Why Ugly Architecture Is Bad for Your Health

https://www.architecturaluprising.com/studies/why-ugly-architecture-is-bad-for-your-health/

by barry-cotter • 3 years ago

116 59 3 years ago

architecturaluprising.com

amelius• 3 years ago

Two questions:

1. When can we sue bad architects for the bad effects of their work on our health?

2. Can wearing VR goggles prevent these bad effects?

topherclay• 3 years ago

These ideas gave me a headache. Expect to hear from my lawyer.

progbits2• 3 years ago

At the British University of Warwick, an extensive study was conducted in 2017. It established that beautiful urban architecture has the same positive impact on our physical and mental health as green parks.

The linked study: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.170170

Here, we explore whether ratings of over 200 000 images of Great Britain from the online game Scenic-Or-Not, combined with hundreds of image features extracted using the Places Convolutional Neural Network, might help us understand what beautiful outdoor spaces are composed of. [...] We also find that a neural network can be trained to automatically identify scenic places, and that this network highlights both natural and built locations. Our findings demonstrate how online data combined with neural networks can provide a deeper understanding of what environments we might find beautiful

Yeah it "established" nothing of that sort. This whole article is built on some extremely weak research.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 3 years ago

On the other hand, ugly architecture could have direct negative consequences. Arnold J. Wilkins, Professor of Psychology at the University of Essex, has found that looking at certain urban landscapes may actually give you a headache and cause migraines.

If you look at the link: https://theconversation.com/looking-at-buildings-can-actuall...?

There are two ways of measuring efficiency; the first is to build simple computer models of the way that nerve cells compute what we see.
For our own research, Olivier and I designed a computer program that measures how well images adhere to the rule of nature. After running the program, we found that departure from the rule of nature predicts how uncomfortable people find it to look at any given image – whether it’s an image of a building or a work of art.

And then later:

That is, our brains use more oxygen when we look at scenes which depart from the rule. Since headaches tend to be associated with excess oxygen usage, this may explain why some designs give us headaches.

This evidence also seems pretty weak

progbits2• 3 years ago

OK so basically making up shit that the author likes and occasionally linking to irrelevant (and bogus) study in the hope nobody will bother reading it.

Flagged.

mycologos• 3 years ago

I think the blog post author just made a mistake and meant to cite [1]. That paper actually attempts to correlate "scenic-ness" and health. But it also says that "[v]isual inspection of photographs with the highest rating for scenicness reveals that they tend to contain landscapes with broad open areas and essentially no manmade structure", which is a pretty different claim than "beautiful urban architecture has the same positive impact on our physical and mental health as green parks" (the paper doesn't mention architecture at all).

The whole post smells strongly of "I like a certain thing and will point to any flimsy published evidence in support of it".

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/srep16899

nayuki2• 3 years ago

Okay? The elephant in the room is that bad urban design is bad for your health: Car centrism, parking lots, stroads, endless sprawl, etc.

sneak• 3 years ago

Yeah, I'd much rather live in a walkable place with unpolluted air with a ton of ugly buildings, than a place with gorgeous buildings that needs ugly, polluting vehicles to get everywhere.

ethanbond3• 3 years ago

But… those things are inversely correlated? Walkable cities tend to be dramatically more beautiful and ugly gigantic POS buildings are the ones surrounded by acres of parking lot and highway…?

I agree I’d take your tradeoff if presented but I think the real world tradeoff is even sillier and more obvious than the one you propose.

toshredsyousay2• 3 years ago

Yeah, American cities full of stroads and parking lots are far uglier than a hypothetical walkable city full of 'bland' architecture.

bobthepanda6• 3 years ago

A big box store with no windows and only a logo for ornament is pretty much as bland as you can get.

bobthepanda6• 3 years ago

Right, and a lot of bad urban design, is "good" architecture.

---

It reminds me of what urbanist Jan Gehl calls 'birdshit architecture', which is stuff that looks good from a bird's eye view or a rendering but is totally impractical in practice. Prime examples include gigantic plazas or lawns without any sort of trees or seating, so you can't really stay in them because they're too windy and the sun is overbearing, they're totally empty (and probably unsafe) as a result, and they just extend your walking distances.

Bonus points if the paths are totally fenced in because they're not where people actually want to walk and they end up trampling the lawn full of desire paths.

nayuki2• 3 years ago

I forget what it's called, but something like "airplane view" architecture is also bad urban design. It's when centralized planners have lofty goals and design huge neighborhoods and plazas that look good from the air. There are towers, gigantic lawns, and a projection of power rather than chaos. There are various Latin American cities guilty of this. I'm struggling to recall the words and examples, so please help me out!

enaaem• 3 years ago

The issue is that many opponents or people who are on the fence will think of higher density as concrete jungles or commie blocks. You also need to sell them an aesthetically pleasing vision. People are emotionally first and will then find logic to justify the emotions

Robotbeat• 3 years ago

That’s kinda fair, but a lot of the architecture hated on actually looks nice. I like the 5 over 1s, for instance.

beebeepka• 3 years ago

Brutalism was no accident.

I think cars, and almost everything related to them, are waaaay worse than ugly buildings for our physical and mental health but I am afraid I'll die alone on this hill. The vast majority would kill for a parking spot, let alone giving up their smelly, loud chunk of metal

toshredsyousay2• 3 years ago

I don't think you are alone, or at the very least I will be buried on the hill nearby. But those with car-Stockholm-syndrome are still the politically dominant force (in the US at least).

sokoloff• 3 years ago

I think there's a pretty large middle ground of society that could be reached, iff a credible and full plan for migrating from one modality to the other were presented. I have probably 30 years of ambulatory life ahead of me. My kids have twice that or a little more.

