Cognitive Architecture: Designing for How We Respond to the Built Environment [2 ed.] 9781000403077, 1000403076

Table of contents :
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of Figures and Tables
Acknowledgments
1 A New Foundation: Darwin, Biology, and Cognitive Science
2 Edges Matter: Thigmotaxis (the ‘Wall-hugging’ Trait)
3 Patterns Matter: Faces and Spaces
4 Shapes Carry Weight: Bilateral Symmetry, (Hierarchy), Curves, and Complexity
5 Storytelling Is Key: We’re Wired for Narrative
6 Nature Is Our Context: Biophilia and Biophilic Design
7 Buildings, Biology + Biometrics: Collecting Empirical Data for Evidence-Based Design
8 The Twenty-First-Century Paradigm Shift in Biology and Psychology Reframes Architecture + Its History
Appendix: More on the Morphology and Function of the Human Brain
References
Further Reading
Index

Citation preview

Cognitive Architecture

In this expanded second edition of Cognitive Architecture, the authors review new findings in psychology and neuroscience to help architects and planners better understand their clients as the sophisticated mammals they are, arriving in the world with built-in responses to the environment. Discussing key biometric tools to help designers ‘see’ subliminal human behaviors and suggesting new ways to analyze designs before they are built, this new edition brings readers up-to-date on scientific tools relevant for assessing architecture and the human experience of the built environment. The new edition includes: Over 100 full color photographs and drawings to illustrate key concepts. A new chapter on using biometrics to understand the human experience of place. A conclusion describing how the book’s propositions reframe the history of modern architecture. A compelling read for students, professionals, and the general public, Cognitive Architecture takes an inside-out approach to design, arguing that the more we understand human behavior, the better we can design and plan for it. Ann Sussman is a registered architect, researcher, and college instructor. She co-edited (with Justin B. Hollander) the book Urban Experience and Design: Contemporary Perspectives on Improving the Public Realm. Keen on bridging the arts and science, she blogs

at GeneticsofDesign.com. She currently teaches a new course on perception and the human experience of place, ‘Architecture & Cognition,’ at the Boston Architectural College (BAC). In 2020, she co-founded and became president of the nonprofit The Human Architecture + Planning Institute, Inc. (theHapi.org). Justin B. Hollander is Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University. His research and teaching is in the areas of physical planning, big data, shrinking cities, and the intersection between cognitive science and the design of cities. He is the author of six other books on urban planning and design and the co-editor (with Ann Sussman) of Urban Experience and Design: Contemporary Perspectives on Improving the Public Realm. He was recently inducted as a fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners and hosts the Apple podcast ‘Cognitive Urbanism.’

Cognitive Architecture Designing for How We Respond to the Built Environment SECOND EDITION

ANN SUSSMAN AND JUSTIN B. HOLLANDER

Second edition published 2021 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Ann Sussman and Justin B. Hollander to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First edition published by Routledge 2014 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 9780367468606 (hbk) ISBN: 9780367468590 (pbk) ISBN: 9781003031543 (ebk) Typeset in Didot and Helvetica by codeMantra

To Stephen R. Kellert (1943–2016) for inspirational work encouraging the study of Nature’s design lessons.

Contents

List of Figures and Tables Acknowledgments 1 A New Foundation: Darwin, Biology, and Cognitive Science 2 Edges Matter: Thigmotaxis (the ‘Wall-hugging’ Trait) 3 Patterns Matter: Faces and Spaces 4 Shapes Carry Weight: Bilateral Symmetry, (Hierarchy), Curves, and Complexity 5 Storytelling Is Key: We’re Wired for Narrative 6 Nature Is Our Context: Biophilia and Biophilic Design 7 Buildings, Biology + Biometrics: Collecting Empirical Data for Evidence-Based Design 8 The Twenty-First-Century Paradigm Shift in Biology and Psychology Reframes Architecture + Its History Appendix: More on the Morphology and Function of the Human Brain References Further Reading Index

