Through thousands of years of evolution, features of the natural
environment helped to mold human behavior. As social beings, early
humans also found resonance with each other in relation to their
surroundings, and even developed emotional templates for certain
situations, such as climbing a hill. These in turn lead to gestures and
spoken language. Neuroscience has shed light on these mechanisms and led
to discoveries about how early architecture contributed to human
cognitive development. A significant shift occurred when natural
elements, such as hills and trees, became influences on constructed
shelters and monuments. This book clarifies how the beginnings of
architecture were coupled with kinematic patterns formerly associated
with natural settings. Without such patterns we would not have the full
range of Embodied, Extended, Enacted or Embedded Cognition-to use
contemporary terms. Today's alienating-built environment, fueled by
technology, contains urban areas in both new and existing cities that
have denied the nature of human behavior as it evolved to sustain social
and cultural life. Such conditions hastened the fossil fuel crisis and
climate change, among other problems. "Tuning Architecture with Humans"
offers new ways of understanding the nature of our crises, and shows how
the human sciences can contribute to more human-centered approaches to
architecture, urbanism, and landscape design.