SENSORY OVERLAP

Architecture is a rich, multi-sensory experience. There is great sensory overlap to our sensory input. It is richly three dimensional and simultaneous. We should therefore push ourselves to include as much of this overlapping sensory input as possible into our drawings. Our analogue drawings.

Science does not fully understand our mental relationships and how the brain works. There is no algorithm which will correlate, say, how direct sunlight changes how our food tastes. Or we do not know the relationships between, say, how the texture of a floor surface might change our perceptions of wall colors.

While this might seem trivial, these sort of sensory perceptual shifts do exist. And since we all share them, they must be fundamental to our sensory overlap.

Yet good design, at a very fundamental level, is all about a superior experience. Good design can be defined by a sympathetic and satisfactory combinations of sensory overlap. One set of sensory inputs are being complimented with that from another sensory segment. This is not unlike how certain wines can compliment and emphasize certain tastes in food.

We accept this wine / food model. This model can be called a paradigm, as it is reasonably well developed with a common and accepted understanding. So it amazes me that while we have a paradigm for the wine / food interface, we do not have an analogus paradigm for sensory overlap in the enclosures in which we inhabit.

So will Transparent Drawing solve all of that? Of course not. Yet by drawing transparently, we are providing a modicum of sensory overlap. We are acknowledging in one drawing the overlap of the enclosure. In our one drawing, we are able to think about and analyze how this sensory overlap might and might not work together. So the contribution of transparent drawing might be to provide some enhancement to the intensity of the spatial experience.

If it does even a small part of understanding sensory overlap, then it will have done it’s job.