Though
it's been a century and a half since the world started standardizing how we
make spaces safe, we've agreed on the ideal height for ceilings, the width of
doors, the slope of stairs, we've given a lot less thought to the emotional and
psychological impact of buildings.
Sarah
Williams Goldhagen: It costs just as much to build a bad building as it does to
build a good building but you need to educate yourself about what a good
building is.
Architecture
critic and former Harvard professor Sarah Williams Goldhagen believes we need a
paradigm shift in architecture, starting with its status as an art form.
Goldhagen:
To call it an art, mistakenly casts it as a luxury good and it's not. It's more
and more clear that the things that we experience in the built environment
profoundly affect our mental health, our emotional health, our physical health,
the way children learn, the way children develop and it's grotesquely neglected.
AJC: It
sounds like you're talking about a civil right rather than an art form.
Goldhagen:
I am, that's the reconceptualization of the built environment that needs to
happen. I analogize it sometimes to the change in the way people thought about
the environment from the 50s to the 70s or 80s. In the 50s nature was nature it
was trees and forests and rivers and mountains and so on so forth and then
people began to become concerned about pollution and various other things that
turned into concerns about global warming.
When you look at global temperatures July was the hottest month on average since reliable record-keeping started and July was not a freak occurrence. The past ten years have seen many high temperature records broken.
Goldhagen:
People realize that it wasn't all these disaggregated elements it was an
ecosystem, it was one system that we all inhabited and instead of calling
nature nature we tend to call it now the environment. And what we need to
understand now is the kind of importance that we all accord now to the
environment is the kind of importance that we need to accord to the built
environment because the built environment is in fact what most of us inhabit
most of the time and it's having an impact on us in all sorts of ways that
people don't appreciate.
It may
sound abstract but the subtle impacts of the built environment on humans are
numerous, profound, and well documented. One study measured a spike in heart
right and cortisol levels in people who walked through a featureless part of
town, demonstrating the built environment's ability to add subconscious stress
to our lives. Other studies saw patients in hospital rooms with a garden view
recover from surgery faster and with less pain than their counterparts in rooms
without a view. But Goldhagen says that for architects to leverage all this
knowledge they'll need to radically and fundamentally change the way they
approach their craft.
Goldhagen:
One of the problems with the way that architecture is taught in schools and
purchased by clients is really to put it simply from the outside. I mean you
sort of look at these big renderings of these very very large scale forms well
nobody experiences buildings that way so you need architectural education to
flip the formulation where they start from the user. Small construction
details, better materials versus worse materials, the sonic qualities of
materials, the tactile qualities of materials. That's what the people who walk
in that building or walk past that building they're gonna notice.
And
Goldhagen herself has noticed many thoughtful designs abroad and at home. One
example the Via Verde sustainable housing project in the Bronx that presents a
strong model for responsible community conscious architecture. Further south in
Philadelphia there's Dilworth Plaza where in 2014 three different firms were
tasked with transforming the space around city hall from a menacing series of
dark alleyways to a vibrant, uplifting center square. James Timberlake, whose
firm's most recent accomplishments include the U.S. Embassy in London, was one
of the architects who embraced the challenge of building joy into a previously
dour public space.
James
Timberlake: That's been one of the great shifts in our country in the last you
know 18 to 20 years is that recognition that we can't gate everything we can't
wall up everything but we need to open up some of these spaces to not only
public expression but public use. I think Sarah Goldhagen's book somewhat
refers to that and when she starts talking about the impact of our public
realms on our psyches and our spirit and how we engage that and how use it and
you can see it on a day to day basis in Dilworth Plaza.
Mean
time, Goldhagen is in surprisingly good spirits about the future of
architecture. Practically and aesthetically.
Goldhagen:
I do think that some things that are initially difficult for people to
comprehend and not beautiful can end up being appreciated as aesthetically
powerful so beauty doesn't always have to be something that's just immediately
pleasing.
AJC:
Doesn't have to be pretty?
