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…

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…

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.

Read more…