While evolution’s natural selection is about competing individuals, a broader perspective on our response to built environments, another set of genetic preparations for survival – another set of innate pleasures – is seen in the ways we mate and settle in communities.  Both the biology and practical survival benefits are compelling – cohesive family groups, strength-in-numbers, extended expertise gained by learning from each other, trading, collaborating and specializing – and we are powerfully motivated to merge our competitive interests into a cooperating population when we can find like-minded people.

Look again at the choice of a “good home.”  For those who can choose, it may well be on high ground, overlooking water and set in parkland.  But making choices based on limited resources, we most often live in clusters – compounds, hamlets, villages, towns, gated or not – where the comfort of refuge is in the presence of neighbors, and security is found behind a protective “wall” of social contracts – customs, laws, and patrols.

It’s a way we’ve been prepared to transcend the in-born human limitations that frustrate competitive success.  We volunteer to compromise our hard-earned independence of action – often enthusiastically – as we join in larger and more powerful alliances – friendships, a team, a community, a culture or ideology.  And those connections, like our connections to nature, tend to draw their power from the spiritual experience – the sense of entering into, belonging to – something larger than our own day-to-day material world.  We sense ourselves joining in time cycles that exceed our life, and the ultimate reward comes from surrendering to a super-natural ally and feeling our living essence achieve a form of immortality.

The significance of the commitment, submerging our own identity, what we are, into a group, can be read in the quick, often violent emotions evoked by – and the willingness to die for – such concepts as turf, ghetto, comrades, and fatherland and by the anxiety of personal separation or exclusion from the “refuge” of a group. These can be – they have been – life-or-death issues.  And forms of hospitality – of sharing food and warmth – are one of the defining customs of a family or a culture. Further, the most admired virtues in many societies are self-sacrifice, loyalty, and courage – deciding to overrule our other survival instincts on behalf of justice, fairness, “duty” owed to others – or instantaneously, without thinking, responding to people in distress.

The underlying biology is in the mix of hormones stirred first by an initial encounter and then validated by repetition. Natural selection has made us a gregarious species, and while we respond to a threat with the well-known “fight-or-flight” impulses – aggression or fear – we may instead, in the same instant, detect a level of warmth or welcome. We’re prepared for the nuanced, often involuntary messages we receive from faces, body language, words, and voices to trigger a different body chemistry, one that induces a “tend-and-befriend” openness, curiosity, empathy and, ultimately, altruism.

We are quick to search out and detect capabilities and competence in potential allies and mates; we want to experience the pleasures of trust, of aligning our feelings and beliefs with theirs, and the sense of bonding outside ourselves.  And while the ease and intensity of person-to-person connections – the chemistry – varies from gene pool to gene pool, introverts and extroverts, and with gender and age, we all tend to mirror – to attune ourselves to – each other’s feelings and behavior. The result is the kind of emotional contagion that underlies both person-to-person empathy and the behavior of crowds or mobs. In other words, our brain networks – its structure – can be shaped by what other people do around us.

“Water, food, and spiritual security – the working and symbolic
crossroads for a cluster of alliances.”

Relationships

In practice, social relationships are our primary “environment.”  We are born into them.  They are part of our identity and shape an experience of the places we build in two important ways.  First, in the constant overload of received information we tend to single out and give first priority to social information. And the resulting pleasure or anxiety of person-to-person connections is often the strongest emotion feeding our responses.  It may be an ephemeral interaction between people and a place – in rituals, trade, sports, or public promenading – or more permanent, like selecting the refuge of a home in a neighborhood of allies and the prospect out onto a reassuring village street.

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Wrapped into our predilection to explore, and at times our most urgent immediate motivation, is the search for orientation – to know exactly where we are.  Again, what happens in a built environment parallels person-to-person encounters. We want to eliminate unknowns and get-our-bearings in relation to the mental maps that we have constructed over time. Being disoriented – being “lost” – triggers anxiety, fear, and ultimately panic. It is clearly a “peril”, and it can be costly. Though we lack the innate homing skills of other animals, we do have an evolved capability to learn how to navigate; it’s another way we “master” our environment and feel “in control”.

