Rhythms of Architecture with Dr. Zakaria Djebbara

Welcome back to AND THE SUN, an art and design studio focused on phenomenology. This is our newsletter. Thanks for inhabiting some strange and wonderful spaces with us.

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This week, we speak with Dr. Zakaria Djebbara, a Danish-Algerian architecture professor whose work explores cognitive neuroscience, phenomenology, and the unconscious experience of space. We talk rhythms, rooftops, sensory storytelling, and why light might just be the most complicated material in architecture.

An Interview with Zakaria Djebbara

Zakaria: We have a word in Denmark—lommefilosofi— that translates roughly to “pocket philosophy.” It’s this idea that when you have a very personal philosophy, you don't really share it. It's something private, something you ponder during long showers. One thing I've been thinking about is that I don’t believe humans were ever meant to stay static, to build permanent cities. The nomadic lifestyle feels deeply attractive to me. And I see more people embracing that—living without committing to one city or apartment. Changing environments is beautiful. When you meet people from tribal communities who still live nomadically, there's a calmness to them. A different atmosphere.

Avery: I totally agree. Modern society often fosters this attachment to fixed places. We cling to a concept of home that might be a city or a specific house, but I think there's more to it. There are opposing forces—stability versus movement and change. Historically, people moved to cities for economic reasons. Now, many stay for social life and dating. It's interesting how that shifts the meaning of place.

Iván: Have you moved around a lot?

Zakaria: Yeah. I live in Denmark, but I'm originally from Algeria, a country rich in cultural diversity—part Berber, part Arab. Moving to Denmark when I was young added another layer of cultural complexity. Growing up, I thought I understood cultural differences. But during my sixth semester studying architecture, we did a trip to Japan. Experiencing East Asian culture for the first time shattered that confidence. I realized how little I truly understood.

That trip changed me. I saw not only different architecture, but different ways of using architecture. It was so practical in ways I hadn't seen before. When I returned, I was disoriented, confused. And that’s when I met a professor named Lars Brorson Fich, who gave a talk about human responses to architecture. Until then, we had only focused on buildings themselves—data, materials, sustainability—but never on humans. He introduced us to phenomenology, psychophysics, and architectural psychology. That shifted everything for me.

From there, I studied Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty—not typical reading for architects—and I realized I didn’t want to be a drawing architect. I wanted to be an evaluative architect. Someone who poses questions rather than prescribes solutions. This led me to explore synesthesia—how architecture can engage multiple senses simultaneously. That evolved into my master’s thesis and eventually into a PhD in cognitive neuroscience and architecture.

Avery: I listened to a talk you recently gave at ETH. One thing that struck me is that you seem to be into modern “active inference” neuroscience theories, the type of researchers who think about continuous interaction with the environment, which is really interesting phenomenologically. You talk about it in terms of attunement: you walk into a space and you're continuously interacting with the space, attuning to it. And so I'm curious, in terms of your background, where along the line did that shift from the static view of buildings to a more temporal view?

Zakaria: Great question. During my PhD, I realized I was still using an architectural lens to understand architectural experience. But I don’t believe in disciplines. I’m anti-disciplinary—I work from questions, not from academic boundaries. That has taken me across MATLAB signal processing, philosophy, neuroscience. A turning point was reading Henri Bergson, who emphasized time and persistence. It made me rethink architectural experience as dynamic, not static.

Then I studied Edmund Husserl, who argued that consciousness is inherently temporal. That helped solidify the idea that every experience is contextually tied to time—including social context. Peter Zumthor has a story about visiting a beautiful place with his wife. When he returned alone, it wasn’t magical anymore. Same space, different time, different company—completely different experience. Architecture is never static.

Avery: And so your VR research methods let you test that, right? With EEG, motion capture—you can actually research the temporal aspect.

Zakaria: Exactly. Around that time, mobile brain-body imaging tech (MoBI) started advancing. Everything aligned. It wasn’t planned—I just ended up here.

Iván: And you also teach?

Zakaria: Yes, a lot. I teach advanced topics on unconscious perception in architecture, but also linear algebra to younger students. My pedagogy is inspired by neuroscience—active learning. For math classes, I give students solved exercises with intentional errors. Their job is to find the mistakes. It trains predictive thinking.

Iván: That’s brilliant—and actually aligns more with how people work in the field. What kind of architecture courses do you teach at the master’s level?

Zakaria: My track is called Social Sustainability, Health, and Well-Being. We use things like exoskeletons to simulate physical limitations, so students understand user diversity. I focus on unconscious design elements—what I call "the hidden effects." Instead of giving fixed guidelines, I teach core principles. I do this in part because architecture studios often ignore guidelines, and instead design with “principles”. It keeps the creativity alive.

Iván: What do you mean by “unconscious”, and how does space impact it?

Zakaria: When I talk about the unconscious, I’m referring to the automatic processes—implicit decisions, biases, attentional habits. Some of these are accessible consciously, but many aren’t. The built environment is something we encounter so routinely that we suppress it just to get through the day. It becomes noise. That makes it incredibly hard to study consciously. But external measurement gives us traction.

