The Architectural Theory of Empathy. From the Aesthetics of Einfühlung to The Neuroaesthetics of Mirror Neurons

Abstract

There is no doubt that the discovery of the mirror neuron system – which took place in the last decade of the twentieth century by a group of Italian neuroscientists at the University of Parma – has fueled a renewed interest in those issues concerning the empathic relationship between man and architecture, which are typical of late-nineteenth-century experimental Aesthetics. Thanks to the use of modern neuroimaging techniques, recent experiments conducted in the Neuroaesthetics’ laboratories are, in fact, now confirming many of the brilliant insights made by a large group of Nineteenth-Century Central European philosophers and art historians who championed the theory of Einfühlung. This school of Experimental Aesthetics accommodates within itself the first instances of human neurophysiology, which gradually led to the diffusion of the new concept of organic space and which resulted, in some cases, in real experimental laboratories of sensory architecture or, we might say, Proto-neuroarchitecture. Therefore, a careful textual and comparative analysis between the cornerstones of the Aesthetics of Einfühlung and the most recent neuroscientific approaches – aided by a focal rereading of some futuristic case studies – can certainly provide new elements of knowledge capable of reopening territories of research that have remained unexplored: this is what we will attempt to demonstrate.