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…

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.

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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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