Following an “introduction” in parts 1 and 2 were a series of posts exploring the evolutionary “origins” of our responses to built environments and then, more specifically, “The Mind that Encounters Architecture.” This next series explores what happens in “the body that responds.”

In their innovative study, Body, Memory, and Architecture, architects Kent Bloomer and Charles Moore spell out how the experience of architecture originates as a body’s responses – how architecture is, in a sense, a “body-centered” art. They distill our enormously complex human nature into convincing insights, and the ways they trace out their significance make their insights immediately available to apply in practice.  The basic ideas, once they have been stated, may seem simple and obvious—fact, they have been exploited brilliantly by artists, designers, and critics.  Yet the power of the insights to steer designs into more satisfying, humane environments – from grand monuments to livable communities – is more often mysteriously neglected.

This is a mystery to me because generations of educators and students have had readily available Geoffrey Scott’s extraordinary The Architecture of Humanism.  The first of many popular editions was published in 1914.

The Architecture of Humanism

In clear and persuasive language, Scott describes the pleasure, the “delight,” we can take in the art of architecture – the line, mass, space, and coherence of the form itself – as we transcribe the compositions of physical contours “into terms of ourselves and ourselves into terms of architecture.”

“The whole of architecture is,” Scott says “invested by us with human movement and human moods, given clarity and value by our intellect.”  And he summarizes this way:  “The humanist instinct looks in the world for physical conditions that are related to our own. For movements which are like those we enjoy, for resistances that resemble those that can support us, for a setting where we should be neither lost nor thwarted.  It looks, therefore, for certain masses, lines and spaces, and tends to create them and recognize their fitness when created.  And, by our instinctive imitation of what we see, their seeming fitness becomes our real delight.”  This, he says, is “the natural [spontaneous] way of receiving and interpreting what we see… This is the humanism of architecture.”

He describes how, without conscious effort, we follow lines of paths and sculptural gestures, tracing out with moving eyes their orientation, extension, and interpenetration until resolved.  And, within our bodies, we sense the movement as an eloquent line “speaks to us.”  And mass, its contours and dimensions in light and shade, is sensed – like a human body – in terms of its unity, stability, and proportions, and at the same time its pressing weight, balance, and support, as if they were forces we feel acting on ourselves.  Likewise, the configuration of spaces are sensed in terms of the body’s potential movement or repose – open-ended or enclosed and secure – with the resulting clarity and pleasure, or contradiction and confusion. Read more…

For millennia we have applied our innate capability for reasoning in mathematics to understand and master the environments we face. Whether “god-given” or laboriously evolved, structures built into a brain are prepared to organize sensations of space into complex orderly relationships and, in built environments, simple geometries.  Once they have been identified and put to work, generations of designers and their patrons have come to believe in the divinity, magic or purity of circles, squares, triangles, pentagons, trinities, and pairs, as well as wholes and proportions – like Palladio’s simple whole-number ratios or a double-cube room or musical rations – as if they may somehow be inherent in an underlying cosmic order – a harmony of the universe.

Their unfolding recognition may have been an experience of what we call “formal beauty.” Plato, who thought deeply about it, found Greek geometry “eternally and absolutely beautiful” and whether it is or not, its systematic use in skillful hands has produced extraordinarily pleasing, coherent harmonious design. For uncounted people it has felt deeply “right” and the forms have pervaded the patterns of both secular and sacred monuments from ancient classical design to Hindu mandalas to French rose windows and ornament around the globe. Their practical survival value has been put to work, too, in enormous investments in geometry – in points and lines that seem to decipher the sun and moon’s movements at Stonehenge and stone structures across the British countryside. And our ancestors embodied the divine itself in geometric forms, placing Poseidon as an architectural presence in the temple where his wild, open Aegean Sea begins at Cape Sunion.

The Greek god Poseidon embodied in the geometry of a temple where his wild,  open sea begins at Cape Sunion.

