The presentation was grounded in a simple yet far-reaching observation: the space we inhabit as adults is profoundly different from the world we first encountered at the dawn of life. The infant’s experience of reality precedes language, concepts, and categories; it is a field of sensations, intensities, rhythms, and affects. As we grow, this primordial relation to space becomes gradually organized through language, culture, memory, and social structures. Yet traces of that original mode of perception never disappear. They remain embedded within us, shaping our emotions, desires, and sense of belonging in ways that often escape conscious awareness.
This altered understanding of perception resonates with some of the most significant intellectual developments of our time. Contemporary neuroscience reveals that perception is not a passive reception of an objective world but an active process through which the brain continuously constructs reality. At the same time, modern physics has challenged the notion of a detached observer, exposing the complex entanglement between observer and observed. While emerging from very different disciplines, these insights converge in questioning the stability and transparency of the world we take for granted.
Yet such discoveries ultimately lead us back to a much older question: how does the human subject come into being? Here, the discussion inevitably encounters psychoanalysis, which explores the formative experiences, losses, and divisions that accompany our entry into language and culture. It is through this lens that the notion of an “original wound” appears—not as a pathology, but as a constitutive condition of human existence, marking the distance between immediate experience and symbolic understanding.
Art has long occupied this threshold between what can be articulated and what remains beyond words. Architecture, perhaps more than any other art, engages directly with this tension because its medium is space itself.
Through light, proportion, materiality, scale, rhythm, enclosure, and openness, architecture continually experiments with the boundaries of the pre-verbal and the unconscious.
Certain spaces can evoke memories we never consciously possessed, awaken feelings that resist explanation, or create a sense of intimacy and estrangement simultaneously.
The presentation proposed that architecture should not be understood solely as the construction of buildings or the organization of functions. It is also a practice that shapes the conditions of human experience and perception.
By engaging the deepest layers of subjectivity, architecture reminds us that we are not merely inhabitants of a physical world. We are also travelers within an inner landscape, continually negotiating the relationship between memory and presence,
self and environment, consciousness and the unknown. In this sense, every encounter with space becomes, however subtly, an encounter with ourselves.