Nesting: Body, Dwelling, Mind

by Sarah Robinson

Increasingly, technology seems to be de-materializing our world. Yet our ideas and experiences—both physical and cultural—remain fundamentally patterned by the complex material interplay of brain, body, and world. With support from pioneering research in the cognitive and neurosciences, Sarah Robinson combines philosophy, poetry, and personal narrative to offer a poignant study of the many ways in which our built environment shapes us as significantly as we have shaped it. Nesting: Body, Dwelling, Mind explores how our very being is sculpted by our interactions in an environment that we ourselves have fashioned, making us our own greatest artifact.

Genres: Architecture, Nonfiction

190 pages, Paperback

First published December 6, 2011

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Reviews

[Ann Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoughtful and thought-provoking, this book is more about philosophy than about architecture. I like it because Robinson cites a bunch of my favorite thinkers & writers, but it is not a book for the average person's taste.

[Henry 磊磊 · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5

Great book overall. It should've been a much shorter book or at least broken up into two parts. The first 3 chapters were the strongest and where the main point of the book lies: "Of Haven," "The Mind of the skin," and "Adieu Descartes." Subsequent chapters weren't coherent with these and also hit or miss.

Of the remaining 9 chapters, Chapters 5-7 "Practically Unconscious," "Dark Matters," and "Time is Rhythm," formed a supplement to the above, but the other 6 chapters were superfluous one-offs.

She has an impressive breadth of knowledge and sources to draw from. The density of quotes was a little much at times, to the point where her voice wasn't there, just a list of quotes. I wonder about her writing process--if she had read widely and collected these ideas and quotes to form the chapters, or had the frame then went in search of quotes. Probably the former.

I would've structured the Chapters 1-3 and 5-7 together for the actual book and the other 6 chapters as appendix or Part 2. I suspect these were other thoughts she just wanted to include because she had already did the 'research'/reading for, but really they were much weaker. Less is more.

A little ironic how much she emphasizes the relationship of humans, architecture, space, and environment, but doesn't practice it in terms of writing, information, and knowledge.