Architecture & meditation

ABSTRACT: This article integrates a research project that aims to understand the architectonic contexts’ influence on meditation practice. One of the phases of the project refers to meditation practitioners’ emotional reactions to a set of architectonic contexts using Kansei. Accordingly, we will use the Kansei inquiry method which allows the creation of predictive models that relate characteristics of architectonic contexts with the expected reactions of meditation practitioners. The more productive type of approach, real scale models, might be unpractical due to the high costs of implementation. The aim of this article is first to establish a conviction about which of the two ways of presenting models might be better for getting this information. Under these two conditions, 30 participants who practice meditation, 15 with PowerPoint (PP) and 15 with virtual reality (VR), classified 10 architectonic contexts on how they may be influencing their will to practice meditation. These 10...

ABSTRACT: In the cities of industrialized countries, long-term stress with effects on physical andmental health is considered a problem.Meditation shows effective therapeutic benefits to physical, and in some cases, mental health. There is some neuroscientific evidence, and traditional belief, that certain buildings may induce contemplative experiences. The creation of these buildings by architects might be mainly based in cultural, aesthetic and even poetic assumptions. Assumptions that some-times might be in contradiction to the real needs of its users. We verify the necessity of an approach to determine howmedium-term meditation practitioners’ behavior could be influenced by the architectural context. Our main objective is to propose the development of a concept for an informatic application that supports architects in planning decisions concerning architectonic contexts for meditation in urban environments. A concept that should allow architects to know which visual, haptic, and...