Sense and Sensibility: The Behaviourism / Phenomenology Debate in Portsmouth Symposium of 1967 on Design Methods in Architecture

Crawford's paper reconstructs the debate at the 1967 Portsmouth Symposium on Design Methods in Architecture between a behaviorist approach to designing for human environments, grounded in Christopher Alexander and Barry Poyner's research on human tendencies, and a phenomenological and existentialist critique of that approach. Critics at the symposium, including Janet Daley speaking from philosophy and ethics, Amos Rapoport and Tony Ward also raising ethical objections, and Jane Abercrombie writing from psychology, argued that the rationalist, behaviorist model of the design methods movement's early years failed to account for subjectivity and human sensory experience. The paper presents the symposium as a turning point at which the design methods movement's confidence in purely rational, systematic methods began to be questioned in favor of approaches that took lived human experience more seriously. Credits: Crawford, C. E. (2014). Sense and Sensibility: The Behaviourism / Phenomenology Debate in Portsmouth Symposium of 1967 on Design Methods in Architecture. Archidoct, 1(January), 32–53. Recuperado a partir de www.enhsa.net/archidoct