Today it is my pleasure to talk with Raymond Richard Neutra, an epidemiologist who served as the Chief of the Division of Environmental and Occupational Diseases at the California Department of Health. Before this long term of public service, he was a professor at UCLA and Harvard Medical School and was founding president of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology. Raymond carries on his family’s legacy as the founder and president of the LA based Neutra Institute for Survival Through Design. We discussed enriched environments, forming good habits through building habitats that support them and good design as a matter of public health. We mutually wondered whether or not neuroscience is necessary to architectural design or is environmental psychology enough? We talked about the necessity and richness of thick descriptions, body to body non-verbal communication, the 72 seasons in Japan, how eating is a social event, kinetic memories and much more . . .
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1:26:43
Psychogeography with Colin Ellard
For more than three decades, the cognitive neuroscientist Colin Ellard has been studying how urban environments shape our moods, behaviors and possibilities. He is a renowned authority and pioneer working at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience and architectural and urban design. He directs the Urban Realities Lab at the University of Waterloo in Canada, and is the author of several books including Places of the Heart: the Psychogeography of Everyday Life. He consults with architectural and urban design teams from all over the world. In this episode we talk about the universal attraction to vitality, boring building syndrome, our rich non-conscious experiences of places, how to speed people up or slow them down though methods of design and much more . . .
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1:29:25
Zen, Air & Atmosphere with Petri Berndtson
For this episode it is my pleasure to speak with the Respiratory Philosopher Petri Berndtson, the author of Phenomenological Ontology of Breathing and co-editor of the book Atmospheres of Breathing, he is a breath coach and research associate of the Science and Research Center, Koper Slovenia, past lecturer of Philosophy at Lahti University of Applied Sciences in Finland and the Trondheim School of the Arts in Norway. Our conversation took place in Helsinki, where we discussed the aerial phenomenology of Gaston Bachelard, Merleau Ponty, Petri's practice of mindfunfulness, the capacity of the Finnish language to express the rich subtleties of atmospheric consciousness and much more . . .
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1:01:34
The Philosophy of Breathing with Petri Berndtson
For this episode it is my pleasure to speak with the Respiratory Philosopher Petri Berndtson, the author of Phenomenological Ontology of Breathing and co-editor of the book Atmospheres of Breathing, he is a breath coach, mindfulness speaker and research associate of the Science and Research Center, Koper Slovenia, past lecturer of Philosophy at Lahti University of Applied Sciences in Finland and the Trondheim School of the Arts in Norway. Our conversation took place in Helsinki, where we discussed the Primacy of Breathing, and Petri's insistence that all philosophical questions need to be rethought and reimagined in terms of breathing and the elemental experience and poetry of the air.
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1:33:13
Sociology & Design with Galen Cranz
This is Part Two of my conversation with Galen Cranz, emeritus professor at the graduate school of architecture at UC Berkeley, a certified Alexander teacher, founder of Body Conscious Design and the author of The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body and Design and the Politics of Park Design: a History of Urban Parks in America among others.
We spoke about her training in the Alexander Technique, her studies in film at NYU, the evolution of her thinking that led to her landmark book, The Chair, why she founded Body Conscious Design--and much, much more . . .
Ireland