The hidden ways that architecture affects the way you feel

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170605-the-psychology-behind-your-citys-design

by pmcpinto • 9 years ago

62 52 9 years ago

Hermel2• 9 years ago

American buildings always feel a little odd to me. My guess is that this is related to them using feet and inches and not the metric system.

taeric2• 9 years ago

I'm not sure I understand your assertion here. How would unit of measure make a difference to the feel?

And, I'm assuming this same oddness of feel extends to older buildings pretty much everywhere?

jerryr• 9 years ago

I think they're suggesting a subconscious perception of the subtle differences in sizes that result from building with round numbers in metric vs imperial (e.g. 1 meter is different than 3 feet). This is interesting, but seems less likely than the more dramatic differences in architectural styles, materials, regulations, and zoning.

Hermel2• 9 years ago

The proportions and standard lengths are all slightly different. For example, standard US fences are 3 feet high, but standard EU fences are 1 meter high. This is a noticeable, but not striking difference.

It's like using letter paper format instead of A4, it also feels a little odd to me.

sutee• 9 years ago

Am I the only one who read the article in the voice of Roman Mars?

sogen• 9 years ago

I read your comment in his voice

carsongross2• 9 years ago

If the façade is complex and interesting, it affects people in a positive way; negatively if it is simple and monotonous

Humans prefer humanistic architecture, with fractal visual complexity and natural materials. Modernism tossed it all out, then the post modernists recognized that that was a horrible mistake, but decided it was too uncool to just go back to what people actually liked.

If you are interested in a short US-centric read on how the whole thing went down, read this:

https://www.amazon.com/Bauhaus-Our-House-Tom-Wolfe/dp/031242...

Post WW2 architects have a lot of human unhappiness to answer for.

whitepoplar• 9 years ago

[deleted]

carsongross2• 9 years ago

The treatment of Christopher Alexander by the architecture faculty at Berkeley is very high on my "Why I don't donate to Cal as an alumni" list.

chrismealy3• 9 years ago

Not an architecture expert, so maybe somebody can help me out, but the early modern architecture was often still complex and humane (I'm thinking 1930s - Amsterdam School and WPA post offices). Only later did modernism become an excuse for big, cheap, and ugly.

clock_tower5• 9 years ago

Modernism -- i.e., the Bauhaus, the International Style, and Le Corbusier -- was always about big, cheap, and ugly. The Amsterdam School was Expressionist, not Modernist; and nothing's more anti-Modernist than a pretty painting on a wall, even if it's in a visually arresting 1930s style.

But that said, the Amsterdam School and the WPA work were beautiful, and I'd never heard of them before. Thank you for mentioning them! I'll be sure to look into both in a lot more detail.

21• 9 years ago

Another VR study, published this year, concluded that most people feel better in rooms with curved edges and rounded contours than in sharp-edged rectangular rooms – though (tellingly perhaps) the design students among the participants preferred the opposite.

I always wondered why rooms tend to be rectangular pretty much all over the world. Googling for that suggests that it's a price thing, but I'm not convinced, since expensive homes still seem to prefer rectangular rooms.

Even contemporary buildings, with extremely weird and non-uniform facades, still tend to be grid-based on the inside.

I would be really interested if this preference study was also done in the real world, not just in VR.

Another related universal thing, why do we sleep with the head towards the wall (as opposed to the center of the room). Googling suggests a deep security measure, since the wall prevents attacks from behind you, which are the hardest to defend against.

Feng-shui deals with these kind of issues, if you move beyond the superstitious layer (have a turtle for money, ...)

By reading feng-shui books I learned to get a bit more intune with my inner feelings (the chi/qi), so now, if I sit in a room with no apparent exit, or with a cluttered path to the exit, I can pin point the insecurity feelings emanating from my subconscious.

Kalium• 9 years ago

If I were to speculate, I would guess that it's a usage-of-volume thing. It's easy to make effective use of volume with grids, but not always as easy with other shapes.

Architecture is, at some level, a packing problem. Packing problems tend to favor lines and corners over organic curves.

wlesieutre• 9 years ago

It's the building structure too, they're easier to design and construct using a repeating structural module. Each column supports the same area, each area has the same design loads, and you get a bunch of identical columns in a line.

And then you need to arrange rooms and corridors around those columns, and it's much more convenient to not have random columns dropping through the middle of most rooms. So you align your walls on the column grid, and now you have a bunch of straight walls and 90 degree angles.

To some degree it goes the other way (I need my rooms to be X by Y, design column grid to match), and you still do rectangular rooms because you know that way you can push your column gridlines into the walls. And it's not perfectly consistent, your central corridor might fall in an off-module grid width. But one way or another most modern buildings are on a grid like that.

tpeo3• 9 years ago

When you're trying to put furniture in the room, trying to fit something with a rectangular base in a room with a rectangular plan is much easier than any other similar problem while minimizing the likelihood of having any wasted space.

