Introduction

In the early 1990s Dr. Jonas Salk came to an AIA Convention to  receive the AIA's Twenty-Five Year Award for the Salk Institute.  At that time he told the officers of the American Architectural  Foundation a remarkable story of having gone to the Abbey at  Assisi (in Italy) for a personal retreat early in his career because  he was "stuck" intellectually in trying to find a cure for Polio.  Something about the architectural experience of Assisi  (view on  left) so inspired him, that it was there he came up with the idea of  his Salk Vacine and how to make it.

Dr. Salk proposed that the AAF mount a research effort to better understand how architectural settings influenced human experience. Just as he had found the architecture of the Abbey at Assisi to provide a setting that stimulated his creativity, so he believed the human mind (and its instrument the brain) are always reacting to architectural settings.

Physics as a precursor

Little advance in physics had been made during the Middle Ages. Although great medieval universities were founded in the 13th to the 15th century, these universities were places for scholarship in philosophy, literature, or the arts. There was little or no science based on experiments, even in the medical schools. There was a brief flowering of science in the 17th century primarily based on the work of Sir Isaac Newton. However, from the time of Newton until the 19th century, little happened to advance physics.

In the 19th century discoveries in electricity and in thermodynamics were firmly established by experiments and principles were incorporated in mathematical formulas. This enabled the engineering community of the 20th century to develop special areas of competence in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and environmental engineering.

It seems likely that just as 19th century physics underlay the development of 20th century engineering applications, so neuroscience (combined with genetics) will become the basis for new applied science tools in the 21st century. In the next few decades is is likely that the fundamental aspects of neuroscience will become the domain of a new generation of applied social and behavioral scientists, engineers and architects.