Goldhagen:
Right, pretty is the word that I, it doesn't have to be pretty because one of
the things we know we need from our environments is challenge. We want our
expectations to be subverted, we want to go oh wait a minute, I didn't know I
could stand on a bridge made of glass and look down. So is it beautiful? I
don't know, it's a little unsettling but it's pretty cool too and it makes me
think about my environment and my relationship to this city in a really different
way.
Sarah
Williams Goldhagen: Welcome to Your World.
By Jim Cotter. Articulate, January 2, 2019
Sarah Williams
Goldhagen was the architecture critic for The New Republic for many years, a
role she combined with teaching at Harvard University’s Graduate School of
Design and elsewhere. She is an expert on the work of Louis Kahn, one of the
20th century’s greatest architects, known for the weighty, mystical Modernism
of buildings like the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, and the
Bangladeshi parliament in Dhaka.
Several years
ago, Goldhagen became interested in new research on how our brains register the
environments around us. Dipping into writing from several fields—psychology,
anthropology, linguistics, and neuroscience—she learned that a new paradigm for
how we live and think in the world was starting to emerge, called “embodied
cognition.”
“This
paradigm,” she writes in her magisterial new book, Welcome to Your World: How
the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives, “holds that much of what and how people
think is a function of our living in the kinds of bodies we do.” Not just
conscious thoughts, but non-conscious impressions, feedback from our senses,
physical movement, and even split-second mental simulations of that movement
shape how we respond to a place, Goldhagen argues. And in turn, the place
nudges us to think or behave in certain ways.
The research
led Goldhagen to science-based answers for previously metaphysical questions,
such as: why do some places charm us and others leave us cold? Do we think and
act differently depending on the building or room we’re in? (Spoiler: yes, we
do.)
Architects
intuited some of these principles long ago. As Kahn once noted of the
monumental Baths of Caracalla in Rome, a person can bathe under an eight-foot
ceiling, “but there’s something about a 150-foot ceiling that makes a man a
different kind of man.” As the peer-reviewed studies mount, however, this new
science of architecture and the built environment is destined to have a
profound effect on the teaching and practice of design over the next generation.
CityLab
talked with Goldhagen about the book and why so much architecture and urban
design falls short of human needs.
C :
Your
book is about how we experience buildings and places through “embodied
cognition.” How did you first learn about it?
SWG :
I fell in love
with architecture the way most people fall in love with architecture, which is
that I went to places that just astonished me and moved me. And so from very
early on I sort of wondered: why does it do that? The arts have this effect on
you, but architecture is so much more profound, I find, than any of the other
arts.
At the time,
there really was no intellectual paradigm for thinking about these questions.
And then about 15 years ago, my husband handed me a book by someone who had
written a previous book he had really liked. The title of the book was
Metaphors We Live By. It’s co-authored by George Lakoff, who’s a cognitive
linguist, and Mark Johnson, who’s a philosopher. The basic argument is that
much of how our thought is structured emerges from the fact of our embodiment.
And many of the ways those thoughts are structured are metaphorical.
There
was an immediate light bulb: “Oh, people live in bodies, bodies live in
spaces.” I started reading more and more about it and realized [that] what
Lakoff and Johnson had figured out was in the process of being confirmed
through new studies in cognition that had been enabled by new technologies.
We’ve had in the last 20 years a kind of ocean of new information about how the
brain actually works. Most of that was confirming the precepts of embodied
cognition, and also going beyond it in certain ways, showing how multisensory
our apprehension of the environment is.
I
realized that our paradigm of understanding how people experience their environments
had radically shifted, and no one had really figured out what this meant. One
of the things I found was that, basically, [given] what we now know about human
cognition and perception, the built environments we inhabit are drastically
more important than we ever thought they were.
C:
One of
your chapters is titled “The Sorry Places We Live,” and you refer throughout
the book to the “beggary” of the built environment. What are the most flagrant
sins that buildings and cities commit against human wellbeing?
SWG :
Oh my
gosh, the list is long! One thing I often say is there’s no such thing as a
neutral environment. If the environment we inhabit— whether cityscapes or
landscapes or buildings—is not supporting us, it’s probably harming us.
[Cities]
undervalue the importance of the design of the built environment altogether.
