Chapter 4: Experiential Schemas

Five Distributions of Conditions

There are many frameworks for organizing thought about architectural experience and no singular right way to organize design knowledge or to access it. In developing our approach, we look at the conditions that drive experience and how people experience those different kinds of conditions. Often beginning from direct empiricism, we asked, What am I feeling? and, What is going on here that I am feeling? It can’t be proven that the categories that follow are absolute or complete. What can be said is that they seem useful and, most of the time, in line with a first-person encounter with the phenomena. We first identify five types of distributions of conditions. Later, we add a sixth type, related to the phenomena but significantly different from the relatively more direct sensory concreteness addressed in the first set. The types of conditions constitute distinctions of conceptual domains that open and expand potential perceptions . Once a conditional type is distinguished (such as rhythms), one finds many occurrences of the type emerging for different forces at various scales.