A plan that makes life worse for the next 20 or 50 years until we get to the other side where it's better is a non-starter. A vague, hand-wavy plan of "eliminate stroads; reduce parking" and no more steps is a non-starter.

I'm not sure if it's practically possible to switch an existing city from a car-centric mode to a pedestrian-centric mode inside of 10 years, but if we could evaluate and debate a credible plan to do that, we might make more progress than is currently happening.

AnimalMuppet• 3 years ago

Brutalism was no accident.

Care to expand on that? If it was on purpose, whose purpose, and why?

ghaff4• 3 years ago

Well it was deliberately created and sold by a specific architecture school. Not all brutalist is bad though.

trgn• 3 years ago

Modernism. Infatuation with the transformative power of high technology (both the physical and bureaucratic kind). The preceding bourgeois order was held responsible for class extortion (from the perspective of the emancipating proles) and synonymous with a small minded pettiness (from the perspective of a libertarian youth). Modernism was an iconoclastic project, a submission to an engineering fetish.

beezlewax• 3 years ago

There are a couple of brutalist buildings in Dublin that look totally out if place but also seem to fit in as part of the city now. I love them but I can see why other people might not.

Worth taking a look on street view at least

NikkiA• 3 years ago

Probably Ernő Goldfinger is the most obvious person to blame, along with the smithsons, Basil Spence and Leslie Martin.

People think of brutalism as some weird 'means to an end' from the communist countries, but brutalism was an explict choice in the UK that the soviets copied.

Tanoc2• 3 years ago

Brutalism was designed to expose the functionality of the way everything was built. We'd been using Portland cement for a few decades at that point, but we always hid it behind facades meant to harken back to traditional architectural functions. Covering Portland cement in brickwork or arranged timber was a common way of doing that. By exposing the underlying core of the building Brutalism was meant to display that transparency would only be allowed so far as to show what a monolith the power structure who used it actually was. Brutalist architecture has few glass openings, vertically massive internal atriums, large thick columns, interior or exterior walls rising at harsh unnatural angles, and consecutive terracing without bracing, all unachievable with traditional building methods or in then-contemporary Mid-Century Modernist architecture. All of this was only possible due to the strong central structure, representative of the aforementioned "monolith" of power.

Blackthorn2• 3 years ago

Mildly related, I remember watching an anime some time ago where the plot was that hostile architecture made its residents go crazy and start murdering each other. I sent it to my architect sister and we had a good chuckle.

pteraspidomorph• 3 years ago

Can you remember what the anime was? That sounds like fun.

mdpye• 3 years ago

I'm not aware of an anime adaptation, but it does sound a bit like J G Ballard's High-rise.

throwaway129228• 3 years ago

Sounds like it might be the 5th Kara No Kyoukai movie.

https://myanimelist.net/anime/4282/Kara_no_Kyoukai_Movie_5__...

loandbehold• 3 years ago

Being poor is bad for your health and also leads to living in ugly environments.

alexalx666• 3 years ago

So that's what really shows an effectiveness of city management, that you don't have to be rich to have good quality of living

downWidOutaFite• 3 years ago

I was hoping the headline was about software architecture because I blame the codebase I work on for my stress and depression.

expertentipp• 3 years ago

Did you try restarting Eclipse?

buffalobuffalo• 3 years ago

Same. I was about to send this to a coworker I'm arguing with about design patterns. It was disappointing to open it and see buildings.

sbuk2• 3 years ago

"Who is running AU?

The Architectural Uprising is a global movement that includes people of all backgrounds, ages, genders, and political views. All united by a passion for beautiful architecture and an aesthetically pleasing living environment."

Given this, I'd treat this site, not just the article, with several metric tonnes of salt. It's like, just their opinion, man, to (mis)quote the dude...

jtr1• 3 years ago

Why?

sbuk2• 3 years ago

It's a bad and lazy question, but I'll respond nonetheless.

"All united by a passion for beautiful architecture and an aesthetically pleasing living environment." is entirely subjective. Presenting opinions on what constitutes 'aesthetically pleasing' as fact is neither productive nor useful. Trying to link this with empirical research so cumbersomely is foolhardy, patronising to the reader and not compelling.

thomasfl2• 3 years ago

I am leading the Norwegian Architectural Uprising. It is hard to proof anything in environmental psychology. I just want people to be more critical to what property developers and the state is building.

SenAnder• 3 years ago

On the other hand it didn't require any sort of scientific proof or popular uprising for ugly modern architecture to displace other styles.

thomasfl2• 3 years ago

Good point. There is no scientifically proven arguments for building modernist architecture. It is really easy to find a lot fallacy in arguments modernist architecture. For instance is it common argue that it should be easy for people in the future to be able to see what age a building has been built. Th guilt by association fallacy is also very commonly used in Europe. Hitler's architect liked columns and pilasters, if you like columns and pilaster, then you must sympathize with Hitler.

wuqtas• 3 years ago

worth a read...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedensreich_Hundertwasser

carapace• 3 years ago

Christopher Alexander "Nature of Order", "Pattern Language", "Notes on the Synthesis of Form"

It's impossible to summarize his work (the above are his most famous books, in reverse chronological order) but the essence of his idea is that space itself is the "luminous ground of being" and our architecture can conduce or block the essential selfness...

I'm doing a terrible job of describing it... sorry.

Why Ugly Architecture Is Bad for Your Health

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