Archinect - News

As Brutalism gains new popularity, what are the mental health consequences of concrete architecture?

2019-03-06T16:17:00-05:00

Antipathy to the “concrete jungle” is rooted in the assumption that concrete-heavy environments are by nature detrimental to psychological health. One study of more than 4 million Swedes, published in 2004 in the British Journal of Psychiatry, seemed to suggest that moving from a rural to an urban environment had a detrimental effect on individuals’ mental health.

"Has the material been made a bogeyman for the urban environment – assumed to be harsh and unforgiving, rather than liberating and inclusive – when many of the problems it seems to embody are more directly related to how inequality and segregation manifest in cities?," writes Lynsey Hanley for the excellent Guardian concrete week series.

Watch Daniel Libeskind speak of his love for NYC's diversity

2016-12-14T14:42:00-05:00

Daniel Libeskind loves the multi-faceted nature of New York City's inhabitants; the rich, the poor, the successful, and perhaps most amusingly, the failures who think they're successful. Although the architect doesn't really break any new conceptual ground in this short video from the Louisiana Channel, one can enjoy Libeskind's merry musings intercut with scenes of the metropolis and its diverse denizens, who form "a very complicated microcosm" of the world:

Designing and understanding the "Happy City"

2013-12-09T20:24:00-05:00

"For years, urban designers and architects have claimed happiness as their goal," Montgomery says. "And yet none of the claims have been supported by empirical evidence. Which isn't to say they're not right. It's just to say that we don't know. That we haven't known." In this spirit of empirical discovery, Montgomery takes readers around the world in search of the places where urban design has (and has not) improved quality-of-life.

Human behavior can be extremely difficult to quantify, and determining its exact context even harder. But some cities just seem happier than others, no matter how difficult that status is to qualify. In his book, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design, Charles Montgomery tries to create an empirical basis for that causal link between happiness and urban design, through case studies of cities where those two concepts are clearly intertwined. Montgomery spoke with Eric Jaffe at The Atlantic Cities about his research for the book, and how we measure happiness.

Sensitive to the fact that what works in Bogotá might not fly in Oslo, Montgomery is not out to find hard-and-fast rules for happiness. He instead wants to tease out methods of urban design that civic governments may use to become more sensitive, responsive and accountable to their citizens' well-being.