Rethinking Aesthetics is the first book to bring together prominent
voices in the fields of architecture, philosophy, aesthetics, and cognitive
sciences to radically rethink the relationship between body and design. These
essays argue that aesthetic experiences can be nurtured at any moment in
everyday life, thanks to recent discoveries by researchers in neuroscience,
phenomenology, somatics, and analytic philosophy of the mind, who have made the
correlations between aesthetic cognition, the human body, and everyday life much
clearer.
The essays, by Yuriko Saito, Juhani Pallasmaa, and Richard Shusterman, among
others, range from an integrated mind-body approach to chair design, to Zen
Buddhist notions of mindfulness, to theoretical accounts of existential
relationships with buildings, to present a full spectrum of possible inquiries.
By placing the body in the center of design, Rethinking Aesthetics
opens new directions for rethinking the limits of both essentialism and
skepticism.
