Welcome to my website. I have recently expanded this site to include not only a full set of learning resources for undergraduate students (on the education page) but also the key resources for the new MSc course (see right). My longer term aim for the site is to engage with a much wider audience of professional colleagues who share an interest in the truth about our understanding of designing for people. Professional colleagues may be particularly interested to listen to the click-to-play radio talk by my friend Paddy Gormley on the MSc page. Paddy discusses the symbolic nature of our understanding of everyday life, using richly evocative and accessible language. Feel free to email me: bill@billthompson.info
Recent Articles Follow the links for some of my articles: Trauma and Tradition in Architecture We begin by considering the concept of reality as that which joins all creatures great and small and yet separates them in time and space. We have learnt to become linked in space by ideas and models that are more or less perfect and linked in time by the joined up writing that brings with it the inherent dangers of being both true and false. Unfortunately, we have not yet learnt enough about ourselves to understand apperception, as participation in more than reality keeps us alive so that we unwisely extend our understanding of apperception to keep alive the traditions built upon lies and partial truths, so that from time to time the lies become exposed and a traumatic change occurs to end or reshape a tradition. In a secular world, these traditions alter the appearance of rules and regulations that convert the mundane world into specific social domain of the identity to which the unambiguous and the unequivocal can belong. A global society allows the same transformations of the mundane to be played with a very much richer palette than any single tradition clinging on to one identity of some kind or another, however ancient, popular, and exclusive; the reality of space is that of a mundane existence and sharing is not part of tradition. This paper describes how the architectural project is probably the most spectacular example of the changes we need to make by thinking about tradition as a global desire for the development of comfort and the removal of suffering rather than as some misguided specification of ancient origins or popular opinion that forces us to convert the mundane into spectacular, instead of allowing ourselves, the very special creatures, to live mundane lives free of pain and discomfort. Hermeneutics for architects? Architectural textbooks typically present hermeneutics as an interpretative relationship to creativity or authorship related to 'meaning of architecture' rather than to meaning in and of itself, which this paper argues hermeneutics is best understood to be. Several rather useful outcomes become available to architects if they take up the description of hermeneutics offered in this paper and there would be substantial support for the claim that the architectural building is an experiment in society as such because no building is an island but belongs to a life world. The objects we work upon, buildings, form part of the life world, the duration of experience for people other than just its owners and occupants so that we need to have a way of widening the political aspects of architecture to include the lives of those who are not included except through an understanding of human consciousness. |
MSc students: click on the image below for a page of essential resources for your course.
Click on the image below for the Practice page, which features examples of my domestic architectural work.
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Architectural
Hermeneutics V The Harry in this essay is Harry Heft, and the philosopher's stone is a contemporary reference to philosophy's problems with materialism. In his recently published work, Heft supported ecological psychology and with it Gibson's ecological perception and Barker's ecological environment, which he synthesized into an ecological psychology. Three objections arise in pursuit of Heft's synthesis.
This essay reviews Heft's book by way of examining those three objections raising contemporary evidence from research into cognitive science and consciousness, which Harry left out. The conclusion is that there is every reason why ecological psychology should flourish, but it is necessary to include within that "model" a more mathematical and scientific notion of materialism. |
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