ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the topic of the architectural environment as the evolutionary, intelligent system that one would assume a human Umwelt would be. It discusses the urban dynamic between Brussels, the political and administrative centre of Europe and Oslo, Norway's capital on the European periphery. The chapter looks at Beirut, which in normal terms represents an urban pathology, while at the same time it doggedly demonstrates a human capacity to adapt and to survive. Umwelt has become a formative concept in biosemiotics, and it is becoming an important term in the study of the existential niche that humans are building for themselves too: architecture. Relating mind to world is a long leap. It would probably have been too long if we had not been able to mirror bodies in minds and evolve the capacity to turn nature into our Umwelt and to generate an architecture of interaction.
