Guest Editors: Stylianos Giamarelos, The Bartlett School of Architecture, Nina Vollenbröker, The Bartlett School of Architecture

 

‘Even a brick wants to be something. A brick wants to be something. It aspires. Even a common, ordinary brick ... wants to be something more than it is. It wants to be something better than it is.’ 

 

In a twenty-first-century intellectual context, Louis Kahn’s well-known address to the brick sets a high bar for architectural empathy: it suggests that Kahn’s peers are able to put themselves in the situation not only of their fellow human beings but also in that of inanimate materials whose non-human desires can inform all-too-human designs. Kahn’s approach would appear less peculiar in earlier, nineteenth and twentieth-century contexts, where discussions of Einfühlung (empathy) extended to inanimate objects and informed aesthetic theories of visual form, as in the influential work of art historian Heinrich Wölfflin. Historically, empathy has been discussed by numerous philosophers – from David Hume, Edith Stein and Edmund Husserl to Hannah Ahrendt, Gayatri Spivak, Eva Dadlez and Jenefer Robinson – who framed it as a particular case of intentional experience, as the basis of an ethical life of compassion that motivates altruistic action, and as a central part in the appreciation of music and literature. More recently, related discussions have been reinvigorated beyond the western tradition, especially in postcolonial contexts, while in clinical research empathy has been central in medical definitions of neurological conditions such as autism. 

 

In architectural contexts, scholars such as Wanda Katja Liebermann have been questioning the validity of putting oneself in another’s situation, especially when this involves lived experiences of sensory difference, of bodily and neuro-diversity, or of socially formed subjectivities. Following the argument of psychologist Paul Bloom, Liebermann warns against empathy as a driving force of design practice, noting that it can easily become a thin veil of reasserting architects’ authority and spatial expertise over the inaccessible lived experiences of the diverse users of their buildings. The two ways of addressing empathy in architecture (relating to embodied differences or inanimate objects) are not necessarily distinct. Architect, historian and theorist David Gissen has recently offered a radical disability critique of Wölfflin’s aesthetic theory of form, which underpins Kahn’s empathising with the brick.   

 

In between the ends of this spectrum of debate, historians of disability such as David Serlin have positively employed notions of empathy to argue for a distinct variety of modernism that developed in parallel with its more well-known didactic variant in the twentieth century. Numerous designers, historians and theorists (such as Juhani Pallasmaa, Harry Francis Mallgrave and María Paula Barón Aristizábal, Natalia Pérez Liebergesell, Peter-Willem Vermeersch and Ann Heylighen) have also deployed empathy to reflect on the embodied imagination of architects or their capacity to forge trust-based relations with diverse communities.  

 

This special issue of Khorein aims to engage with the full scope of these wide-ranging discussions. Can architects’ empathy indeed extend from the human to the non-human (animals, plants, materials), as suggested by Kahn? And what could this mean for design, especially in the current context of climate emergency? Can empathy speak to the intersections of disability and architecture? What is the future for empathy in twenty-first-century architectural design practices? 

 

Submissions should be emailed to khorein@ifdt.bg.ac.rs.

Submission deadline: September 1, 2025