IAS Seminar: Searching for Humanity in the Forest of Abstractions

IAS Guest Speaker Professor Sergei Gepshtein delivers a seminar on their research:

A community of scientists and architects has been forming for years around the hope that the sciences of perception, cognition, and behavior could deepen architecture’s understanding of people. A significant literature emerged in support of this expectation. But the work remains marginal to both professions. One reason is that science and architecture hold incompatible abstractions of the person. For experimental science, the person is an observer isolated from surroundings and purpose; for architecture, a figure supplied by theory rather than study. With neither abstraction given priority, I describe a way forward in three parts. First, a new basis of inquiry is emerging, different from the assumptions of either field. Second, this basis brings into view questions that science could have asked long ago but did not, for want of occasion. Third, a new model of education must prepare people to work from this basis and pursue these questions.

Dr. Sergei Gepshtein is a scientist and professor whose work spans perceptual psychology, systems neuroscience, and computational neuroscience, with particular emphasis on depth and motion perception, perceptual organization, and the dynamics of biological networks. He is President of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, a professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California San Diego, a founding member of the World Building Institute, and founding director of the Center for Spatial Perception & Concrete Experience at the University of Southern California. His work has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Kavli Institute, the Swartz Foundation, and Japan’s National Institutes of Natural Sciences. He is developing interdisciplinary curricula that combine the mechanistic accounts developed in science with the experiential and humanistic perspectives central to design.

Arrivals from 11.45am for a 12pm start. For those joining in-person, lunch will be served after the seminar from 1:00pm.