Interventions on Cultural Heritage: Architecture and Neuroscience for Mindful Projects

The paper aims to investigate the intersections between the disciplines of Architecture and Neuroscience focusing on interventions on cultural heritage. Starting from the assumption that the main objective of architecture is ensuring the well-being of the inhabitants at different scales, and that architecture (with its forms, its proportions, its spatial hierarchies, its relationships) generates behaviors, the authors investigate the terrain of overlap with neuroscience, (particularly in its openings towards the disciplines of psychology, social and behavioral sciences) in order to design meaningful cultural experiences. The concept of disciplinary contamination regarding cultural heritage is not to be discussed only in physical terms, but also in intangible terms including all social and cultural values of heritage buildings and sites. This is also because values associated with cultural heritage can be protected and enriched by an approach that generates reactions on a cognitive and emotional level, and it needs to be mediated both at the level of architectural interventions and museography. For this reason, starting from the first intuitions that some designers had during the twentieth century, the paper investigates possible ways of collaboration and experimentation and refers to studies currently underway.