Late Roman Villas and Cognitive Science

Abstract

If you look at the Baths of Caracalla … we all know that we can bathe just as well under an 8-foot ceiling as we can under a 150-foot ceiling … but I believe there's something about a 150-foot ceiling that makes a man a different kind of man.Without the benefit of cognitive or evolutionary theory, late Roman villa patrons and designers intuited their way toward houses that engaged and strongly affected the emotions of inhabitants and visitor participants. Through the lens of their unique cultural moment, they discovered and deployed strategies that respond to certain innate and universal human needs. These were the aspects of a formal language of design that arose from a competitive 'architectural arms race' among a newly minted elite in the era of the late empire, which left a heritage that echoes through the history of architecture. Through the application of methods in cognitive science we can recover some of those strategies and understand their effects with a new specificity. Cognitive science confirms, continues, and elucidates earlier discoveries in phenomenology and psychology, placing the embodied and active human agent into the center of the experience of ancient architecture.

The architectural experience of the Kasbah of Algiers: Insights from le Corbusier’s experience and neuroarchitecture

“…The hippocampus and the parahippocampal areas act as cognitive maps to create mental representation of the environment in the brain (Moffat, 2016). They are recognized as the key sites for consolidating long-term memories for storage (Stephenson, 2019). Neuroimaging studies show that the entorhinal cortex, the subiculum, and the dentate gyrus are also involved in spatial navigation (Jain et al, 2017).…”