It may be a case of selective viewing, but I feel sure there is a fundamental shift happening in how Western culture describes the connection between the mind, the body and the physical world. My primary interest areas are visual art, literature, cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, cultural theory, psychedelic studies/neuroscience, spirituality. And as wide ranging as those fields may be, I feel the tremors of change everywhere. Like tectonic plates that move adjoining land masses, new ways of perceiving reality are interacting in a variety of disciplines.
So The Architecture of Resonance: From Objects to Interactions by Sarah Robinson is arriving at a fertile moment. Research in a variety of disciplines is converging, and it is aligning with ideas she has long explored in her books: Nesting (2011), Mind in Architecture: Neuroscience, Embodiment, and the Future of Design (2017), and Architecture is a Verb (2021).
For years western cognitive science has approached the mind as an information-processing machine sealed inside the skull. The 4EA framework (Embodied, Embedded, Extended, Enacted, Affective cognition)—developed through the work of Varela, Thompson & Rosch, Andy Clark, Alva Noë, among others — dissolves that metaphor. This shift in how we perceive ourselves is a quantum move, and one that is just beginning.
These new ideas about consciousness are aligned with Robinson’s project. She uses the term resonance to describe a kind of embodied, pre-reflective attunement between a person and their environment–particularly architectural space. Drawing on neuroscience (mirror neurons, embodied simulation) and phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty), resonance for Robinson is the way a body feels in a space before conscious thought kicks in. It’s a sympathetic vibration between the nervous system and the built world–haptic, visceral, below the threshold of explicit awareness. While consciousness typically refers to an explicit, reportable experience, Robinson’s resonance operates largely at the sub-personal or pre-reflective level. It’s closer to what cognitive scientists call embodied or enactive cognition than to phenomenal consciousness per se.
We all have had the experience she describes, and each of us could assemble a list of places where we have felt that resonance. Mine includes Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Le Corbusier’s Chapelle Notre-Dame du Haut de Ronchamp, the Sultan Ahmed Mosque (Blue Mosque) in Istanbul, the Lotus Temple in New Delhi, among many others.
Robinson demonstrates that buildings are not neutral containers. They are active participants in our cognitive and perceptual lives. This viewpoint fundamentally reframes architecture, moving it from the production of large aesthetic objects to design for our expanded 4EA consciousness. Because Robinson was trained as both a philosopher and an architect, she synthesizes this viewpoint with unusual clarity. That is also why her book is able to translate these ideas to so many other aspects of life, and to being alive.
Robinson finds linkages with significant conceptual frameworks such as Hartmut Rosa’s theory of social acceleration and Jean Gebser’s “consciousness structures”—archaic, magical, mythical, mental-rational. These conceptual systems strengthen the depth and breadth of her premises.
For Robinson, architecture has always been more than a human project: buildings participate in webs of material, atmospheric, and ecological relations that exceed any single occupant’s experience. She asks the primal question: given all that we now know, how do we build?
In her words:
“The book carefully details an alternative for thinking and designing that shifts attention from abstract formalism and object orientation to the creation of dynamic interacting fields of affective, tactile, kinaesthetic, ecological and social engagement. The book articulates resonance as a model and metaphor for the way we interact with our environments.”
Robinson’s explorations are full and expansive, with chapters dedicated to essential categories of resonance. (A remarkable graphic at the book’s end links her categories of resonance into a cogent whole–affective, sonic, haptic kinaesthetic, visual, cognitive, social.)
I have been compelled by Robinson’s ideas for years, and they continue to impact the way I feel and perceive my work as an artist and a seeker for a deeper understanding of what it means to be conscious in this shared reality. Resonance has now become my personal code word for a whole class of ideas and feelings I encounter when I read about 4EA, entheogenics, phenomenological/ neuroscientific research, or contemporary fiction. Her ideas are deeply impacting my current stack of books: Michael Pollan’s A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness; James Bridle’s Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence; Diane Pasulka’s Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences; Andrew Gallimore’s Death by Astonishment: Confronting the Mystery of the World’s Strangest Drug; and George Saunders’s latest novel, Vigil. Her way of describing our experience has thoroughly penetrated my sense-making apparatus.
And it isn’t just mental constructs, content and concepts. The body is a part of this as well. From the book:
“At the cosmic scale, the functioning of our entire bodies depends on our resonance with the sun. Light not only feels good on the skin, it is full of information: cuing us to our position and tilt on our rotating planet, calibrating our hormone levels, the thinning or thickening of our hair, the waxing and waning of our appetites, immune systems, and sleep cycles. These circadian rhythms are among the most thoroughly studied phenomena in biology and not a single cell has been found to lack its own circadian clock. Our lives are tuned in this resonant loop between cosmic and human realms.”
Robinson has been deeply influential in tuning me into that “resonant loop between cosmic and human realms.” She has done it with determined intelligence, incisive insight, visual mastery, and a rare visionary gift. To quote one of her favorite philosophers, John Dewey: “Because the artist is a lover of unalloyed experience, he shuns objects that are already saturated, and he is therefore always on the growing edge of things.” That’s where she has been, and where she will continue to be.