“The classic legibility of a city – geography and the power of the alliances that built Florence”

Maps and legibility

In his pioneering study, The Image of the City, professor Kevin Lynch analyzed mental maps created by many people to orient themselves in a city.  Although each individual’s map was necessarily unique, he found important overlaps – propensities – that he organized into clear, practical, usable ways that we use to make a city “legible”. Many of his insights and much of his vocabulary of  “imageability” and “way finding” have been adopted, built upon, and absorbed into the conventional wisdom of generations of designers because they can be successfully applied in practice – and not only in his field, urban design. It seems likely that he is describing patterns that come naturally and easily into most human minds – a specific genetic preparation for learning.

In any case, we all know that aids to navigation and clues to orientation are integral parts of built environments – whether conscious and intended or not. Lynch focused on the physical form of Boston, but his pattern of thinking also organizes the broader bands of perception that we habitually use in practice to find our way.

• He identified five key elements that continually reappeared in mental maps – edges, paths, districts, nodes, and landmarks – and spelled out common themes that are perceived in each of them, primarily qualities of clarity, continuities, differentiation, and dominance, and the awareness of motion and time – plus, naturally, the recognition that all are then interpreted through filters of culture, personal skills, and associations.
• In addition to distinctive spatial forms, sources and echoes of sounds, aromas or stench, temperatures, wind and light levels are all elements in the maps.
• Sensing distinctive kinds of human presence and action, past, present, and anticipated – the social and cultural clues – can be even more powerful. The energy and excitement of crowds and commerce, a fear of strangers and violence, or the reassurance offered by records of long established human settlement, all tell stories of stability, danger or vitality that define a place – and whether we want to be there or, instead, find a path to escape or explore further.
• Ultimately, of course, the underlying coordinates of a mental map are framed in the context of our own pressing motivations, accumulated memories, and the feelings locked into them.

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Hildebrand’s research he applies to architecture the familiar landscape concepts of “refuge and prospect”; it spells out how our search for both is a response to shifting intensity among contending predilections. The basic impulse is evident early in the hide-a-ways and forts built throughout childhood. And gender, age, resources, time-of-day or season, strength or vulnerability, or urgent motivations of a “personal project” clearly can have widely differing influences on the way each of us will seek out a secure place. But he backs up a convincing case that designers can produce more welcoming, satisfying, human environments by recognizing that their publics will in fact experience them in these deep-seated, survival-based terms.

Sanctuary

Hildebrand takes the next step, too, defining and illustrating the architectural qualities that underlie protection and a release from fear or out-of-control nature in a “refuge”.  Most important is the low height and enfolding form of a “ceiling” plane or overhanging trees.  Light levels lower than in surrounding spaces, protected openings plus mostly solid-seeming walls – often the reality of, or echoes of earth forms, color, and materials – all naturally reinforce the feeling. Then horizontal dimensions significantly smaller than those of surrounding spaces – the “cozy” inglenook, “den,” or walled gardens – and an entrance that is a succession of vestibules or buffers, elevate the retreat into a “sanctuary”.  As a prime example of combined refuge and prospect he again uses the designs of Frank Lloyd Wright with their focus on cave-like hearths and long, sheltering overhangs, combined with broad windows and projecting decks – warmth, protection, and openings out to freedom.

“Hearth and ‘prospect’ at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water”

He could have cited, too, the secure “shells” of more popular, conventional houses with their courtyard or backyards and outlooks into the neighborhood. And there are other dimensions of “refuge” as well.

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In a study he calls The Origins of Architectural Pleasure, architecture professor Grant Hildebrand analyzes how specific responses to architecture, including aesthetic experience, could well have originated in evolved behavior. The details of the research and reasoning he assembles seem to me a clear, persuasive foundation for a more rigorous, more effective humanism.  He’s distilled the enormous complexity of a mind and body into concepts usable in day-to-day design, and that’s why my own explorations build on and in a sense grow out of his.

Habitats

He starts with the idea that natural selection clearly favors those who have imagined, found, and then re-shaped an environment into a “good home.”  And, as a result, natural selection has favored “an innate predilection to build in some ways and places rather than others,” adapted to the natural settings where a family would thrive.  Drawing on the social sciences, literature, the arts, plus his own observations, he traces the value we place on these selected sites and architectural forms back to biology – to innate survival-based behaviors.  Naturally, many of his insights are being applied in our day-to-day practice, though many are ignored or given a low priority, but whatever theory guides a design, he shows ways our publics are most likely to respond and why.

