacities an architecture that is connected--attuned--to its location and its inhabitants. Architecture Pérez-Gómez explains operates as a communicative setting for societies; its beauty and its meaning lie in its connection to human health and self-understanding.</p><p>Our physical places are of utmost importance for our well-being. Drawing on recent work in embodied cognition Pérez-Gómez argues that the environment including the built environment matters not only as a material ecology but because it is nothing less than a constituent part of our consciousness. To be fully self-aware we need an external environment replete with meanings and emotions.</p><p>Pérez-Gómez views architecture through the lens of mood and atmosphere linking these ideas to the key German concept of <i>Stimmung</i>--attunement--and its roots in Pythagorean harmony and Vitruvian temperance or proportion. He considers the primacy of place over space; the linguistic aspect of architecture--the voices of architecture and the voice of the architect; architecture as a multisensory (not pictorial) experience with Piranesi Ledoux and Hejduk as examples of metaphorical modeling; and how <i>Stimmung</i> might be put to work today to realize the contemporary possibilities of attunement.</p>