But there’s another plausible hypothesis that our readiness to “see” geometric principles and the simpler numbers we use in built environments can be found within ourselves – that, again in Plato’s words, “the mathematical structure of nature and the beauty of pure mathematics” is natural selection at work. They are representations of the complex realities “out-there” that have been created by evolving mental structures “in-here” – structures enabling logic and reasoning – as our ancient ancestors learned to master a natural setting through spontaneous, everyday visual, tactile, muscular experience. We ourselves live inside forms that have clear, coherent boundaries, bi-lateral symmetry, the insistent perpendicular pull of gravity, cycles of full circle rotation, straight lines of sight, and parallel, angled, jointed limbs, plus a propensity in our minds to see lines and shapes implied by points. In interactions with our surroundings we observe celestial geometry, and we discover crystalline forms, smooth, curved arcs of trajectories, our own flows of movement, the efficiency of straight-line paths and the stable horizon line. From all those and related sensory experiences, one might trace a direct path, through our capacity for abstraction and logic – and the pervasive human dream of perfectibility – to the simplified, cohesive, lucid, predictable, idealized relationships that have seemed so obvious in Euclidean geometry. In other words, the working geometries of places we have been building may well have developed out of human interaction with nature as the relevant “deeper order.” Read more…

A mind is predisposed to organize learning and experiences into narratives, and as we search for order and patterns, our attention is captured by human stories. We can’t resist clues discovered in unfolding plotlines, beginnings and endings or conflict, climax and resolutions; the search for causes and effects is built into our “learning” brain. And we’re equally drawn to moods and settings – all experienced through real or fictional characters that grow, change, solve problems and, ultimately, win in their own way. We tend to package the results in myths, legends, literature, and entertainment that bind families and communities together and ultimately define a culture. This happens, for each of us, in the environments we build as well. The narrative representations made “in-here,” as we mirror, or imagine ourselves in the reality “out-there” become our way to impose an understandable order on fragments of experience – and realize its pleasures. Like naming, stories create their context, giving perceptions a meaning.

Encountering a new place, we enter, in effect, into stories already underway.  And as the setting and the human life that animates it engages our interest, we tend to find our own place, to belong or not, within these flows of people, spaces, and events. As the accumulating sensations trigger messages, associations, and emotions, we fill in the details and fit them into our belief systems, theories, and prejudices. We weave them into our “personal project” – our own imagined journey through life with its intentions and motivations of the moment. Then the narrative momentum, this illusion that we can control, is the way we fix a built environment into our long-term memory and, as a result, merge it into our lives – and often into our identity.

Telling a story with a built environment is integral to design and is often done with great skill by people who know their audiences. And some of the most popular, memorable public places are those conceived as theater from the start – a stage where lives play out. Dramatic narratives are laid out for us with paths, vistas, suspense-and-resolutions, and the choreography of see-and-be-seen entrances and processions.  The great English garden at Stourhead is, literally, designed to tell stories of the owner’s family, of Greek mythology and a landscape architect’s ability to express “the genius of the place.” Read more…

Whatever may be intended in theory or practice, the places we design always have parallel lives as symbols.  Symbolism is at the essence of language and communication; it’s found everywhere in the arts; and it’s inherent in the built environment because we expect it to be there, distilled as physical forms – materials and colors, obelisks and gateways and a whole range of icons that trigger associations. They’re our visible evidence of otherwise invisible ideas, values and beliefs – our own and those of the people who are legislating-regulating-investing-designing-and-building our habitat. They make it possible to communicate in abstractions, and in day-to-day experience they condense, and carry a heavy load of information.

Symbols gain credibility from repetition, and each follows its own path of change as well. Like metaphors or traditions we, as well as our predecessors in religion, politics, business, and design have continually invented new, and debased old ones, to fit the shifting contexts that give them meanings. They may be as durable as the classical orders and pointed arches, “sheltering” roofs, marching colonnades and altars, or as ephemeral as l’art nouveau or jugendstil ornament.

The most effective display of their power in built environments is where the arts of persuasion have been practiced at their best – in the rituals and settings of royal grandeur or of ultimate immortality – in other words in associations with survival, winning, and prosperity – wealth, status, and the favor of the gods.

