Chris Abel

"I have always enjoyed the writings of Chris Abel. They are full of surprising insights and provocative connections between such diverse issues as history, technology and ecology"

Norman Foster, Founder, Foster + Partners

"Chris Abel is a nomad in the intellectual as well as the geographical sense. The result is always unconventional and challenging, and sometimes impressively prescient"

Colin Davies, The Architectural Review

"Abel does the work of a horde of architectural critics writing all at the same time from all over the globe’

Ken Yeang, Hamzah & Yeang

"For anyone interested in actually understanding the radical responses of architecture to the changing times, Abel offers a powerful perspective built over many years of reflection that is more relevant than ever"

Anthony Burke, University of Technology Sydney

"‘Having been taught by Chris I can testify to his passion and knowledge. VAST is amongst the very best in advanced tall building studios internationally"

Antony Wood, Executive Director, CTBUH

"This exhibition and book come at a crucial moment in the development of our cities…not because such approaches are the ultimate expression of the Modernist project or of a particular aesthetic, but because they can help to solve the problem of the growth of our cities"

Norman Foster, Founder, Foster + Partners

"It really makes me look at nearly everything I do with a critical eye; everything from the products I consume, to my design choices. It has added an entirely new dimension to the way I analyse architecture and lifestyles"

Student Andrews, on a climate change seminar, UNL

Empathy

The concept of empathy is therefore central to both an interpretation of 'architecture as identity' and to the newly emergent human science. Though the architect and the scientist may put the concept to a different purpose - the architect empathises with a people and a place in order to give form to that identity, the scientist in order to understand, describe or explain that identity - our understanding of the processes of empathetic reasoning, or 'indwelling' as [Michael] Polanyi calls it, is therefore likely to become of increasing importance both to our conception of the new human science itself, and to our understanding of how it is that people come to 'feel at home' and identify with a place, which may be a single room or a whole region. My own conviction is that the key to the explanation (rather than the simple description [Harold] Proshansky and Norberg-Schulz have settled for) of place identity, lies with something like Polanyi's theory of empathy as a process of tacit knowing. The same also goes for how architects acquire the complex skill of design in the first place. The art of architectural design, I maintain, lies with architects' tacit skills and not, as the advocates of design methods would have us believe, with the availability of complete and explicit knowledge.

From: 'Vico and Herder: The Origins of Methodological Pluralism,' in R. Jacques and J. Powell (eds), Design: Science: Method, Westbury House (1981), pp. 57-58.