Avery: What about using the mind itself as a measurement instrument? For example, by using contemplative training to refine sensory perception and applying that to understanding how spaces impacts us.

Zakaria: That’s exactly the direction some research is heading. Julio Bermudez and I developed a framework called contemplative neuroaesthetics. It proposes that rhythmic engagement with space can create a heightened aesthetic experience.

Avery: That’s fascinating—and gets into something we’ve been exploring in our own work. Like, what if you gave these trained practitioners protocols to report high-resolution phenomenology as they move through a space? Or even designed spaces with their input?

Zakaria: It’s a fantastic experimental paradigm. I would love to see it explored more rigorously.

Avery: One principle I see recur in your work is rhythm or oscillation. How do you think about rhythm intuitively?

Zakaria: Fundamentally, I believe nothing is static. I’m a process philosopher. Everything persists through rhythm. Walking, breathing, gazing—it's all rhythmic. And rhythms are nested. Body, brain, and environment synchronize through rhythm. When misaligned, we adapt and our body attempts to realign with the environment. That adaptation is a phenomenologically rich event.

Avery: That’s a powerful framework. And it loops back to time—because time is change.

Zakaria: Exactly. Conscious experience is about change. Substances don’t exist in isolation—they persist through time. Even color perception depends on changing sensory input.

Avery: That’s essentially how trained meditators describe sensing light, color, or temperature—not as fixed qualities, but dynamic processes.

Zakaria: Lately, I’ve been fascinated by the idea that consciousness might primarily function to discretize continuous sensory experience. Without it, the world is a chaotic stream of input. Consciousness creates order—twisting internal knobs to stabilize perception, allowing us to categorize things as red, blue, warm, cold, familiar, unfamiliar. Maybe consciousness evolved precisely for this discretization, maintaining a stable sense of reality amidst constant flux.

Avery: This connects directly to how we move through architecture, where we use landmarks to create a sense of permanence in the flow of our continuous perception of the space. We orient ourselves in space much like children do with a caregiver—once we know where something is, we can explore freely, even if it’s no longer in sight. It’s not about constant visibility, but about internal certainty.

Iván: Has your research influenced actual built environments?

Zakaria: A little, though it’s still early. Human-environment interactions are incredibly complex, and hard to translate directly into design. But we’ve contributed to a few projects. At one hospital, for example, there was debate over where to place the reception: architects wanted it visually prominent, while developers prioritized proximity to the entrance. Our testing showed that once people know where the reception is, visual contact becomes irrelevant. That was a valuable insight for them, it shifted their planning.

Iván: So what types of practical questions is your research best suited to answer?

Zakaria: Three stages of architectural work benefit from this line of research: early conceptualization, design stage testing, and post-construction evaluation. Ideally, I'm involved mid-design—when architects are unsure between two designs. We put users into VR experiments, measure attention, memory, navigation. The science thrives in this phase. After construction, things are trickier, less controlled—more ethnographic and observational.

Iván: How do you work with light and lighting design in your work?

Zakaria: Light is insanely complex, especially in architecture. Visual neuroscience is the most-studied neuroscience field, yet it remains full of mysteries. We ran a fascinating study on “atmospheres” of corridors—how different lighting conditions alter perceptions of spaces. Participants walked through different corridors but ended in the same final blue space. Most people swore the final room changed depending on the corridor lighting they experienced beforehand. It hadn't. Their perceptions were subtly conditioned by prior lighting conditions—demonstrating a profound unconscious effect.

Can specific lighting reliably induce specific experiences, like familiarity or community? No way; experience is too complex, too context-dependent. But we know lighting can significantly alter perception. That alone is intriguing and practically valuable.

There's an incredible yet very simple experiment that was done in a school: the goal was to reduce classroom noise. Traditional acoustic solutions didn’t help much. Then someone suggested lowering ceiling lights to make the space feel smaller. It worked—the kids automatically lowered their voices, responding unconsciously to a smaller-feeling space. A perfect example of subtle architectural influence through lighting.

Avery: This connects with our recent show—it was mostly about light and the unconscious. Our capstone installation was a simple meditation hut, open only through a window facing a projected blue sky. It was inspired by those moments on rooftops where, leaning back in a chair, your field of vision is suddenly all sky. The effect is subtle, but powerful—this illusion of being suspended in vastness.

Iván: We’re developing a V2 of that piece, actually. It would be installed outdoors with a mechanical aperture that dynamically frames the largest uninterrupted patch of real blue sky. Like a precision-engineered sky window.

Zakaria: That’s beautiful. It reminds me of James Turrell—dismantling spatial boundaries to overwhelm perception with possibility. You're working with rhythm, sequence, and sensory storytelling. It’s really compelling.

Avery: And it also draws on the idea of serial dependence—what you see just before impacts what you see next. That rooftop moment only works because you saw the buildings, then didn’t. The contrast creates the effect.

Zakaria: Yes! And I love that you’re working with such subtle tools. Not hammering perception, but tuning it. There’s something poetically architectural in that.

Stay entrained for more—next week we sit down with a neuroscientist who studies how ultrasound stimulation can augment meditation and the ways in which AI can support the integration of meditative and spiritual experiences.

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