Plus, it's also much easier to change the configuration of the room, or to transfer one piece of furniture from one room to another. So even if people weren't just lazy about how to fit perfectly pentagonal furniture in their houses, so long as they were trying and testing new shapes, furniture would probably evolutionarily converge to something squareish.

drsopp• 9 years ago

No, I don't agree. Where did you get this idea? Did you see Antoni Gaudí's organic arcitecture in Barcelona? I find them so soothing. I think our rectangular inclinations stems mostly from what we can afford.

ThrustVectoring• 9 years ago

Rooms are rectangular because human brains find it simpler to map, I think. The order and structure involved means you can treat things much more interchangeably - for instance, the available directions for travel don't change as you move around in a rectangular grid, and rooms are all the same shape.

The only reasonable alternative is a regular hexagonal tiling, and that means having more neighboring rooms, which gives its own problems.

xyzzyz• 9 years ago

Other commenters replied to you pointing out the difficulty of packing things in non-grid based space, but they are only a manifestations of the fundamental reason, which is cost: it is much cheaper to build straight walls, and the furniture for straight walls can be mass made, which also makes it much cheaper. Furniture for non-straight spaces usually needs to be custom made.

d-sc• 9 years ago

I work for an apartment development company. To build round walls would be prohibitively expensive and impractical. Every part of your pipeline from building materials to tools to furniture is designed for linear-walled rooms.

nieksand• 9 years ago

Furniture is definitely an issue.

When I was in Singapore in the early 90s, I remember my family looking at a rental unit in the Draycott towers. It was super cool looking, but lack of places for furniture to go is what nixed it.

For the curious... exterior and interior:

https://www.singaporeexpats.com/singapore-property-pictures/...

http://draycott.weebly.com/uploads/1/7/5/5/1755412/3811624.j...

serhei• 9 years ago

Variations on octagonal rooms could be a good approximation. For example, bay windows are practically a way to achieve a similar effect, without departing from a rectangle structure too much.

silvestrov• 9 years ago

One aspect of living in very old buildings in Europe (buildings more than 150 years old) is that no corner is 90°, no ceiling is completely flat, no door is standard size.

This makes for very cosy flats which are very much liked and in demand. It also makes for very good acoustics, unlike modern flat and hard walls/ceilings.

And yet people in charge here still build "modern" buildings, even when we have known for the past 50 years that this kind of building never make people feel part of a community, which is so important for society.

delegate• 9 years ago

I guess it's a lot cheaper to build square angles, then 'organic' shapes.

Just a guess, though.

jdonaldson• 9 years ago

Think of all the things that are flat and straight... boards, wires, pipes, furniture, etc. It's easy to fit flat to flat. If things are curved, you need to match angles and curves everywhere using flat shapes.

theoh• 9 years ago

Best article I know about the rectangularity issue is this, by Philip Steadman: http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/13217/1/13217.pdf

Domenic_S• 9 years ago

The UC Davis "Death Star" [0] is one of those buildings, it was meant to encourage human interaction but ends up just building dread. Terrible building.

https://localwiki.org/davis/Social_Sciences_and_Humanities_B...

andrewflnr• 9 years ago

That's a shame. I actually really like skyways and stuff like that, but to deliberately make it confusing is inexcusable.

labster• 9 years ago

I'm actually a fan of the Death Star. For me, it was one of those places where you could turn a corner and get a completely different perspective. And it was decently fun to LARP in. I was in the sciences so I never spent much time there, but I like the uniqueness of the building. I just wish it was a little more unique, using other colors and textures than plain gray concrete.

tpeo3• 9 years ago

So, what I'm reading is: "Architects to phase in eye-candy as they find out bare walls to be unedifying".

Is this an overly cynical reading of the article?

clock_tower5• 9 years ago

Bare walls plus eye candy just gives you Postmodernism, which isn't much of an improvement over Modernism. The goal is to build genuinely smaller buildings, or buildings with a wider range of uses. (Think of how the Empire State Building has shops on the first few floors and offices above, and its stepped-back construction lets it blend in with more standard six-storey facades.)

tpeo3• 9 years ago

Diverse urban landscapes is something that I can get behind, but the issue (as I see it) is that there's something else at play here. Mixed-use, for instance, is already well justified as an urban policy by contemporary urban economics. Designing streets in such a way that they're easier to navigate is something that is already well motivated by contemporary behavioral agent-based modelling of urban landscapes (besides being an idea which is probably as old as urban planning itself).

It's the idea of some immediate psychological response to the environment like that of the stress level of a passerby to a facade that bothers me, because it reminds me too much of stuff which IMO hasn't been particularly useful in urban planning, such as the broken windows theory. There's no immediate inference that can be made from the immediate psychological response of a passerby to the behavioral response of a urban population to the same environment over long periods of time. There plenty of neighborhoods in this world that might look like shit but which aren't actually shit, and most often neither do the plainer houses in a given neighborhood house people any worse than their neighbors. But in so far as lots of money might be wasted trying to "solve" these issues, the whole idea to me sounds to me like a massive red herring.

spraak• 9 years ago

This is why earth buildings can be so healing psychologically.

okreallywtf2• 9 years ago

My first few thoughts on reading this:

1. Cool, I've always wondered the same thing whenever I visit DC. I wonder what it would be like to walk to/from work with big, grand architecture all around and if it would change my mindset if I saw it every day, it certainly does when I visit.