List of Figures and Tables

1.1 A house plan from Roman architect Vitruvius’ De Architectura (translated as the Ten Books of Architecture), prepared for the Emperor Augustus, first century BCE. The plan features nearly symmetrical men’s and women’s sections (‘men’s quarters’ [left]; ‘women’s quarters’ [right]) and in each of these areas multiple bilaterally symmetrical elements including room plans and column layouts 2.1 Tourists and residents gather at the edge of Piazza del Campo, Siena, Italy 2.2 On the left, 555 Hudson Street, Jane Jacob’s narrow New York City townhouse in the West Village, Lower Manhattan (partially hidden by scaffolding from a neighboring building) 2.3 ‘Ambulation Man’ and ‘Ambulation Woman’ walk with their heads at a natural tilt of about 10 degrees 2.4 The first maze for laboratory animal testing was modeled after a human one designed for entertaining English royals; later versions were used in laboratories to study animal and human thigmotaxis 2.5 The arcade of the Edward W Brooke Court House in Boston (1999, Kalmann McKinnell and Wood) does not acknowledge the way people like to walk, inadvertently promoting confusion in the urban landscape 2.6 The nineteenth-century Rue de Rivoli arcade in Paris, designed by Napoleon’s architects, supports the ways that humans walk and encourages our movement forward 2.7 A corridor street in Siena, Italy, invites you (and Ambulation Man) forward, encouraging an effortless stroll

2.8 The figure-ground drawing of Boston’s North End shows Hanover Street as the only continuous road running north to Boston Harbor, which is visible in the top-right corner 2.9 The figure-ground drawing of Scollay Square before demolition for urban renewal in the 1960s; for orientation, the gray rectangle denotes eighteenth-century Faneuil Hall, a historic meeting and market place 2.10 Figure-ground drawing of the Scollay Square area after urban renewal to create the new Boston City Hall (rectangle in center) and broad City Hall Plaza 2.11 Shoppers stroll in Kapalicarsi, or Grand Bazaar, an ancient market center in Istanbul, Turkey. It is essentially a covered street 2.12 Figure-ground drawing of Palmer Square, Princeton, New Jersey, a tight, walkable shopping district under 75 meters wide that was built off a major thorough-fare 2.13 Diverse storefronts aligning along Palmer Street West in Palmer Square across the street from Princeton University in New Jersey 2.14 A park between Palmer Street West and Palmer Street East is tightly enclosed by retail buildings and restaurants, making for a quiet pedestrian realm 2.15 Figure-ground diagrams of three of Columbia Maryland’s ten planned villages at top and bottom right; bottom left ‘Town Center’ mall. All show car-dependent design, a hallmark of midtwentieth-century design 2.16 Columbia, Maryland’s ‘villages’ carry few distinguishing features 2.17 Acres of parking lots define Columbia, Maryland’s ‘Town Center.’ 2.18 Columbia, Maryland’s design makes navigating by car or on foot a challenge 2.19 It can be hard to tell where you are in Columbia, Maryland 2.20 The ‘Town Center’ indoor mall features Columbia, Maryland’s only plan that mimics a traditional double-loaded street

2.21 Figure-ground diagram of Main Street, Disneyland, in Anaheim, California 2.22 Main Street, Disneyland, in 2005. Cinderella’s Castle in the center distance provides a landmark; pedestrians tend to stick to the sides of the street even with few vehicles present 3.1 One-year-old Thomas connecting to his grandfather Martin; humans have evolved to prioritize vision and, within that same category, the face 3.2 Self-portrait, Grimacing, 1910, by Austrian painter Egon Schiele (1890–1918); Austrian artists like Schiele worked at revealing the inner states of their subjects, argues neuroscientist Eric Kandel. The paintings engage the viewer instantly and our involvement can be understood as an artifact of our brain’s unique architecture 3.3 ‘Figural Primitive’ of the face used in human visual processing from infancy on as rendered by artist Trey Kirk 3.4 The Gardener, c. 1590, viewed upside down, by Italian painter, Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527–1593), is harder to read as a face than when turned right-side up. A Mannerist, Arcimboldo worked in a transitional style between High Renaissance and Baroque, one known for intellectual playfulness as we can observe here 3.5 The Gardener, right-side up, is immediately easier to take in as a face 3.6 The Summer, c. 1593, upside down, by Arcimboldo takes more effort for the brain to process than the painting rightside up, see Figure 3.7 3.7 The Summer, c. 1593, rightside up 3.8 ‘Thatcherized’ images of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher by artist Nora Shull from an official photograph. Human subjects will focus on the face on the lower-right-hand corner, even though the one directly above it, in the top right, is, except for its orientation, identical. Our processing mechanism prioritizes the right-side-up face with the most distorted, frightening features

