GrubStreet Launch Lab: The Power of Place

Harvard Book Store and GrubStreet welcome debut novelist JONATHAN DAVID KRANZ and local architect ANN SUSSMAN for a discussion of their books Our Brothers at the Bottom of the Bottom of the Sea and Cognitive Architecture: Designing for How We Respond to the Built Environment. How do we orient ourselves in our surroundings? And in return, how does our environment impact us? Ann Sussman and Jonathan Kranz explore the “power of place” from non-fictional and fictional perspectives, presenting readings that outline the complex and mysterious intersections of self and setting.

On Our Brothers at the Bottom of the Bottom of the Sea:

Don't fall, Ethan scrawls in red permanent marker across the rides and signs of Sea Town. Since his brother Jason's death, Ethan can't let go of his big brother.

Don't fall, Rachel reads as she prepares to dump back into the ocean the shells her brother Curtis collected. Curtis had Down syndrome, but that isn't why he plummeted to his death from the Rock-It Roll-It Coaster.

Together, Ethan and Rachel are about to discover just how far a man will go to protect his kingdom.

With lyrical storytelling, Jonathan David Kranz spins an irresistible tale of mystery and grief, guilt and culpability.

On Cognitive Architecture: Designing for How We Respond to the Built Environment:

In Cognitive Architecture, the authors review new findings in psychology and neuroscience to help architects and planners better understand their clients as the sophisticated mammals they are, arriving in the world with built-in responses to the environment that have evolved over millennia.

The book outlines four main principles—Edges Matter, the fact people are a thigmotactic or a 'wall-hugging' species; Patterns Matter, how we are visually-oriented; Shapes Carry Weight, how our preference for bilateral symmetrical forms is biological; and finally, Storytelling is Key, how our narrative proclivities, unique to our species, play a role in successful place-making. The book takes an inside-out approach to design, arguing that the more we understand human behavior, the better we can design for it. The text suggests new ways to analyze current designs before they are built, allowing the designer to anticipate a user's future experience. More than one hundred photographs and drawings illustrate its key concepts. Six exercises and additional case studies suggest particular topics—from the significance of face-processing in the human brain to our fascination with fractals—for further study.