There is this sort of professional split between high architecture and
building, which my research shows is just fallacious. It’s all architecture and
it’s all important, because it’s all having an impact on people all the time.
More
specifically, very often in cities, the overall form of buildings is given much
more priority than materials, surfaces, textures, and details. What we know
about the way we appropriate and experience places is that the overall form of
a place is not what most dramatically affects our experience of it. It’s more
what psychologists call the surface-based cues.
Architects
tend, particularly with parametric design, to emphasize overall aggregate form,
and all that other stuff gets filled in later. And then, very often, it’s
value-engineered out. That’s what’s creating a lot of the impoverishment in the
environment. To have “sticky” places—places that engage you, your sensory
system, your motor system, [and] help you create a sense of identification with
[them]—you have to have all those things, and most buildings don’t.
Another
thing is differentiated, non-repetitive surfaces. [The psychologist and author]
Colin Ellard did a study of how people respond: He basically put sensors on
people and had them walk by a boring, generic building. Then he had them walk
past something much more variegated with more ways to [engage] visually and
therefore motorically. He found that people’s stress levels, measured by cortisol,
went up dramatically when they were walking past the boring building.
The
reason I emphasize non-conscious [cognition] is because most people are very
bad at knowing why we’re feeling or thinking the things we are. You could be
walking past that boring building and you ascribe your stress to a bad
conversation you had with someone the other day. But cognition is embodied, and
you’re standing next to this soul-desiccating place, and that’s what’s going
on.
The book
is peppered with the findings of scientific research on how the environment
shapes us and our lives. The brains of London cab drivers actually change after
they memorize the city’s geography. The design of a school can account for up
to 25 percent of a child’s rate of learning. Why haven’t these findings upended
architectural education?
SWG :
Number two,
the information which I draw in the book to construct this paradigm of how
people experience the built environment comes from a lot of different
disciplines. Cognitive neuroscience, environmental psychology, evolutionary
psychology, neuroanthropology, ecological psychology. In most cases, the
studies that I was looking at and ended up finding most useful were not
necessarily about the built environment. It was up to me to look at a study on
how people respond to water surfaces versus mirrors, and then figure out what
that meant for the design of the built environment.
Another
reason is that in the academy, the effect of poststructuralism and identity
politics has been to hammer into people’s heads the notion of cultural
relativism: “You can’t possibly say things about how people experience the
world because it’s all culturally constructed, socially constructed; it differs
by gender, by locale.” And so the other dimension was that talking about
individual experience, even if it’s related to social experience, but from an
embodied-cognition point of view, meant that you were apolitical. Because you
were talking about something very subjective and individual. So it was kind of
forbidden territory.
C:
The
embodied-cognition approach is universalizing, although you make it clear that
any design guidelines arising from it leave room for different social and
cultural responses. Is it easier, or harder, to take this approach now than it
would have been 10 or 15 years ago?
SWG :
I don’t think
it’s coincidental that I’m not in the academy and I wrote this book. I don’t
want to sound like I’m attacking architectural education because there are
plenty of people out there doing great things. This book basically started with
an essay on Alvar Aalto and embodied cognition and metaphors, in a book edited
by Stanford Anderson. I presented this when I was still teaching at Harvard,
and people went nuts. They just went crazy. “Wait a minute, you’re making all
these universalist claims!”
My response to
that was, and remains, “Sure, there are a lot of things that are socially
constructed. All you have to do is read my earlier work; it’s not like I
disagree with those ideas. The fact is that humans live in bodies, and brains
work in certain ways.”
There’s this
dichotomy between those who [think] about architecture in social and political
terms, and those who [think] about subjective experience, and never the twain
shall meet. One of the things the book does is basically dissolve that
opposition. The critical wink is the work of this [psychologist] Roger Barker,
who had researchers assigned to kids. [The researchers] followed them around
and took notes. Breakfast, school, chess club, ballet. The conclusion was they
could tell more about the kids by looking at where they were than by looking at
who they were. Their individual psychology mattered a lot less in terms of
their experience and behavior than the environments they were in.
So there
isn’t this opposition between looking at it as a social construct versus
experiential construct. It’s all the same thing. It’s a continuum.
