After being concerned with neuroarchitecture, I have wondered whether there have been the consideration about ‘a sort of’ neuroscience when architects have designed buildings. Recently, the neuroarchitecture, that is the fusion of neuroscience and architecture, receives attention as the new field in architecture. But I have thought that during designing a building there have been this consideration from the past, just designers have not called it ‘neuroscience’. I paid attention to the architectural theses for the verification of this consideration. The architectural theses suggest analyses, ways and alternatives about architectural design’s main trend of its time through the objective verification. Therefore I judged that the study of contemporary architectural theses could guess the directivity of contemporary architectural design. Accordingly, I analyzed whether latest architectural theses have considered ‘a sort of’ neuroscience.
The process of this analysis is as follows.
(1) The collection of all theses being published in the Journal of the Architectural Institute of Korea Planning and Design Section, from July to December in 2011.
(2) The extraction of the theses that have the title or keywords related neuroscience’s keywords.
(3) The analysis of the extracted theses’ properties in respect of keywords, uses, and ways.
(4) The classification of 3 grades in accordance with the degree of relation with neuroscience.
(5) The analysis of the most related theses(1st grade) in detail, and the introduction of representative theses.
(6) The conclusion of the analyses about relation between architectural theses and neuroscience.
All subjects of this analysis were 213(100%) theses. The extracted subjects that had the title or keywords related neuroscience’s keywords were 86(40%) theses. Among them, the subjects being judged as related with neuroscience were 50(23%) theses, and they were classified as 3 grades in accordance with the degree of relation with neuroscience through the analysis of the keywords, uses, and ways. The most related subjcets(1st grade) were 17(8%) theses, and they were classified as 9 groups: area cognition, streetscape vocabulary, exhibition user’s movement sight, commercial sight, office environment, emotion sense, space psychology, egress route, and agent modeling. Among 17 subjects, 3 theses were introduced.
As a result, it was estimated that about 10~20% theses of the architectural planning and design theses considered ‘a sort of’ neuroscience. That means the architectural design have considered ‘a sort of’ neuroscience and it will be continuous. In addition, if the ‘neuroscience’, that provides scientific and objective evidence, is applied to the architectural design practically, the design can obtain the ‘trust’ through the evidence and objectivity instead of abstraction and subjectivity. We can expect the innovative future image of architectural design through the ‘valuable fusion’ of neuroscience and architecture.