3.9 The photograph of a Martian hill or mesa, taken from NASA’s Viking 1 Orbiter as it flew over Mars in 1976, seems to show a human face 3.10 ‘Robert the tractor,’ a 1957 Ford 661 Workmaster is a beloved member of the family for owners in Duchess County, New York 3.11 Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi (c. 1500) appears to look right at you; in 2017, at $450.3 million, it became the most expensive painting ever sold at auction 3.12 The interior of Apple stores in Greater Boston promotes products with posters displaying large faces on its devices (2013 and 2018). We cannot look away, and subliminally will be directed to move into the store, toward them. The display feeds our neural circuitry precisely, metaphorically fitting our faceorientation like a glove 3.13 The Lampoon Castle, home of a satirical Harvard student newspaper has caught the eye of pedestrians walking down Mount Auburn Street in Harvard Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts since its 1909 opening and is a frequent stop for international tour groups today 3.14 The side elevation of The Lampoon Castle, designed by architect Edmund Wheelwright, reads like a face, too 3.15 The Portrait Building, Melbourne, Australia, by architectural firm Ashton Raggatt McDougall, opened in 2015, memorializing the face of aboriginal leader William Barak (1824–1903) 3.16 The Dunker Church, c. 1852, Sharpsburg, Maryland seems to be ever observant and even mournful; it stands on Civil War battlefield of Antietam 3.17 Bavarian Inn, a tourist stop in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, looks friendly 3.18 A street in Lacock Village, Wiltshire, England, owned by the UK’s National Trust, presents a row of face-like fronts and appeals to tourists 3.19 Building faces can have diverse dispositions, sometimes within the same facade, which influences us subliminally; the top

image is from the city of Newcastle, Australia, and the bottom is from Ruit, near Stuttgart, Germany 3.20 The appealing face of Puppy, by American artist Jeff Koons, both dominates and draws visitors to the front door of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, by architect Frank Gehry (1997) 3.21 Plan and section of Allianz Arena, Munich, Germany, 2005, by Herzog and de Meuron, show the 100-meter threshold at work; the dimension sets the limit for viewer and player participation alike, establishing the distance of the furthest seats and approximate length of the sports field 3.22 The 100-meter threshold is embedded in the plans of many of the world’s most famous civic and religious places. From the left, The Taj Mahal Garden in Agra, India; St Peter’s Square in Rome, Italy; and Places des Vosges in Paris, France. One hundred meters mark the radius length from the plan’s central point to its edge 3.23 Piazza del Campo, the popular medieval square in Siena, Italy makes for a great civic and social space. A resident walking into its center is likely to easily find and recognize a friend or acquaintance in the same space. (The rectangle delineated inside the piazza for scale is Figure 3.23 100 × 60 meters.) 3.24 Compare and contrast how the limits of our social field of vision mesh with the Piazza del Campo (Siena) on the left, but not with Boston’s City Hall Plaza, on the right. The ability to see faces helps define spaces and is a consequence of the primacy of face-processing in the human animal 3.25 Section of the Grand Canal Theatre (2006) in Dublin, Ireland. Thirty-five meters is considered a maximum threshold for reading facial expression without electronic amplification 3.26 We find things become increasingly interesting when we can use all of our senses; this happens for humans at close range of about 7 meters (7.5 yards) or less. At about 3 meters or under, we can engage in personal conversation. In the photograph, the woman’s image on the far right is where our eyes will linger; the figure at far-left center, whose form is barely

visible, represents the 100-meter limit, and is the least interesting 3.27 Narrow Hanover Street was laid out in pre-colonial times and has been attracting people since—its consistently changing and mostly narrow storefronts keep things interesting for pedestrians today 3.28 At under 20 meters (65 feet) wide, Hanover Street offers us a range of visual and emotional experiences without our having to expend much effort. Its dimensions make it easy to see others, something we innately enjoy 3.29 The golden rectangle 3.30 The ‘golden spiral’ forms within the golden rectangle; in a golden rectangle, a square cut from the rectangle produces another golden rectangle… ad infinitum generating successive fractal scales along one direction as 1.62, 0.618, 0.236, 0.090.. 3.31 Elevations of Le Corbusier’s Villa Stein in Garches, France and the Parthenon in Athens appearing to fit within the golden rectangle, now considered likely applied after the fact (HerzFischler, Salingaros) 3.32 The human viewport, evolving for fast horizontal scanning, approximates a rectangle of 3/2 proportions 3.33 Each eye can sweep between 100 and 120 degrees in the vertical (see diagram above) and horizontal directions. Humans are bifocal (which enables our depth perception), and the horizontal range of both eyes overlap, creating a rectangle where the Horizontal/Vertical (H/V) approximates 1.5 3.34 The human field of vision superimposed over various rectangles shows its relationship to common media dimensions. Note how 35-mm film with ratio 3/2 = 1.50, first used for movies then adopted for still pictures in the early twentieth century, closely fits our viewport. Things sized this way require less effort to see 3.35 Visually compelling windows in Lower Manhattan propel people down the street; the low window frames accommodate the natural tilt of the human head when the body is walking. Our vision and locomotion are interdependent, a consequence of our evolution