C :
SWG :
The second
thing is behavioral economics, which I think has been really key, and has been
adopted into policy. People don’t make decisions logically. They make decisions
based on association and fallacious heuristics. I think that has paved the way
for people to recognize, “I don’t have as much agency as I thought I did.” The
paradox is, with a book like this, I’m hoping to enhance people’s agency with
their awareness of it.
C :
You
argue that “enriched environments” should be a human right, included in the
UN’s Human Development Index. What has to happen next for human-centered design
to become not a luxury, but the norm?
SWG :
Well, a
lot. One of the reasons the book is targeted to a general audience is that
basically, we need a real paradigm shift in how we think about the built
environment. It’s kind of analogous to the paradigm shift that happened in the
1960s and the way people thought about nature.
When I
was really young kid, nature was nature. It was forests, trees, lakes, rivers.
Then people begin to use the word “environment.” It was a political and social
construct, and emphasized the interrelatedness of all these different
components within nature. That was a response to pesticides, air pollution, and
so on. Now, kids get education in the environment from the time they’re in
first grade. They start learning about climate change, visit waste treatment
plants. That’s the kind of paradigm shift that needs to happen about the built
environment. Then it suddenly becomes of general public health importance.
What
concretely needs to happen: One, architectural education. Two, real-estate
development. Three, building codes, zoning codes, all these things need to be
reviewed according to these kinds of standards. Four, architects need to not be
so skittish in thinking about human experience and learn more about it. It’s a
much larger problem than just, “Architects should do better.” It’s not a
professional disciplinary problem, it’s a larger social problem. We also need
more research.
I was at
a book event where Richard Roberts [a former New York City housing
commissioner] said, “I’m going to recommend to every public official I know
that they read this book.” I’ve had a lot of architects tell me that they gave
the book to clients.
SWG :
Sarah Williams
Goldhagen lives in a church. Well, a former teen-pregnancy center, in East
Harlem, that was once a Pentecostal church. Either way, there is an
ecclesiastical feeling inside.
The
revered American architecture critic and former professor sits opposite me at
the head of her dining room table. It’s the day after an early March blizzard
hit the northeast, and as rays of morning sun filter through cathedral windows,
their intensity is magnified by a carpet of snow on the ground outside. The
natural light illuminates the entire double-height space, but Goldhagen anchors
the room with her quiet poise—even as she picks at a gluten-free bundt cake.
She’s bespectacled and dressed all in black, a look I’ve come to associate with
austere Chelsea gallerists. Her warm smile, though, breaks through the
seemingly hard-edged facade.
The
reason for our meeting is to discuss her new book, Welcome to Your World: How
the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives (Harper), the first major work of hers
to be written for the lay reader—a departure from two academic tomes she penned
in the early aughts, Louis Kahn’s Situated Modernism (Yale University Press)
and Anxious Modernisms (The MIT Press). Welcome to Your World, which was
published last month, pulls from new research in psychology and neuroscience to
explain exactly what its subtitle suggests.
Goldhagen’s
home, which she shares with her husband and children, is a perfect prototype
for the design her book lobbies for: a tasteful mix of organic materials,
natural light, and greenery. I pause my scanning of the room to take a sip of
tea. Maybe it’s just because my feet are snug inside a pair of Goldhagen’s
slippers, but I feel at ease. (At her home, guests are provided with sanctioned
footwear.) She would contend, however, that my comfy toes aren’t the half of
it.
In
Welcome to Your World, Goldhagen manages to summarize a wealth of new research
on the environment’s effects on the individual. What once seemed hopelessly
nebulous—the importance of aesthetics, the impact of the arts, and so on—can
now be scientifically proven. Patients convalescing in hospitals recover faster
when they can see nature from the window. Test-taking in a room with a sky-blue
ceiling leads to a higher score. Welcome to Your World gives designers the language
to communicate the importance of their trade—a task they’ve been attempting for
centuries, but with little success.
Having
spent her whole life studying and analyzing architecture, Goldhagen is relieved
to finally have proof of what she’s been saying all along. From her nine-year
tenure as The New Republic’s architecture critic to the decade she spent
teaching at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Goldhagen has never ceased to
advocate for the necessity of good design. And now, sitting in her ethereal
home, holding a forkful of bundt, she is certainly not going to stop.
