Introduction

Abstract

A few people in this generation of architects and designers may recall the knell of post modernism precipitated by the Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition at MoMA in 1988. The cohort of design students educated before that time were introduced to topics in humanistic design by their instructors who were educated in the 1960s. Those instructors were in turn influenced by the countercultural Whole Earth Catalog and the environmental design movement, the educational leadership and writings of Charles Moore, the neo-rationalist Tendenza movement (typologies and the ripple effect of Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein’s A Pattern Language), and Edward T. Hall’s work on proxemics in The Hidden Dimension. Also on those instructors’ reading lists were works by Merleau-Ponty from the embodied branch of phenomenology, and Gaston Bachelard’s seminal The Poetics of Space that introduced the phrase ‘intimate immensity,’ which validated the interior as an arena for exploration. In te rio rs D O I: 10 .1 08 0/ 20 41 91 12 .2 01 8. 14 86 08 8