Our buildings, neighborhoods, and cities directly impact our health and well-being. This basic fact is appreciated increasingly across the full range of professions involved in design and maintenance of the built environment.  At the same time, we know little of how  the relationship of persons and environments works in detail: how exactly our experience and behavior, emotions and engagement in the community are shaped by the built environment. 

​

A number of scientific disciplines have been called to help us fill this gap, including most notably the disciplines allied under the umbrellas of neuroscience and cognitive science. Encounters of scientists and design professionals produce an exciting new frontier of human knowledge, and they lead to new understanding of the roles and responsibilities of the designer.

​

Moving Boundaries Collaborative is an interdisciplinary international initiative seeking to disseminate this new understanding by means of education and advocacy. The initiative operates at the interface of the just mentioned scientific disciplines and such design disciplines as architecture, urban planning, landscape architecture, and interior design. Based in Porto, Portugal and San Diego / La Jolla, California, which is the home of the venerable Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA), connected by an active network of collaborations with kindred schools of design around the world, Moving Boundaries is poised to curate a global community of students, professionals, and organizations that share our vision and values. 

​

Our groundbreaking Spring 2025 Course and Retreat, titled Moving Boundaries: Human Sciences and the Future of Architecture, held in Amares in Northern Portugal, will bring together over 55 distinguished international participants: scientists and architects, sociologists and psychologists, lighting/interior designers and health professionals, historians and philosophers, who will illuminate multiple facets of the impact of the built environment on human health and well-being. The geographical situation of this course is not accidental since one of our goals is to investigate how impacts of the built environment are grounded in the local culture. Unique atmospheres of the Minho Region, Porto, Amares, Geres Park, and surrounding landscapes will give us ample opportunity for such study. The course will feature numerous tours, field trips and workshops, in which we will uncover the rich cultural heritage of these regions in Portugal, illustrating sustainable and resilient relationships of the person, community, and place. 

​

What is more, the settings around our teaching venue in Amares and in Porto — vibrant rural and urban environments — feature an impressive array of ancient and modern architecture designed by such masters as Alvaro Siza Vieira, Eduardo Souto de Moura, and Fernando Tavora. The region of Northern Portugal is well known for its distinctive vernacular craft, work in local materials such as granite and wood, furniture design, linens, jewelry and other craft, linguistic, musical, culinary and wine making traditions and memorable and serene landscapes.

​

The program will provide each participant with numerous opportunities of interaction with some of the best minds in architecture, landscape architecture, interior design, health professions  and science — during presentations, roundtable discussions and workshops, but also during many social events planned over these eight days. We will learn together, from one another and from the unique environment of this course, gaining the strength for transforming architectural and interior design education and practice the world over.  

​

In its larger aspirations, Moving Boundaries is designed to serve as a platform for collaboration between educators and scientists, health experts and clinicians, practitioners and students of architecture, as well as with institutions of design, research and learning.  Our initiative is animated by ideas and creations of such notable architects and critics as Kenneth Frampton, Richard Neutra, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvaro Siza Vieira, Louis Kahn, Alvar Aalto, Carlo Scarpa, Luis Barragan, Balkrishna Doshi and Juhani Pallasmaa, and also by such innovative thinkers as Maurice Merleau-Ponty in France and John Dewey in the United States. Collective legacy of these individuals demands that we view design from an uncompromisingly humanistic perspective, committed to personal flourishing, and centered on the individual’s physical health and psychological wellness.