ABSTRACT

Buildings are ubiquitous in our everyday lives: we inhabit and use them for practical purposes, and most of us are constantly exposed to the built environment, both urban and rural. Our relationship with buildings, however, is not only practical, but also cognitive. Our aesthetic and cognitive experience may involve any kind of building, from the simplest warehouse to the most sophisticated museum. Architecture is placed in a cognitive context and, to the extent that it functions cognitively, what we learn from buildings may be a relevant and unique contribution to understanding, irreducible to other ways of comprehension. Interpretation is then a matter of fit, "of some sort of good fit—fit of the parts together and of the whole to context and background," as Nelson Goodman says. A building considered as an artistic symbol requires interpretation, and this implies that it can always be misinterpreted.