Ann Sussman will be in Boston on Tuesday evening to discuss her book Cognitive Architecture. She will speak at an event sponsored by the New England chapter of the Insitute of Classical Architecture & Art beginning at 6 in the College Club of Boston, at 44 Commonwealth Ave. More details and reservations are here.

Since I’ve been immersing myself in this subject via the work of Nikos Salingaros and Michael Mehaffy, whose recent book Design for a Living Planet I reviewed here, I am eager to hear Ms. Sussman, who wrote her book along with Justin Hollander. It is subtitled “Designing for How We Respond to the Built Environment.”

Here is how the ICAA chapter website’s event calendar describes the book, published by Routledge: It “reveals the subconscious tendencies at work when we navigate the world around us. These ‘hidden’ predispositions reflect our long evolutionary trip as revealed by recent research in psychology and neuroscience, and can help explain why we favor certain urban conditions and building configurations and shun others.”

I can’t believe I am unfamiliar with Sussman’s book. Well, not for long.

Dark cloud: Amazon has a blurb praising the book by Moshe Safdie. Uh-oh. I am braced. I read stuff that contradicts my views all the time, but I don’t expect that from the ICAA. Can it be that Safdie is broad minded or just wrote a blurb because he looked at the subject of the book and assumed that it reflects the fraudulent way modernists hitch their work to science when they know nothing about science at all. Well, again, Tuesday evening we shall see.