E-motion About Oxford: Exploring Architecture and Art of Oxford Through Theories of Space and…

Catalog description

It is not a coincidence that the first president of the Stanford House was Dr Geoffrey Tyack, a renowned historian of architecture: over centuries, the setting for the intellectual and creative activities at Oxford has been as important as the activities themselves. We are embodied creatures, so space affects the way we think and the way we feel - and Oxford uniquely offers a diverse open-air classroom to examine a thousand years' development of spaces used by people for multiple purposes as well as the history of people's responses to them. Answering Juhani Pallasmaa's call voiced in his famous work The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, we will attempt to break away from the study of space from the exclusive perspective of discourse analysis by treating our examples holistically as multisensory objects and by experiencing them directly, in situ, as a small group of scholars. E-motion about Oxford Seminar uses the wealth of the city's heritage to achieve two main objectives: one is to help students recognise and make sense of the main artistic and architectural styles and their key ingredients; the other is to apply environmental psychology and affect theory to explore the relationship between man-made space and emotions. After all, affect arises from relationships between people, between people and spaces, and between people and objects - it's about how things make us feel through interaction.