Perception

Definition

Perception names the process by which sensory input is organized, interpreted, and experienced — central to both phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty's embodied perception) and art-historical analysis (Gombrich's psychology of pictorial representation). In architectural discourse, perception ranges from the scale of bodily encounter with material and space (Pallasmaa's haptic perception) to the scale of urban movement (Venturi and Scott Brown's analysis of highway-speed perception) to the politics of mediated perception (Virilio's logistics of perception).

Key Thinkers

• E. H. Gombrich — Art and Illusion; perception as schema-and-correction, not passive recording.
• Edmund Husserl — the mechanism of perception: adumbrations (Abschattungen) — the object given facet-by-facet under "conditionals" and "relations of 'motivation'" (via Cerbone).
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty — embodied perception; the body as subject of perception; "the world is what we perceive" (via Smith).
• Juhani Pallasmaa — haptic perception as critique of ocularcentrism in architecture.
• Ross T. Smith — the pedagogical account: perception as trainable — the studio's aim "to transform the ways in which [students] perceive the world and themselves in it"; heightened perception as an acquired, irreversible condition.
• Paul Virilio — logistics of perception; speed, military technology, and the mediation of vision.
• Robert Venturi — perception at highway speed as design constraint.
• (Discussed in the source, not yet paged — see log: Alois Riegl — optic and haptic as the two alternating modes of perception grounding artistic styles; Wilhelm Worringer — the parallel abstraction/empathy pair. See optic-haptic-perception.)

Related Concepts

• representation — perception's relationship to depiction and symbolism.
• movement-perception — perception mediated by vehicular speed.
• embodiment — the body as the ground of perception.
• atmosphere — perception of ambient qualities.
• perspective — the mathematized gaze: homogeneous Cartesian space, the passive eye, and the deception of the senses.
• quadrature — perception as designed deception: the senses deceived "in the right light" at the anchored vantage point.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• source-notes/venturi-1977-learning-from-las-vegas
• A history of style and the modern interior (Deyong 2018) — the art-historical periodization of perception: Riegl's optic (long-range, perspectival) vs. haptic (close-range, tactile) modes alternating through history, and their influence on the modern interior; see optic-haptic-perception.
• Quadrature (La Coe 2018) — the seventeenth-century theory of deceptive perception: Descartes's passive eye (the retinal image requiring mental interpretation; light as transmitted movement, the blind man's stick analogy), reflections and illusions that "appear to be the real things because they affect the eye in the same ordered correspondence of light rays," and the ethical question of the intellect's ability to distinguish truth — with Pozzo's embodied observer as the designed counter-case.
• Volatile Architectures (Drobnick 2002/2006) — the olfactory extension of the sensory-hierarchy critique: the white cube's "pollution-free pristine state… relegates architecture to a purely visual state," and the editors' framing claim that opening the interior to the full range of the senses "counters visual primacy and recognises that colour and smell have significant effect on our perception of space and objects" (p. 89) — smell as a determinant of spatial perception the visual tradition omits; smell engaging visitors "on a physiological and psychological level" (p. 89). See olfaction, optic-haptic-perception, white-cube.
• Design studio through the subtle revelations of phenomenology (Smith 2018) — the pedagogical and Husserlian register: perception as conditioned and adumbrational ("Adumbrations are facets of an object in space as it presents itself to you… our perception of an object is conditioned on how we approach it or what it offers us" — see adumbration); perception as additive ("It is the multiplication of the facets of single perceptions that become an additive perception of the object itself"); and perception as trainable — students "transform the ways in which [they] perceive the world and themselves in it," reporting they have never "seen" the world like this before; "With a heightened level of perception, we can no longer ignore fleeting moments of delicacy, beauty, or pain." See subtle-revelation, phenomenography.

Open Questions

• How do digital media and screens transform architectural perception?
• What is the relationship between Gombrich's schema-based perception and Peircean semiotics?