What is this feeling of insideness?
The average American spends 90% of their time indoors. So much so, an individual’s microbiome mingling with the microbes in their home, school, workplace, have created mutations, new species of microorganisms only found inside.
This may provide a sense of comfort, familiarity, symbiosis at a microscopic scale for the places we inhabit, but what is to become of the outdoors, reduced in space and time? Is our desire for insideness rendering the outside world uninhabitable?
March 24, 2023 Presentation
What makes a place feel the way it feels? Is it the physical forms that define a space perceptually or is it a connection biologically or psychologically that determine the feelings we have when we inhabit a place? What can physics, geometry, philosophy, poetry, phenomenology tell us about architecture and the sensations we experience inside?
In this presentation to middle school students, Matthew describes his personal journey practicing architecture, the design of his own house questioning conventions, his graduate thesis exploring the sense of space, a prototype house for blurring the division between inside and outside, the future of architecture solving for the uninhabitable, and challenging students to think about how places they inhabit make them feel.
Presentation Audio (podcast):