Specifically, Hildebrand points out that a safe, effective habitat must offer both a refuge, providing a microclimate, protection, and concealment – especially for the times when we are least watchful or most vulnerable – and a prospect, a look-out with views over well-lighted open spaces, the places that may offer opportunities – food and water, “provisioning,” exploring, trading – or reveal threats and approaching predators.  The natural places that would offer both together – a cave, cliff dwellings, and edges-of-the-forest, with an overlook ahead, protection behind – and ready access to a generous, fertile, natural setting of climate, land, and water – seem like archetypes, found again and again.  And he cites examples from a range of cultures over long spans of time – in Japan, throughout Europe, and today’s America.

“We built ourselves into the life of the desert” — Architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West in Scottsdale

Building ourselves into the life of the land. Hildebrand explores in more depth the design implications of “refuge and prospect,” but first I want to expand further on responses to the component of experience we tend to call “nature” – the interacting processes of climate, geology, hydrology, and biology that go on whether we intervene or not.  Our relationship is inherently ambiguous.  Surviving and prospering depends on understanding, mastering, and managing its impacts, and our human “dominion” over nature – our separation and superiority – is institutionalized in our biblical and classically based civilizations.  Yet in practice, we are an inseparable part of any natural environment we invade, and whether driven by visions of quick exploitation or sustainability, private possession or the public domain, ultimately we rely on an intimate, nuanced collaboration.

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The concepts “natural selection” and “survival,” in the evolutionary sense, ultimately mean competitive reproductive success – passing the genes on to other generations – and they are implicit in – in a sense they drive – everything we design, build, and inhabit.

The ancient city of Petra at a desert crossroads, now in Jordan

In practice, every human choice is about “rewarding” ourselves with “pleasure.”  Scientist Steven Pinker puts it neatly “…(G)enes selfishly spread themselves.  They do it by the way they build our brains.  By making us enjoy life, health, sex, friends, and children, the genes buy a lottery ticket for representation in the next generation, with odds that were favorable in the environment in which we evolved.”  In other words, when our thoughts and actions trigger pleasure circuits – a reward system of connections and chemistry in the brain and body – we sense we are enhancing our odds for surviving and prospering – winning Pinker’s “lottery” – in whatever environment we encounter.  The “happiness” we’re in “pursuit of” is not an abstraction, but repetitions of these kinds of physical pleasures.

Naturally, “survival” – the word I’ll use to refer to “natural selection” or “reproduction of the fittest” – means staying alive and healthy, pairing with the right mate, raising a family and building a secure, nurturing habitat.  It’s built into innate predilections. Then, in practice, “survival” involves competing, winning and sustaining the independence to control “my” surroundings for “my” interests.  That, in turn, is likely to work best by acquiring the strength of more knowledge, better tools and more skills, multiplying them through trusting alliances, and exploring, migrating or trading to gain access to still more resources. It involves, too, constantly moving ahead, avoiding losses and anchoring security by storing-up and protecting the “wealth” that has been won, earning respites from challenges – in other words “prospering.”  The most valuable “wealth” was and is, of course, the accumulated knowledge needed to master the environments we encounter and to manage them in ways that maintain a constant competitive edge.

Further, the natural in-born human limitations that can stand in the way of competitive success keep us searching for ways to transcend them.  And with our evolved creative imaginations we continually develop technologies – tools or weapons – that diversify and multiply our biologically constrained skill, time, and energy.  Equally important, innate predilections – reinforced by body chemistry – to advance by cooperating comes into play.

Survival-of-the-fittest includes a propensity for the forms of moral behavior that make trust and collaboration possible. We’re prepared to volunteer to compromise a hard-earned independence of action – often enthusiastically – by merging our own personal projects into the survival and prosperity of larger and more powerful alliances – mating, friendships, a team, a community, a culture or ideology.  We exchange a measure of freedom for strength and diversity. And then those connections, in turn, become part of our identity. They draw their power from another innate level of pleasure we tend to call spiritual experience – the sense of entering into and sharing – belonging to – something larger than one’s “self” – a larger purpose and sense of destiny.  The ultimate reward comes from surrendering to a super-natural ally; joining in time cycles that exceed our lifetime and feeling our living essence achieve a form of immortality.  Some, of course, try to escape the rigors of earthly competition altogether by living in an imagined or virtual world.