At a glance, a steeple on a skyline or soaring Gothic vaults – a reach up toward heaven – can, for millions, symbolize a path to salvation aided by a visceral sense of transcendence or, for others, represent a complex, reassuring, reasoned theology and truth. The serenity of the Buddha or elegantly written verses from the Koran or a skyline of minarets and domes can do the same.  Each can evoke an overriding emotional response – for some, peace, and for others, rage and violence.  In either case, we often merge the symbols of these larger alliances into our own identity, purposes, and destiny. And when we do, they can dominate responses to any person or any place. Read more…

Authenticity. In a way paralleling analogies, the mind welcomes the sense of authenticity or authority communicated through allusions – finding references, direct and indirect, to ideologies, social hierarchies, a person, events, stories or comparable environments of another place or time.  They are, in a sense, “quotations” of something else and imply a kinship. Most familiar in built environments – and fully exploited in brands – are the repeated revivals of styles and references to iconic places, associating a place we design with other admired, envied, or ancestral buildings, gardens, or cities – or past and present celebrities.

They have been an integral part of design in America since the settlement by Europeans. Before and after the American Revolution Jefferson’s and others’ tangible architectural references to the democracy of ancient Greece, and the virtues underlying virile, republican Rome, were their way of expressing the ambitions of their new Republic. Later the allusions in the Vanderbilt’s and others’ homes and gardens built up and down the east coast, were intended to associate them with European landed aristocracy – the American continent’s colonial masters – and express the validity, and the confidence in the social stature of this un-rooted crowd of upstarts. Christian churches still tend to allude to the spiritual certainties at the medieval peak of their power and, more recently, designs of new communities tend to allude, detail-by-detail, to the small towns of a romanticized past in east or west.

At a larger scale, when yearning for the refuge felt in an earlier home territory, we still try to transplant European or eastern landscapes in western American deserts, and other allusions invoke emotion-filled memories of earlier homelands in the architecture and street scenes in the urban villages of every colonial or immigrant settlement. At a place like Disneyland or the Las Vegas Strip, the high density of very different cultural allusions adds to the excitement and   “disorientation” into a novel kind of reality. At times, allusions relate to functions, too, like naturalistic ponds or the famous duck and hot-dog buildings, and crisply detailed metal and glass have been used to allude to the precise, efficient, high-tech thinking or manufacturing processes that go on inside.

The Sanssouci summer palace in Potsdam – more elegant allusions in the “form” of structural ornament to the court’s “care-free” life – the “function” inside.

Read more…

While the mind seeks out the reassurances and comfort – the known workability – of familiar patterns, and as we become habituated to our styles and surroundings, the hungry senses, always alert for changes – and surprises – are still hunting for the rewards of “the new” – new territory, wealth, status, knowledge and ideas, personal and social alliances, sensations and new levels of security. We have the eyes of “prey,” constantly alert to danger, but also the eyes of “predators” searching environments for advantages and victories.

What’s happening “in-here” parallels and fuels the impulse for exploration. Our, vigilant early warning system is quick to identify anything new as a threat or opportunity; it’s given a top priority, and our response is reinforced by the flows of body-chemistry, triggered often by fear but, for others, by the always-ready anticipation of pleasure. After the “first impression” comes the exhilarating release from confinement – a sense of liberation from limitations of the past and its inadequate technology or subjection to others’ priorities, symbols or styles. There’s the sense of a fresh start – like a “sea change” that rejuvenates and rebuilds channels of thought and creativity. Equally fundamental is the pleasure of feeling “first” – establishing in a place we design or “own,” a unique “number one” identity for ourselves, for our clients or community, as a presence on the turf that we have won.

As a result, we constantly pursue the competitive edge of the “next” new thing because survival and stature has depended on it. In built environments both basic technologies and fashions multiplied as each generation found startling new ways to exploit discoveries, solve problems or express feelings of “transcending” with long spans, heights or speed – the “conquest-of-space” – or a succession of ornamental visions of other romanticized times and places, from democratic Greece, Republican Rome or exotic China and Japan, to crisp, efficient, contemporary, innovative machine production – visions that we want to add to our identity. And the industries of built environments have institutionalized promotion of “new” in massive expositions from London’s Crystal Palace to today’s trade shows.

The lure of “the new” is reinforced, too, as we look back on the happy-ending stories of once-shocking monuments – Eiffel’s Tower, that became the lasting symbol of a renewed France or the embattled classics of our own new world by Le Corbusier, Mies, Sullivan, and Wright, that opened tradition-bound eyes to the culture that was changing all around them – and to the opportunities we take for granted today.

