Abstract

The vital relation between coastline and human emotion has been projected within every possible rhetoric means (from poetry and painting to literature and cinema) but never before had this relation played the most affective role to our behavior than nowadays where cities are determined to return these areas back to citizens and restore all these notions-meanings that have, so violently, been removed from the urban waterfront as a result of the socio-economic changes of the last decades. But in most times this effort is muddied by amateurish attempts at generalization with standardized architectural practices which develop more or less customary reactions during design process towards the problematic of the Edge. They usually neglect the study of the mediate zone between water and emotion-creation and common logic pushes away its rhetoric capacity as foolish and nonsensical, as a damned anamnesis. This space, from now on submitted to the lows of unconsciousness, requires a new planning and design concept: the Expressive Space, which encapsulates applied research from different scientific fields, such as behavioral sciences and psychology. The aim is to set out the phenomenological frame for the pathos of experiencing a spatially meaningful and multisensory Edge, exploiting the specifics of our culture, behavior and derived emotions along shoreline. In the following paper, our interest will be focused on an exploration of the environmental psychology of waterfront areas and emphasis will be placed on the role of water- notion as context in human function able to model emotional phenomena by practicing imagination within urban design.

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Nov 17th, 12:00 AM

The Design of the Edge as Cultural Activity: Towards a Dislocation of the Greek Logos.

The vital relation between coastline and human emotion has been projected within every possible rhetoric means (from poetry and painting to literature and cinema) but never before had this relation played the most affective role to our behavior than nowadays where cities are determined to return these areas back to citizens and restore all these notions-meanings that have, so violently, been removed from the urban waterfront as a result of the socio-economic changes of the last decades. But in most times this effort is muddied by amateurish attempts at generalization with standardized architectural practices which develop more or less customary reactions during design process towards the problematic of the Edge. They usually neglect the study of the mediate zone between water and emotion-creation and common logic pushes away its rhetoric capacity as foolish and nonsensical, as a damned anamnesis. This space, from now on submitted to the lows of unconsciousness, requires a new planning and design concept: the Expressive Space, which encapsulates applied research from different scientific fields, such as behavioral sciences and psychology. The aim is to set out the phenomenological frame for the pathos of experiencing a spatially meaningful and multisensory Edge, exploiting the specifics of our culture, behavior and derived emotions along shoreline. In the following paper, our interest will be focused on an exploration of the environmental psychology of waterfront areas and emphasis will be placed on the role of water- notion as context in human function able to model emotional phenomena by practicing imagination within urban design.

 

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