Variedades de arándanos en Chile originadas en Estados Unidos

Evidence-based design (EBD) is the process of basing decisions about the built environment on credible research to achieve the best possible outcomes.

EBD has emerged out of the healthcare design industry in the United States. It is part of a larger trend towards accountability in architecture. Healthcare architects can now earn the EBD credential to place after their names. It certifies that they have taken additional coursework and passed a certification test. The emphasis is upon the use of legitimate research as the basis for making design decisions. It sounds like a laudable goal. The problem is that relevant hard scientific research findings related to architectural design decisions are almost nonexistent. The research that has been conducted tends to be social science research whose findings are difficult or inappropriate to generalize as recipes for “best practices.” Environmental psychology, man–environment relations (MER), and environment/behavior studies (EBS) have been some of the labels that have been given to efforts at the development of a research- based design practice. It is significant that most of this work was done in the 1970s, with little impact on architectural practice, then or now. This is best demonstrated by the work of the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA). It is in its forty-second year as an organization that promotes environmental design research, yet the research findings of its members are not part of the mainstream architectural knowledge base. The problem is that EBD must rely on answers to only those questions for which findings can be generalized beyond the specific circumstance that the research encounters. Even a simple question such as the effects of different colors on mood and behavior has no solid answers, despite a number of studies. Even the often-claimed calming effect of pink on prison inmates has been refuted.

Perhaps one day architects will have a reliable body of research findings on which to base design decisions. That day seems very far off. At best, the questions that will be answered by research will be the least

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important ones that the architect faces. Research will tell us what to do about some technical or functional aspect of the building, but not why to do it, or if the result is beautiful.

See also: Architectural determinism • Architectural psychology • Behavior and

environment • Intelligence •Performance-based design • Psychological needs

Existentialism

Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Existentialism – like phenomenology, to which it is closely related – is one of the major schools of twentieth-century philosophy. It has had a significant influence in architecture and many other fields concerned with the relations between ideas and things. The term itself was probably coined by the French Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel around 1945, but it was popularized by his compatriot Jean-Paul Sartre, initially through the 1946 lecture and book entitled Existentialism and Humanism (Sartre 1948). The sources of existentialist ideas can also be traced back to a number of significant thinkers from the nineteenth century, including Karl Marx, Søren Kierkegaard, and perhaps most importantly for Sartre, the iconoclastic work of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

Seen by many as a branch of phenomenology, a key source for existentialist ideas is the early work of Martin Heidegger, particularly his magnum opus Being and Time, first published in 1927, which influenced Sartre’s own major philosophical work Being and Nothingness which appeared in French in 1945. True to one of the basic principles of the existentialist approach that philosophy should develop from the “bottom up” (as in the famous slogan “existence precedes essence”), Sartre sought to make his ideas accessible at all levels of society, creating works in a number of literary genres such as novels, plays, and political magazines, and going on to become a major public figure in the post-war French intellectual scene.

The crux of the existentialist approach is that each individual must take responsibility for his or her own actions and decisions, and that – in Heidegger’s terms – authentic being involves acknowledging the finiteness of life (or “being-towards-death”) and celebrating the possibilities offered by dwelling within the Fourfold (Heidegger, 1971). Often accused of encouraging unnecessary angst and despair at the futility and apparent meaninglessness of life, Sartre claimed his seemingly nihilistic philosophy was actually profoundly optimistic. He emphasized both the freedom and the obligation for each individual to create a fulfilling and satisfying life by transcending whatever humble and unpromising circumstances they might originally find themselves in. Rather than blaming “outside” forces such as social conditions or genetic inheritance, it is up to each of us to take responsibility for our own successes and failings.

In architecture these ideas have had a profound – although diffuse – influence, including in the work of broadly phenomenological writers such as Christian Norberg-Schulz (1971, 1975, 1985) and Juhani Pallasmaa (2001). On a more directly political level these ideas have also fed into

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the area of professional and environmental ethics, where many architects have been motivated to engage directly with building users in the task of improving their everyday living conditions, such as Christopher Alexander, Lucien Kroll, and Alvaro Siza. JH

Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only insofar as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is. — Jean-Paul Sartre See also: Phenomenology