Eiffel’s Tower – the shocking new architecture that became the lasting symbol of a renewed France – and of Paris at a peak of its cultural leadership.

Finding, evaluating, and applying “the new” is, of course, already in the mainstream of design education and practice. Today’s schools and professions are among the avant gardes in the revolutions of Modernism.  But again, many leaders in our professions and schools have erected obstacles to be overcome. First, many, naturally aspiring to personal fame, seem to honor, above all, introspection, expecting that inventive, “new” personal languages will be readily understood, admired, and accepted by others, when, in fact, they haven’t learned – they haven’t been taught – how their audiences are likely to experience the places designed for them. Second, creative designers and their clients, thrilled by the promise of discovery, and relief from the rigidity of exhausted ideas, believe they can skip over years of accumulated learning, and the fine distinctions debated in past generations. The result, of course, has been novelty and diversity with as many failures as successful breakthroughs. And often in the struggle for our voices to be heard in a crowd, we confuse striking eccentricity with the creativity that our own sometimes careless, promotional, utopian language has led our publics to expect.

Still, these are exciting times.  Many of the people we design for are obsessed by innovation and the “new.”  At the same time, advancing sciences of human behavior and ecology are opening up a deeper understanding of the people and places we are designing for. And that is why I draw parallels with the creative avant-gardes of the Italian Renaissance years, when liberation from settled, familiar medieval patterns prepared the way for new, open-minded self-awareness – a new understanding of what it is to be human – and waves of a world-changing new humanism flooded into the arts and sciences. Now, as in the past, some pioneering designers will give their clients and publics – again and again – what they never imagined they could have. Some will achieve what we call “celebrity,” and some, after a generation of successes, “greatness.” Others will hesitate. There are always elements of uncertainty, and any form of “the new” may be rejected.  But the hunt will go on. Read more…

As the senses continue to absorb new information, intersecting and roiling the currents of thought and memory flowing through a mind, networks in the brain are actively structuring the multiplying messages into coherent relationships – an order – so that decisions can be made and action taken with convictions about the outcome.

Sorting out the input

Finding “order” is a primal response to environments. We crave the pleasure of exploring complexity, but with it, the rewarding experience of recognizing, simplifying, and organizing perceptions into practical patterns we can understand and live by. And we’re good at it. Each of us has, at our own level, a kind of “structural intelligence” – just as we have a musical or social or mechanical intelligence. Facing discrete, concrete perceptions we are able to sort out similarities, differences, categories, connections, and associations, and then imagine them structured into unified pictures. In built environments that may mean coherent styles, fashions, hierarchies, narratives or legible pathways. It always means theories, too, the abstractions and generalizations needed, in the absence of enough facts, to understand, plan and predict. And in practice day-to-day, our predilection for order is so strong that we are willing to work with quick scans, plausible hunches, or a “best fit” to impose patterns on disorder and surprises. We want clarity; we need an answer; we need to reduce uncertainties; and given a few clues we guess, infer or imagine the rest, move ahead, and search for reassurance in repetitions and redundancy. It’s a way we can sense we’re in control, and it’s an essential survival skill.

Experiments in Gestalt psychology and its principles of perception – part of the conventional wisdom of the design professions for decades now – have demonstrated the predisposition in most of us to find orderly patterns and see things “whole” – like we see ourselves. Confronting fragmented, ambiguous visual images, we tend to connect points, extend lines, and fill in gaps.  In our imagination and with “optical illusions” we assemble whatever minimal clues are available into conventional, or at least recognizable, complete forms and functional flows. And as we infer a closure – seeing what “ought” to be – we, ourselves become more engaged and our projected presence enlivens a design.

Specifically the Gestalt and related experiments have shown a propensity to assemble shapes and patterns into the basic geometrical shapes spelled out in ancient Greek culture – or following the same basic principles, in organic patterns, like a tree, watershed or a body structure – with boundaries, centers, symmetries, rhythms, and harmonic relationships. Further, on the way to constructing a “whole” we tend to organize complex places into two, three, four or five connected, coherent segments, or “chunks” of sorted out categories, in order to accommodate the limits of a working memory. These propensities are most evident in classical designs, where such things as grids or symmetrical and three-part or five-part vertical and horizontal compositions connected by axes tend to frame the distinctive, settled clarity of its recurring styles.

