L’expérience architecturale des parcours de la Casbah d’Alger : corrélations entre les propriétés morphologiques et les réactions neurocognitives humaines.

Abstract

This thesis investigates and discusses the vernacular design of the Casbah of Algiers with reference to cognitive science and phenomenology and outlines an approach to the perception and the cognitive reception of its architectural language in order to appreciate how this architecture delivers its visual and aesthetic appeal to its visitors. Such approach places the active human mind and body at the centre of architecture as an experience. Hence, this work follows an enactive-ecological approach to carry on the investigations, while focusing on the complex relationship between the human agent and the built environment. Our argument suggests that the Casbahř builders designed intuitively a way toward spaces that engage and strongly affect manřs emotions, by deploying architectural strategies, spatial conditions and morphologies that respond to universal biological and innate psychological human needs. This research aims to recover some of those design strategies, and understand their effects on the architectural experience of the Casbah of Algiers. Hence, the interrelations and the correlations between the Casbahřs morphology and design strategies in one hand and humanřs cognitive response in the other hand are looked at closely, through the use of a set of analytical approaches and methods, in reference to cognitive sciences, each having a specific question to answer and a goal to achieve. In order to understand the architectural experience of the Casbah of Algiers, a content analysis is conducted on a number of old and new testimonies about the experience of the Casbah by different people. This analysis allows proposing a suitable set of theoretic hypothesis about Řthe architectural experience of the Casbah of Algiersř and itřs morphologic and design strategies in relation to Řhuman cognitive response to build environmentř. Later, these hypothesis are then verified by means of isovist analysis and sequential analysis, taking as a case study Řla rue Sidi Driss Hamidouchř as representative street from the Casbah.