Towards an empathic architecture

Increasingly in recent years, different disciplinary knowledge has sought to overcome the traditional dichotomy between the natural sciences and the humanities, i.e., between a method based on “explaining”, that seek random connections and universal and necessary laws in accordance with a nomothetic arrangement, and a method based on “understanding” and in particular on empathic understanding – Einfühlung – in its various articulations, developed within the hermeneutical philosophical tradition and upon the idiographic nature of observation. In the last years, architecture has also opened up new perspectives in order to provide the designer with a better understanding of “who we are and how we actually engage the world”, as Harry Francis Mallgrave writes in his recent book (2018). Long before the Sars-Cov-2 pandemic crisis forced us to stop, leading us to think more about the spaces of our daily lives and their direct influence on the well-being (or malaise) of our bodies, some factors have contributed to what has been defined as an "emotional turn": they include the progress made by the neurosciences (particularly, the discovery of Mirror Neurons System), the resumption of phenomenological themes with the development of the “new phenomenology” and of atmospherological aesthetics, and, closely related to these, the rediscovery of empathy as a fundamental fact of human nature and perhaps the chief way in which understanding is organized in the consciousness of human action. Starting from the salient developments of embodied cognition since the 1980’s, this essay will underline an idea of architecture as a “shared continuum” between the human and the natural, that is between nature and culture, body and mind, self and world, to regain in architectural design a dimension linked - in the phenomenological tradition - to the living body, in which the rediscovery of empathy becomes the possibility to articulate an understanding of space that hinges upon feeling and human action.