2. While its interesting to consider, this feels like an optimization for a system we don't even have working yet. There are so many ills to deal with in our societies that I feel like its not something that is worth spending much public time or effort on (research it all you want by all means). I hate to feel that way because when people deride NASA/space research/pure research it frustrates me because they aren't mutually exclusive with solving earth problems (fix our planet before we try to go to mars!), but I can't help but feel like this could mostly improve life for people who are already living pretty good too. I'm conflicted about actually putting this into practice.

clock_tower5• 9 years ago

On your second point, the poor suffer from Modernist architecture. The projects actively bred crime, by encouraging isolation and demoralization -- Pruitt-Igoe was actually dynamited, and its inhabitants were much more peaceful and civilized after they were moved to normal housing. (And they'd been much more peaceful and civilized before being moved into Pruitt-Igoe, too.)

The rich, and the prosperous upper-middle class, can live where they like and enjoy traditional architecture (look up New Traditional construction), but ordinary people are stuck with ordinary buildings, which are awful under a Modernist regime -- or under our current Postmodernist regime of cheap pull-up sheds adorned with ticky-tacky.

okreallywtf2• 9 years ago

Interesting, do you think modernist architecture itself breeds problems or do you think the economic conditions bred the crime? I get the feeling that the architecture was used in some cases specifically to group together people that they wanted to get away from the upper and/or middle classes and consolidate together, but I wonder how much of that can be attributed to the actual architecture itself. I don't feel like we can know that until we have a more equal society or at least one where straight poverty isn't as much of an issue.

rm_-rf_slash• 9 years ago

Ithaca, NY, may not have the most remarkable architecture, but I am always amazed at how beautiful the city looks from the hilltops.

Crucially, there are few buildings above two stories in the many blocks between the downtown area and the south shores of Cayuga Lake. There are so many trees in between that one could be forgiven for thinking that a major section of the city is little more than a forest or a densely wooded park, when viewed from above.

Chris_Newton• 9 years ago

I’ve been reading a book called The Edifice Complex by Deyan Sudjic that is related to this idea. I’m only part way through, but it’s already provided some fascinating examples of how very powerful individuals have used architecture, often to an extreme degree, to intimidate and to project authority when others have come to visit them.

ProfessorLayton• 9 years ago

I agree in regards to intricate façades, which I tend to find beautiful and inspiring, particularly Beaux Arts style. I'm actually a bit bummed that small, intricate details seem to have gone out of fashion in today's architecture. Some newer buildings may be interesting at the macro-level, but still feel lacking when it comes to small details.

I also feel that way about residential architecture, where intricate façades seem to have faded away in newer homes. Even grotesque McMansions feel comparatively tame in comparison to say, an Edwardian or Brownstone style home.

Pointing cost as a reason made sense back then, but now feels counterintuitive, as we have so many more materials and ways to mass produce intricate details today that we did back then - 3D printing, CNC, etc. - I don't see why a Victorian style neighborhood couldn't be built today without the intensive labor costs it used to take to make those details that make those homes so beautiful.

fibbery• 9 years ago

Maybe it's the intensive labor that made them valuable in the first place, as signifiers of wealth. Now that intricate details can be mass produced inexpensively, minimalism is in vogue.

chrismealy3• 9 years ago

I'm with you. I've thought a lot about how technology could be used to increase the amount of detail in architecture (rather than decrease it), but I'm not a designer, and my daydreams never go anywhere (I think you just can't beat old brownstones and 17th century Dutch houses. They're not even that ornate, but the quality of materials were high). New construction in my city looks like cardboard boxes taped together, and that's for a $1,000,000 house.

soared2• 9 years ago

Mentioned at the end of the article is desire path and of course there is an active subreddit with tons of awesome pictures: https://www.reddit.com/r/DesirePath/top/?sort=top&t=all

soared2• 9 years ago

I'm tempted to send this to my boss in support of redesigning our 90s-esque cubicle farm.

skilesare• 9 years ago

One should read The Nature of Order by Chris Alexander and / or The Timeless Way of Building

gt_• 9 years ago

Anyone interested in this subject matter would be smart to consult Gaston Bachelard's seminal work 'Poetics of Space'

For anyone creating in VR, this book should be required reading. But, I haven't heard anyone working in VR acknowledge it. My background is in art, and I have held this book as just short of sacred throughout my practice.

chrismealy3• 9 years ago

"Happy City" (mentioned in the article) is a terrific book, and surprisingly down-to-earth.

The hidden ways that architecture affects the way you feel

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