CF : In
this book, you’re pushing back against a culture that doesn’t value
architecture. What do you think has contributed to this apathy?
SWG : Design
isn’t highly valued in the United States, and there is a kind of
self-perpetuating quality to that. Because it’s not highly valued, people think
it’s not important. Another reason is that people tend to think of architecture
as a fine art, which would mean it’s something very expensive and available
only to the elite. That’s simply wrong. As a friend of mine said, “Thinking
about architecture as an art is category mistake.” That doesn’t mean that an
artistic sensibility isn’t important, but it’s not art—it’s a public good.
CF : Being
an editor at a design magazine makes me biased, but I’d have to say I agree.
SWG : My
sister once said to me that hiring an architect is just a way to waste money.
Can you believe that? My sister!
SWG : In
part, it’s a failure of education. In most countries in Europe and Asia, people
get a general education in the built environment. For example, in the
Netherlands a lot more people are trained in the basics of the built
environment than in the United States and more of them end up being architects.
Here, you’re lucky if you get it in college.
CF : What
about architecture schools? Are they effectively teaching students what they
need to know?
SWG : One
of the principal targets of my book was architectural education. Having come
out of teaching history and theory in architecture schools, I found a lot of
people making assertions about what architecture should be that were pretty
unsupportable. There’s a lot of stuff we can point to that designers need to
know that they’re not being taught, and I don’t understand why. Well, I do
understand why. Because until I wrote the book, no one had presented it as a
body of knowledge.
CF : What
would you say to people who claim that it’s a monetary problem? That if
everyone could afford it, we’d all invest in design?
SWG : I
was once asked a question at the Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas. It’s a
little politically conservative out there. Someone said, “Well, you know
they’re building a post office in Bentonville. It’s a public building, so it
has to be functional and inexpensive. What would you say about that?” And I
said, “It costs just as much money to design a bad building as it does to
design a good one.” I think that at any level of investment, you can make
better decisions or worse decisions, and if you’re not making good decisions,
you’re making bad ones.
CF : One
of the worries that I had when I was reading your book is that you rely heavily
on data and hard evidence to prove your point. If there’s anything I’ve learned
this past year, it’s that the truth isn’t always enough to convince people.
SWG : First
of all, just because Donald Trump was elected doesn’t mean that data goes out
the window. What I’ve realized is that people are susceptible to big paradigm
shifts. For example, we used to think that the brain developed into your
mid-twenties and it was kind of set. Now, we know none of that is true. That is
an easily comprehensible idea that someone can get: “Oh, the brain is changing
all the time.” Yes, there’s an ocean of studies that I’ve read and researched,
but the central idea is really very simple and communicable, which is that we
can know things about how people experience environments.
CF : Was
it different to write about scientific studies, rather than observations and
interviews?
SWG :
This is
by far the most difficult project that I have ever done. That’s in part because
I was crossing a lot of different disciplines, from cognitive neuroscience to
environmental psychology to all these branches of psychology that I didn’t even
know of before. I had a long correspondence with a cognitive
neuroanthropologist from Florida. He’s actually very interesting. Who knew?
CF : How
has the cognitive neuroanthropologist and everyone else reacted to the book?
SWG : The
scientists love it. Terry Sejnowski, who blurbed the book—he’s the Francis
Crick Professor at The Salk Institute—came up to me and said, “You’re right on
target. This is exactly right.” He actually wanted to publish it in the Journal
of Computational Neurology, which he edits. I said it didn’t sound like the
right fit.
SWG : It’s
happening in other fields. It’s a big thing in the study of literature. Some
people think this is a bad direction in the humanities because it drains away
the humanism of the arts. But I’m a big believer in information—I think more
information is better.
CF ; Are
there any architects you believe are doing a good job now?
SWG : I
do. One more general point is I think that technologies have been developed in
the last fifteen years that allow for large-scale interpretations of mass
customization. It makes it much easier for architects to inflect moments in
their buildings in an experiential way.
