RESEARCH ARTICLE

Building cognition through material engagement

  • Hugo Mulder
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  • Department of Technology and Innovation, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

Received date: 14 Dec 2021

Revised date: 08 Feb 2022

Accepted date: 24 Feb 2022

Published date: 15 Aug 2022

Copyright

2022 2022 Higher Education Press Limited Company. Publishing services by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communications Co. Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Abstract

With the ascent of robotic architecture in academic discourse, we ought to reconsider how we understand building cognition. This paper revisits the Rietveld Schröder House from 1924 as a precursor of robotic building. With a built-in capacity for change, the building (now a museum and listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site) has a highly adaptable space plan that could be continually reconfigured by its occupants. The agency of change is shared between the house and its occupants, most notably Truus Schröder, who lived in the house for 60 years. This paper takes a material engagement approach to explore the relation between the occupant and the house and speculates how this might be a model for designers of contemporary and future robotic architecture to rethink concepts of autonomy and agency in building cognition.

Cite this article

Hugo Mulder . Building cognition through material engagement[J]. Frontiers of Architectural Research, 2022 , 11(4) : 642 -652 . DOI: 10.1016/j.foar.2022.02.008

Outlines

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