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Architectural Hermeneutics V

Harry and the Philosopher's Stone

The School of the Built Environment, Ulster University.

The Harry in this essay is Harry Heft, and the philosopher's stone is a contemporary reference to philosophy's problems with materialism. In his recently published work, Heft supported ecological psychology and with it Gibson's ecological perception and Barker's ecological environment, which he synthesized into an ecological psychology. Three objections arise in pursuit of Heft's synthesis. Are Gibson's affordances connected to spatial presence, or are they epiphenomena? Is Barker's ecological environment a spatial relationship or a "mental picture"? And is the human life world a spatial or phenomenological presence? This essay reviews Heft's book by way of examining those three objections raising contemporary evidence from research into cognitive science and consciousness, which Harry left out. The conclusion is that there is every reason why ecological psychology should flourish, but it is necessary to include within that "model" a more mathematical and scientific notion of materialism.

Key Words: architecture • hermeneutics • spatial analysis • Harry Heft • psychology

Environment and Behavior, Vol. 35, No. 4, 478-485 (2003)
DOI: 10.1177/0013916503035004002


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