Abstract

Many architects are familiar with psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. Far fewer are aware of the final version, however, completed more than two decades after the first, or of the precise meaning of the need at the top of that final hierarchy, “transcendence.” In the absence of deliberate built expressions of Maslow’s notion of transcendence, this paper uses parallels with the Zen-inspired Japanese tearoom as a means of exploring its potential architectural implications. It shows how four fundamental ideas that Maslow’s transcendence called into question, the separate self, the material body, space, and time, can all be effectively challenged through the design of built environments. Based on these findings, it is argued that Maslow’s examples of transcendence represent a potentially significant and under-explored source for built environments to serve the human need that he placed above all others. The paper concludes that Maslow’s particular interpretation of transcendence—as essentially moving beyond commonly accepted ideas—is potentially applicable to many if not most aspects of our lives and hence also to the built environments that accommodate them.