Imaginative Reasoning in the Shaping of Buildings

Imaginative Reasoning in the Shaping of Buildings proposes that buildings evoke the viewer's recreative imagination and this matters to the shaping of buildings. Author Sonit Bafna argues that three topics in human cognition---explanation and interpretation, attention, and imagination---support this idea, and he draws from psychology, studies of vision, aesthetics, and philosophy of mind and science. Includes cases studies such as, a comparison of early twentieth-century German and English houses, a survey of Mies Van Der Rohe's residences, changes in Louis Kahn's design of a Unitarian church, and pavilions in the royal palace at Fatehpur Sikri in India, and 90 black and white images.