The field of neuroarchitecture examines how individuals experience designed environments. Our experience of architecture is informed by how our brains react to different stimuli in these spaces, from homes to healthcare facilities. These stimuli also contribute to how we form memories and how we care for them, as the design choices in “memory care” residences demonstrate. Having noted connections across neuroscience and architecture in the work of architect Suchi Reddy and sociologist John Zeisel, Michelle Joan Wilkinson invited them to speak about home, memory, and design. Here, they reflect on their own memories of home and how their respective interdisciplinary design approaches are influenced by neuroscience and neuroaesthetics.
A Space for Being, exhibited at the Salone del Mobile Milano, April 9–14, 2019, explores how thoughtful design can impact us. Informed by neuroaesthetics, an interdisciplinary field of study that strives to understand how the brain responds to aesthetic experiences, Google’s Ivy Ross, Muuto’s Christian Grosen, and Reddymade’s Suchi Reddy developed A Space for Being as an interactive installation that incorporates diverse stimuli. © Emanuel Hahn
MICHELLE WILKINSON What does home mean to both of you?
SUCHI REDDY For me, home is a mind/body state. In neuroaesthetic terms, we would call it a state of embodied cognition, where your body reflects certain physiological characteristics of relaxation or belonging that I think translate to a sense of home. It really is a state of being rather than a place, when you think about it in an individual perspective, but in a larger perspective, like in a community, city, or country, then cultural influences start to play a role in the sense of belonging. It becomes a state of feeling at home because your emotional, psychological, and spiritual and political beliefs are being met—senses of freedom, and how you are an immigrant in these places, are particularly resonant for me.
JOHN ZEISEL Suchi used the term “embodied cognition,” which is a nice way of saying “feeling.” The colloquial way of saying it is, “I feel at home.” I feel at home in nature. I feel at home when I’m cooking. I feel at home when I’m with my kids. I feel at home when I’m all by myself and I’m listening to music. So, it’s really not place-specific. It’s the way we feel in these places. And again, as Suchi mentioned, it can be a whole culture. All our parents or we ourselves immigrated from places, and somehow our parents, relatives, and we ourselves got to feel at home, we made it home. Home is not something that is there before we get there. It’s also not something outside of ourselves. “Embodied” means it’s part of us. And really, it’s a dialogue between us and the environments that we’re in, and then it’s our feelings that define it. So feeling at home is wherever you have that feeling.
REDDY I completely agree. The mantra of my practice is “form follows feeling.” It has been a quest over the years to achieve that feeling no matter the typology of architecture or design that we’re engaged in— whether it’s a hospital, a home, or a city. We have to think about what that sense of “feeling at home” is like. I’ve been on a crusade to reorient compasses of design toward this angle.
Excerpt from Making Home: Belonging, Memory, and Utopia in the 21st Century, (Cooper Hewitt | The MIT Press, 2025) published in companion with Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial (New York, Nov. 2024-Aug. 2025)
Reddymade designed this prototypical hospital room as a “sensory healing space” to be inserted into a standard hospital room space as an experimental “spatial prescription” to amplify the medical treatment of patients suffering from disorders of consciousness, which impair self-awareness and interaction with the environment. (Examples are a coma, a vegetative state, and a minimally conscious state.) The concept was created in collaboration with the International Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins University. © Reddymade
Nature is home: Garden with clear pathway back “home” brings nature into life, Hearthstone Memory Care Residence at New Horizons Marlborough, Marlborough, Massachusetts, 2014; Photo by John Zeisel
Destinations orient: Hallway with orienting photographs and clear destination turns wandering into walking, Hearthstone Memory Care Residence at The Esplanade Manhattan Senior Residence (formerly Esplanade Hotel), New York City, 2012; Photo by John Zeisel