Amsterdam canal life – the “signature” settlement pattern – a meeting of land and water – as the perceived order of a city

These specific responses are explored further in later pages, but the point here is that our sensory systems tend to channel sensations into basic patterns that were prepared as the mind evolved.  We seem to naturally sort out spatial information into stories – we’re all born story-tellers – and maps-of-our-known-world in such image-of-the-city perceptions as Kevin Lynch’s edges, paths, nodes, districts, and landmarks. Or we may organize perceptions of a city into its “signature”, fundamental settlement pattern, like the meeting of land and water along the canals of Venice or Amsterdam. And beyond that, we take pleasure in finding the order in unifying themes that can anchor a large and diverse place to our purposes or memories – and into longer patterns of space and time. We see themes everywhere and assign picturesque names based on the geography of “hill-country” or “lake country” or the urban ambience that emerged – like New Orleans’ “Garden District,” and “French Quarter,” or the urban paradise of the “Champs Élysées.”

We celebrate order, too, dedicating land and resources to landmarks whose function is to symbolize a surviving social or political structure – like a triumphal arch that records victory over the out-of-control chaos of war, or in older European cities, “plague columns” that celebrated the healing of a shattered society, linking it back to the timeless order of divine protection. And today we are just as likely to build a holocaust museum memorializing the opposite – an out-of-control, destructive brutality that’s inherent in human nature – a work of art dramatizing and clarifying the tragedy of dis-order and our dis-jointed restlessness in the face of what seems like a broken world. Read more…

Experience tends to take place against a background of expectations.  In his studies of perception in the arts, E. H. Gombrich describes how our responses become shaped by what he calls a “mental set,” a form of selective attention – a filter to avoid being overwhelmed by an inescapable mass of sensations.  In practice, it primes the senses and frames perception until much of what we see is what we expect to see.  Our minds are predisposed to mobilize past experiences and often years of study – or just as often, visions aroused by advertising language and judgments of peers – to prepare for identifying the “distinctive features,” the characteristics of a place that are most likely to be relevant to our immediate intentions for advancing a “personal project.”  With different levels of intensity, propensities to plan or to improvise – differing by age, gender, health or intent – we often enjoy surprises, but we still crave the pleasure of a basic predictability, to anticipate what a place – like a person we encounter – will do to us or for us.

Climbing to Chartres Cathedral, standing on its hilltop, rising above the town, with aspiring lines linking heaven and earth, firing up expectations of profound spiritual experience

In other words, we naturally bring into play another basic survival skill, the ability to think ahead.  We draw on both our literal “explicit” long-term memories and the momentum of “implicit” ones that fill our conscious mind to imagine a future experience in a place. And we often find as much pleasure, or anxiety, in the structured anticipation as in its actual, complex, challenging presence.

Because a “mental set” tends to create a context for responses, naturally it may become self-fulfilling. And because it’s shaped by the places where we live and the biases built into the languages we speak every day, the mental images we’ve formed can fill the brain’s networks until they override an on-the-spot experience with easy habitual patterns of judgments or stereotypes. But just as often the preconceptions are repeatedly penetrated and updated by feedback from the qualities of the place itself, and the mental set, for better or worse, is re-primed by the design. In the end, the mind that remembers a place is no longer the one that encountered it.

Looking for evidence

Many of the most effective designers are the ones that have educated themselves about, and analyzed the likely expectations of their intended audiences. Thoughtful research into the likely stresses and fears brought by people to hospitals and schools is now a routine part of many design processes and has produced pleasing, welcoming – more “humane” – user-friendly, child-friendly places. Sophisticated architects and landscape architects have learned how to design convincing first impressions and sequences of experiences, composing signs and symbols, light and color, scale, soft or warm places, the presence of non-threatening sounds or people, and the presence of nature – all in ways that tell a story of empathy, understanding, and security – offering a sense of refuge, and neutralizing “perils” and fear – in advance, almost like the refuge of home.

Read more…

Parts 1 and 2 of this series of posts introduced the idea of opening up a broader perspective on architecture, landscape, and urban design that I’m calling “a new humanism”.