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Human nature

The experience of a built environment is, of course, different in each culture and in each of us. Yet we all share an evolutionary past – an experience that step-by-step created patterns of instincts, innate capabilities, and primal human values – a core of a human nature – that kept winning in a competition to survive. And we are all clearly enough alike to create cohesive societies, global ideologies, and designs – like those of classical Greece and Rome, the Taj Mahal or English landscapes – that have commanded respect and inspired imitation across continents, through revolutions and over millennia.

Taj Mahal — Mughal art at its peak in northern India, sketch by Albrecht Pichler

An evolutionary perspective

The scientists who study human evolution have assembled widely accepted evidence that today’s human genetic makeup has been formed through adaptations to natural and social environments that developed originally in central Africa.  Our ancestors’ minds and bodies evolved primarily in subtropical woodlands and savannahs, where cohesive family and kinship groups survived – as prey and predators – in shifting mixes of competition and cooperation, often in conditions of scarcity, exploiting sources of food and water, selecting and building secure, cost-effective habitats – or exploring and migrating to more promising land out in an uncontested territory. And in those environments they selected mates and raised generations of offspring, one after another becoming better adapted to interact productively and reproductively.

The specific qualities, the mind-body structures that survived through the millennia of individual encounters with victory and defeat, exploring and learning with fear or pleasure, became the physiological-psychological foundations of a “human nature” – the sapiens in homo sapiens.

They add up to complex interwoven systems that activated pleasure circuits in the brain and “rewards” in body chemistry when our ancestors made decisions – and were in places – that enhanced their “fitness” to survive – to win, advance and prosper. Civilization and affluence naturally enlarged the meaning of “survive”, but the structures created by natural selection still drive everything we design and build today. In the words of biologist E.O. Wilson, “We stay alert and alive in the vanished forests of the world.”

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Experiencing architecture, landscapes, and urban places is inescapable and as integral to the pleasures and frustrations of life as our encounters with people – or with the natural world or ideas. And as we respond at conscious, but more often unconscious levels – spontaneously, instantaneously, and in reflection years later – the environments we’ve built shape everyone’s moods, thoughts, emotions and the ways we move and act.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water

But what we feel or think is only triggered by the places we’ve built “out-there.”  “Experience” takes shape when a mix of sensations flows into our inner worlds, already restless with memories, associations, trains-of-thought, and motivations of the moment, in other words when they encounter our evolved mind and body – who we are “in-here.”

The people who regulate, design, and build the places that add up to our habitat know this, or at least talk about it, and many are working with sophisticated, well-tested technologies, knowledge and ideas. Yet, look around. Over-and-over again the results on the ground, the places that are actually built and lived in – the clear, tangible expression of our society – after a first flash of marketing and excitement, prove disappointing.

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This blog series is about an opportunity.  It’s written from the point of view of an architect and urban planner trying to work out ways that more of us can design more practical, meaningful, beautiful places—the kinds of places most likely to realize both our own intentions and the aspirations of patrons, clients, and publics who rely on us.

The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Frank Gehry, architect. Sketch by Albrecht Pichler

My basic idea has been to step back, look at the unfinished cultural revolutions of Modernism, and continue to build on their defining enterprise—the rapid advance of reliable sciences. The impact they have had on construction-related technologies has been enormous. But the insights of the maturing sciences of nature and human nature—of evolution and ecology and how human biology interacts with an environment—are only beginning to be applied systematically in design education and day-to-day practice. We have valuable bodies of knowledge about the physical environments we build “out-there” on the land—places that profoundly affect how we all feel, think, and act everyday over a lifetime—yet we are only beginning to understand how each of us actually experiences those environments, “in-here,” and why we respond and react the ways we do. In the design professions we are, in a sense, like doctors trained more deeply in anatomy than in a patient’s total experience. That’s more or less left to informed “intuition” and, in the case of our professions, ideologies or “design sense.”

Contemporary knowledge of the biological foundations of “experience” is potentially as revolutionary in its own way as the re-discoveryof the arts and natural philosophy of Greece and Rome by the humanists of the European Renaissance. We now have effective ways to understand the exceptional skill of the artists and designers who, over millennia, have been creating the world’s great places. We can’t know what was in their minds, of course, but we can know why we respond to their work as we do.  Some very smart people are at work in this field, learning and writing about nature and human nature, and I have laid out a sketch that applies my understanding of their findings and ideas in an organized perspective—a way of thinking about design that I call “a new humanism.”

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