Architects know best, as they often claim. With conviction, they’re sure certain details will make a space more hospitable, more beautiful, more preferable, and more enjoyable...But an emerging field of research is now uncovering and quantifying our psychological response to buildings: cognitive architecture. The hope is that by better understanding through science what exactly it is people like or dislike about our built environment, designers can truly improve it. — Fast Co Design
What does it mean to see a building? As we approach a building, what is that calls our attention? The door? The entry? That corner detail that is doing something we have never seen before?
Architect Ann Sussman and designer Janice M. Ward are two leading researchers studying how our brains see buildings. Their interest arose from their own observations and curiosity about how architects could create places that encouraged walkability and lingerability. Their results give us a glance into the fascinating and potentially freeing manner in which our brains and conscious really see architecture.
10 Comments
I just can't with this. Ugh.
1. Eye-tracking is a cool technology. But the entire point of architecture - what differentiates it from advertising, TV, lots of art - is that architecture is a *physical medium*. A picture of architecture is not architecture, and studies of architecture that rely only on images are meaningless bunk. We drink in architecture with all of our senses, within a greater physical/social/temporal context, that is the entire point. A picture of a column is meaningless - when you walk up to that column and it changes as you approach you get physical feedback - sound, vibration, temperature - that you don't get from a picture.
2. Common Edge is into traditional nostalgia. Be honest.
It's so predictable that this kind of empirical evidence would be refuted.
Anything that supports the simple fact that people tend to prefer the kinds of building facades designed before modernism must be called "traditional nostalgia" or worst.
I'm not sure why sites like this continue to lie about how people actually experience architecture. Considering we are primarily wired for the visual sense, it's no surprise that we enjoy building facades that are comprehensible. Like music, we are wired for harmony, rhythm, and proportions, all things traditional architecture did regardless of style, until the only non-nostalgic style became modernism.
I've got nothing against modernism per se, but to continue to refute all the new science regarding how humans interact with their environment sounds like the right wing's disdain for environmental science. I guess, right or left, we are still human.
So Thayer you're saying architecture is primarily a visual experience, so much so that ignoring the other senses is the best way to analyze it?
This isn't even about modern vs. traditional (Common Edge is, but this study isn't). There's *nothing* scientific about this study (although I believe one of the studies did look more deeply into what areas of the brain were firing as the eyes scanned the image, which is starting to get into *actual* neuro-biological analysis, but again, based only on vision, nothing else). I would even put *more* legitimate value into a study that shows people pictures of buildings and asks simply "Which do you like best?" because then there's no pretense that the result is built on anything other than fuzzy preference - without delving into the why of the preference, at all.
This is pseudo-science. It's like those spurious correlation studies that find that deaths by drowning in swimming pools correlate with the popularity of Nicholas Cage movies. Bunk.
Edited to add: It's not the study *itself* that is totally non-scientific. It studied a relatively small set of reactions under decently-controlled parameters. It's the *reporting* of it on Common Edge, that vexingly half-baked website, that turns a decent study into a bunch of hooey.
Agree this is pseudo-science, and proves how dangerous and precarious any mixing of data and agenda can be. Add that to a complete bunk idea that architecture is a superficial visual art, and you get nonsense like this.
There is a lot of interesting reading about neuroscience and architecture. Someone with a pro-modernist agenda could easily prove the benefits of the kind of simple, clear, beautiful spaces associated with that movement too. My feeling is that most people have deep, complex associations that come from many variables that have little to do with the subject at hand, leaving little room for truly unbiased neuroscience, but that is how it should be, as architecture is a human art and science.
"We drink in architecture with all of our senses, within a greater physical/social/temporal context, that is the entire point."
I don't believe that the authors said that we don't. That would be silly. But it's undeniable that one of the many ways we appreciate architecture is visually, and it's an important one.
Studies that rely on photographs cannot provide a complete picture, but it's not reasonable to dismiss them as "meaningless bunk". Could there not be something to learn here that's valuable, if one were open to it?
Regarding Common Edge, they are certainly friendly to traditional architecture, but I certainly wouldn't say they are into "nostalgia", unless you see the two as synonymous, which I certainly don't. But even if they were, is that a reason to dismiss a study like this out of hand?
By the way, what precisely do you maintain is pseudo-scientific about the research summarized in the article?
"It's the *reporting* of it on Common Edge, that vexingly half-baked website, that turns a decent study into a bunch of hooey."
I may be wrong, but I believe that the authors of the Common Edge article are the researchers themselves. I'm interested what specifically about the reporting do you think is "hooey". And, since you think the study is a "decent" one, what conclusions do you think should be drawn from it?
Donna, if you where the least bit curious about the neurology of the brain, you'd know that "If brain space indicates the importance of a sense, then vision is the most important. Roughly 30 percent of neurons in the brain's cortex are devoted to vision, compared with 8 percent for touch, and 2 percent for hearing"..."In fact, the human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text, and 90 percent of information transmitted to the brain is visual."
It's ironic that you claim Common Edge to be bias as if this site isn't. We all have our biases, it's just that you continually deny the plurality of the modern world. I'm afraid it's you who is nostalgic for a time when no one dare question modernism's claim to be the only acceptable style. Now that science is proving otherwise, it's interesting to see modernist ideologues claim 'fake news'.
It would be great if we could have a conversation about these kind of issues, instead of people just instantly dismissing the information and conclusions, and then disappearing, as if their minds are completely closed. I just don't get the incurious attitude on the part of so many here.
Not sure what exactly "cognitive architecture" is, but sounds related to the growing field of Neuroscience as applied to Architecture. Which Archinect has covered since at least 2012. Amelia in particular took a great look at ANFA et al., back in 2014. Some of that work does certainly go beyond mere eye-tracking (including using data culled from fMRIs, EEGs etc.) As referenced in the Common Edge piece.
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