November 19, 2014

The Urban Yoga Project: How we Interpret our Space. {Beautiful Photos}

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0 Boost Score Katarina Tavčar (2,800)

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When I first saw these photographs, I was immediately intrigued.

The thing that grabbed my attention was the amazing composition, and of course the beautiful poses, but I wasn’t sure what the purpose and the message were.

So, I dug a little deeper and discovered the artist behind them, and the concept she’s trying to portray.

Space is defined by geometrical, measurable aspects, but also by the subjective interpretation of a user. Urban Yoga is a new method of analysing potential space, specially it’s subjective aspects—smell, sound, taste, memories, stories, movement and atmosphere.

Subconscious, sensory stimuli have a huge influence on our perception of space and how we feel in it.

This project highlights the importance of these feelings, and the importance of humans in architecture.

Urban Yoga is an architectural experiment headed by Anja Humljan, an architect and yogi.

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Despite the photography highlighting various poses, the experience is more about the philosophy of yoga:

If we want to be happy, we have to live in harmony with ourselves and the environment, because we are not just our body—we are our mind, we are our consciousness that feels, interprets, imagines, dreams and wants to connect with the environment we live in.

Urban Yoga 3

The photographs are metaphors for the experiment the project is trying to explore: how do we subconsciously perceive space based on our sensing? The pictures are trying to create a dialogue between architecture and general public, specifically the dialogue surrounding space being so much more than what we see.

Lately, architects have been focusing too much on the needs of investors and not enough on the needs of users, which is why more and more people feel stressed in urban environments.

The artist sees the potential in an interdisciplinary approach to the problem—expanding and adding knowledge from other professions, even the ones that might seem unrelated to architecture, like yoga.

Harmony between the space we’re living in and the space in ourselves is essential for our wellbeing.

Maybe these photographs can remind us of that, and give architects an idea of how to use interdisciplinary collaboration to improve our working and living spaces.

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