Parts 3 through 9 outlined the first step – tracing out the evolutionary origins of innate skills, propensities, and motivations that lead us to respond to built environments the ways we do – from the competitive drive for individual security, survival and prosperity to the equally deep-seated cooperative impulses that lead us to settle in communities. They explored our powerful links to the natural world, the continuous search for order and orientation and the creativity that gives us a unique niche in every ecosystem we invade.

Part 10 now starts a series of eight posts that take a deeper look at “experience” itself – what is it like to be there – focusing on how the evolved mind that encounters architecture works in practice.

First though, a note about words:  “Architecture” is simply a brief way to say architecture, landscapes, and urban places – “the built environment.”  And I use the term “designers” as an abbreviated way to say “architects, landscape architects, land planners, urban designers, interior designers, and the decision-making clients and governments who direct them.”  This does not, of course, imply a hierarchy of professions, but the word “architecture” has a general sense of an overall, organized structure of things.  Likewise, I am not implying the common distinction between architecture as “high art” and “mere building”.  We live in both – and mostly in the latter.  The total built environment is the art and science that no one can escape.

“Encounters” is more complex.  The whole body is involved.  Like searchlights, all of the senses are continually seeking out information – promises of pleasure and opportunity, threats and trouble, orientation and aids to navigation.  And forms, light, color, sounds, warmth and movement, become sequences of “cues,” signs and symbols that call up memories and beliefs, magnified by our body-state and linked-in emotions. The searches and these sensations naturally become interlaced, consciously and unconsciously, with other streams of thought and feelings already flowing, “in here”, along channels shaped by our specific role or purposes of the moment. In a sense, it’s like the theater with playwright, director/actors, and audience interacting to create “experience”.

Vierzenheiligen – a Bavarian Baroque church, a blaze of light immediately
engages the whole mind and body – and promises still more

Read more…

Experiencing a sense of community – belonging to a successful network of human alliances – is one of the great pleasures of the places we build.  And at village or at city scales we dedicate an enormous share of our resources to accommodate and symbolize the group’s protection, effectiveness, and cohesion.  Facing the propensity for destruction and violence that’s inherent in person-to-person competition, we strengthen bonds and loyalties with places to meet, act out our agreements and shared stories, resolve the inevitable conflicts and plant symbols of our “social contract” – the places to eat together, judge, worship, trade, play, and celebrate with shared movements, ideas, voices. and action – and finally in the burial grounds that record the continuity of the shared gene pools.

“The Greek theater where a city saw and heard itself being a community – sharing its myths, passions and history”

Civil society’s most honored monuments are the places where a community can read the stories of individual competitors surviving and prospering together – stories of victories, resolved conflicts, bonds of loyalty, generosity and philanthropy, and the favor of a deity. It’s seen in the bold, arrogant commercial and town hall towers of medieval Europe’s newly independent cities – with their symbolism of wealth and power that’s inherent in penetrating a skyline. Today we do the same. We announce our stability and pedigree in the neo-classical languages of power – in finance, universities, and governments – or the engineering of grand transportation infrastructure and waterfronts that tell stories of still larger geographical alliances. And the most moving are the places where citizens see – and hear – themselves being a community, sharing the passions stirred by their myths, arts, and on-going history – the Greeks in their intimate theaters or today’s crowds in museums or performing arts venues. And it can happen in parks, plazas, and arenas where spectacles, music, or sports – at small and large scales – evoke feelings of solidarity, working or fighting side-by-side as a team or as a gang, making connections just as binding – at least for the moment – as genetic kinship. These places where we reinforce and celebrate – respond to – our prospering alliances are the settings where we experience what we call “sense-of-place” and “authentic” communities.

Alienation

In any mix of diverse and mobile populations, under any social structure, the built environments, the public faces of places financed and occupied, naturally express the victories, values, religion or status of the winners. When, for better or worse, they also become symbols of exclusion and oppression, they become physical targets for the outsiders – called, naturally, barbarians, rebels or terrorists. They have been throughout history. And in our globalizing, urbanizing settlements we can expect continued destructive responses to the places we build.  The alienation is just as deeply felt as “belonging,” and the winners are responding as they always have, with hardened perimeters and surveillance – refuge and prospect.

Read more…