CF : That’s
interesting, because many critics of architects such as Zaha Hadid and Frank
Gehry have credited those technological developments for their creations.
SWG : I
think Zaha Hadid was a terrible architect. I haven’t been in every one of her
buildings, but in the ones I have, the craftsmanship is awful. The
moment-to-moment experience of these buildings is just nonexistent, because
they’re these large-scale conceptualizations that end up getting built that
way. But the technology’s not to blame—it’s how you use it.
CF : If
not the technology, what do you think has enabled the system that supports
architects in that vein?
SWG : Constant
self-promotion and the awards commissions coming to the same short list—this
phenomenon happened within twenty to twenty-five years. I don’t see it changing
that much because the market forces keeping the “starchitecture” system in
place are so powerful that it’s going to be hard to contravene them.
CF : What
would have to change to alter that system?
SWG : I
do think clients need to be better educated—they need to hold whoever they hire
to a much higher standard. Part of the problem in the commissioning of
architecture is that [the end product] is very difficult for people to
visualize as clients so they don’t know what they’re buying a lot of the time.
Architects need to be better at communicating what they’re thinking.
CF : Funny.
Architects will tell you the clients do too much talking as it is.
SWG : This
is part of what I’m trying to break down. I ended up not putting this in the
book, but there are studies that show how differently architects look at
buildings than non-architects do.
CF : Makes
you think about how many bad buildings are under construction right now.
SWG : Exactly,
and the amount of building that’s going to take place in the next fifty years
is just staggering.
CF : You
see time lapses of cities being built in China and the pace is unbelievable.
SWG : Actually one of the things I’m pleased about
is that the preeminent business publisher in China bought my book, and they’re
expecting to sell a bazillion copies. Yes, China needs my book.
CF : Hopefully
they listen. If there’s one thing I gleaned from Welcome to Your World, it’s
that architects have more power than they know.
SWG : You’re
right, [my book] gives architects, landscape architects, urban designers, and
everyone else involved in the built environment an awareness of their immense
power. They can either make human experience or really fuck it up.
Feeling
Sad? Blame the Building. Interview
by Chloe Foussianes. Surface , April 12, 2017
We can do
better.
This is the
fundamental message of Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes
Our Lives (Harper, 2017) by architecture critic Sarah Williams Goldhagen.
Published this week, the book delivers a forceful indictment about the
impoverished state of our constructed world, based on the author’s deep
experiences as an itinerant architecture critic for the New Republic and as an
instructor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Most importantly,
Goldhagen’s argument is not merely a matter of opinion; rather, it is based on
enlightening studies in neuroscience and cognitive psychology that reinforce
the consequential relationship between our buildings and ourselves.
The
impetus to write Welcome to Your World can be traced to Goldhagen’s 2001
American Prospect article, "Boring Buildings." “It is a truism to
state that architecture composes the immediate physical environment of our
lives,” she argued. “But in this country, we too often forget that high-quality
architecture is also a social good, one that more than repays the investment.”
In her new book, Goldhagen expands on her critique of culturally,
aesthetically, and environmentally impoverished buildings with examples that
she calls “four sorry places.”
Such
settings include the slum dwellings, where one-third of the world’s urban
residents live; the soul-sucking suburbs in which many middle-class Americans
reside; schools for wealthy families that ignore best design practices for
learning environments; and starchitect-designed landmark projects that fail to
recognize basic aspects of human behavior. Refreshingly, the expansive sweep of
Goldhagen’s condemnation eschews favoritism towards particular groups—such as
renowned architects or vernacular builders. Rather, she focuses on what science
tells us about good and bad design, regardless of socioeconomic level or
geographic location. The most compelling moments in the book are those in which
the author employs convincing studies to dispel commonly held beliefs, as
demonstrated in the following examples.
