Architecture is a Verb

A veritable encyclopedia of ideas, all pressing toward one sage insight: good design—far from being an act of technocratic rationality—resides in the poetic, festive, and cultural interplay between self and other, or better, the art of exploring the depth of our visceral engagement with the world. All else is inhumanity.

—Harry Francis Mallgrave, Emeritus Director of Architectural and Theory program at Illinois Institute of Technology and the author of The Architect’s Brain, Architecture and Embodiment and From Object to Experience, among other books.

Robinson’s clear prose brings hope—stitching together insights from philosophy, existential phenomenology, the cognitive sciences, ethology, psychology, anthropology, architectural and literary history, to shed light on possibilities that are open to designers and architects in our complex world. . . in an intellectual poetics meant to evoke, resonate and make you think.

—Alberto Pérez Gómez, Director of the History and Architecture Program at McGill University and author of Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science, Built Upon Love and Attunement, among other books.

Architecture has been incessantly theorized, taught and practiced merely as an art of aestheticised material structures and space. Sarah Robinson presents architecture convincingly and inspiringly as a network of relationships, actions and interactions; buildings reveal, structure and articulate our encounters and relations with the world. Through deftly weaving knowledge from diverse disciplines ranging from philosophy to psychology, anthropology to neuroscience and history to poetics—this book opens up comprehensive and balanced but truly radical views of the complex phenomenon of architecture. The reader will surely encounter and experience buildings differently after having read this significant book.

—Juhani Pallasmaa, Architect, Professor emeritus (Aalto University), Writer, Member of the Pritzker Architecture Prize Jury, 2008-2014