The mind/body thought. Empathic cognition from Einfühlung to embodied simulation.

From Rasmussen’s "Experiencing architecture" to "Questions of perception" by Holl, Pallasmaa, Pérez-Gomez, and Mallgrave’s recent book "From object to experience", the empathic and affective condition has taken on increasingly central importance in the reflection on architecture. This essay covers certain salient moments in the development of empathy in aesthetic criticism and phenomenological philosophy, emphasizing the cultural and scientific factors that recently contributed to what has been defined as an “emotional turn”. Particular emphasis is given to the developments, since the 1980s, of embodied cognition and to the perceptive model of embodied simulation which, following the discovery of mirror neurons, may today constitute the functional basis of empathy – that affective empathy which we must, however, place alongside a reconstructive empathy that, starting from the perceiver’s lived experiences, requires attention, imagination, and memory. In this convergence between natural sciences (with particular attention to the cognitive sciences and neurosciences) and human sciences, architecture can regain a dimension – in the phenomenological tradition – linked to the living body, in which the rediscovery of empathy becomes the possibility to articulate an understanding of space (in both use and design) that hinges upon feeling and human action.