In
typical practice, architects privilege form over material. Long before they
select particular assemblies or systems for a building, architects will have
designed—and redesigned—a project’s siting, massing, and geometry. This emphasis
is reflected in academia, where students study the formal aspects of a design
over its material constitution. Goldhagen believes our experience of the built
environment is the opposite. The brain processes contextual cues based on the
nature of surfaces—not overall forms—and evaluates their physical qualities
based on the summation of past material experiences. “Our responses to
surfaces, consequently, are more likely to powerfully contribute to our
holistic experience of place than our responses to forms,” she writes. “In
short: form has wrongly been crowned king, because form-based cues elicit less
of a whole-body, intersensory, and emotional response than surface-based cues
do.” Based on a study by Canadian cognitive scientists Jonathan Cant and Melvyn
Goodale, this realization suggests that architects should place more emphasis
on material considerations in the design process, and at an earlier stage.
An acronym
associated with architectural practice—among other industries—is KISS, short
for “keep it simple, stupid.” This sentiment pervades much of contemporary
design culture, which aims to minimize complexity and visual noise—often to
extremes. Consider the ultra-refined simplicity of products designed by Apple,
or the company’s new ring-shaped building designed by U.K. firm Foster +
Partners. This kind of clear intelligibility is a positive effort at the
object-level, but can be a detriment at larger scales.
For example,
urban proposals for homogeneous tower blocks and street grids—such as Le Corbusier’s
1924 Ville Radieuse and Ludwig Hilberseimer’s 1944 modern city project—have
long received scathing criticism as dehumanizing dystopias. Yet the architect’s
goal should not be complexity, as this quality thwarts comprehensibility and
accessibility in the built environment. Rather, Goldhagen argues that designers
must aspire to achieve "patterned complexity," which approximates how
we encounter the natural world—simultaneously intricate and legible. According
to the author, architects may achieve this objective via various strategies
including “chunking” spatial volumes based on program, introducing visually
compelling material languages, and creating surprise by shifting one’s
expectations of a particular construction typology.
Big cities are
often celebrated as ideal settlement models from an environmental perspective,
based on their per capita reduced land area and ecological footprint compared
with smaller, more sparsely populated municipalities. The fact that the natural landscape, while
appreciated, is often minimized in large metropolises is accepted as an
inherent outcome of the intensified demand for space. Generously sized
landscapes such as New York’s Central Park or Tokyo’s Imperial Palace grounds
are considered luxuries in cities that are otherwise dominated by impervious
surfaces. Yet such green spaces are not extravagances but essential provisions,
Goldhagen argues. She offers a multitude of scientific evidence for the
powerful benefits of nature: medical patients offered views of trees are able
to leave the hospital a day earlier than those facing blank walls; children
exposed to adequate green spaces demonstrate superior cognitive functioning and
reduced stress.
Despite the
overwhelming evidence, green spaces comprise less than 10 percent of many of
the world's largest cities—such as Shanghai (2.6 percent) and Los Angeles (6.7
percent). Political will emerges as a critical force here, as evidenced by the
fact that cities such as London, Stockholm, and Sydney exhibit 35 percent or
more green space due to their local governments’ prioritization of public
welfare. Architects can similarly advocate for living landscapes as a
fundamental requirement—not in the form of the typical suburban lawn, which
Goldhagen denounces as an monocultural afterthought, but in well-designed
environments crafted by talented landscape architects.
The boldest
argument in Welcome to Your World is the eradication of the differentiation
between architecture and building. This long-held dividing line—which defines
architecture as an elevated, higher-level craft in contrast to building as the
construction of ordinary shelter—reinforces the elitist, exceptional
associations of the former while permitting the latter a “free pass” to meet a
minimum set of aspirations. “The distinction between building and architecture,
between designing for aesthetic pleasure and designing (or building) for
‘function,’ is misleading, wrongheaded, and defunct,” Goldhagen writes.
“Everyone needs better—indeed, good—landscapes, cityscapes, and buildings of
all kinds, everywhere.”
Such a lofty
goal may seem overly ambitious; however, the fundamental contribution is the
shift in perspective. By expecting more from all aspects of the built
environment, as opposed to the comparatively rare moments when architects have
the opportunity to design landmark commissions, Goldhagen is issuing a
challenge to a much broader audience than just the AEC industry. Given the
direct correlation between the constructed world and human development, we all
have a reason to advocate for better design.
Assessing
Architecture Through Neuroscience and Psychology. By Blaine Brownell. Architect ,
April 13, 2017.
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