3.36 Society Hill, Philadelphia. The central city neighborhood has the highest concentration of eighteenth and early nineteenthcentury architecture in the United States, and includes three 31story residential towers, at center right in the figure-ground drawing, built as part of a federally sponsored urban renewal effort completed in 1964 3.37 Redeveloped low-rise town houses mitigate the transition to I. M. Pei Towers in Society Hill, Philadelphia, and were constructed as part of the urban renewal project 3.38 The windows and doors of I. M. Pei Town Houses in Society Hill, designed to repair the old neighborhood fabric, can easily be assembled to make abstract faces 3.39 Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century row houses in Society Hill give the area its historic charm and seem face-like 4.1 The ‘fairy castles’ of Göreme, a village in Cappadocia, Asia Minor, Turkey 4.2 The Interior of Karanlik (Dark) Church, Göreme, Turkey, dates from the end of the twelfth and early thirteenth century. It has a cruciform plan much like a traditional freestanding medieval church and multiple bilaterally symmetric elements. Author: Karsten Dörre 4.3 Trinity Church in Boston’s historic Back Bay neighborhood, designed by architect Henry Hobson Richardson, and is a study in the power of bilaterally symmetric shape 4.4 Martha-Mary Chapel in Sudbury, Massachusetts built by industrialist Henry Ford to honor his mother and mother-in-law, c. 1941 4.5 Chambord Castle in the Loire Valley, France, designed as a hunting lodge for the French King Francois 1st (1494–1547) and never completed. It is the most visited estate in the Loire Valley today 4.6 Symmetry conveys power in interior architecture: this craftsmanstyled living room, designed as public entertainment space for the Webster S. Blanchard house, was built for a young businessman in 1922 in the outskirts of Boston

4.7 Vitruvian Man, by Leonard da Vinci, c. 1490, with his text surrounding it, illustrates a Renaissance ideal: man’s perfection within nature and embraces the classical notion of nature’s perfect geometries. To get this to work, da Vinci ingeniously places the center of the circle in the man’s navel and the center point of the square in his genitals 4.8 Villa Capra, ‘La Rotonda’, Vicenza, 1566, by Andrea Palladio (1508–1580) from Planta de “i quattri libri” (1570). In the hands of the high Renaissance master Andrea Palladio, symmetric plans and elevations reach an apotheosis. Publicacion de Ottavio Bertotti Scamozzi, 1778 4.9 Asymmetrical pink lumpy sponge. Sponges are considered the foundational species for all life that followed including our own. Recently pushed back in age, they are now thought to have emerged 550–750 million years ago. Author: Nick Hobgood 4.10 Bilaterally symmetric rams appear in Antioch Culture, House of Ram’s Heads Floor Mosaic (detail), late fifth or early sixth century CE, marble and limestone tesserae, 76.2 × 208.3 cm, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts, Excavation at Antioch, 1936. 33 4.11 Photographs like the ones above were used in psychological research to show the innate symmetric preferences in humans. The research found that test subjects preferred a symmetrical face (left) with added symmetric decorations over an asymmetric face (right) applied with asymmetric paint 4.12 In psychological tests, subjects consistently picked a pattern symmetrical around a vertical axis as more attractive than one symmetrical about a non-vertical axis 4.13 The Taj Mahal (c. 1653) in Agra, India has a clear, hierarchical shape with a tri-partite arrangement, a top, middle, and bottom not unlike a face; it can also be seen, not incidentally, as a study in curves, another form humans innately prefer 4.14 Dancing Maenad, Roman, c. 27 BCE–14 CE, Metropolitan Museum of Art, portrays a mythical dancing devotee of the Roman god of wine, Bacchus, and can be viewed as a study in the appeal of curvaceous shapes

4.15 Curves define the character and help magnify the power of the Oval Office, seen here with President Barack Obama in 2013 4.16 Fractal beauty in a romanesco calabrese cauliflower. Selfreplicating forms fascinate us: our interest in these patterns has been linked to our evolution and observation of similar arrangements, such as tree patterns, in nature over eons 5.1 The drawings for Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘A Fireproof House for $5,000’ were published in the Ladies Home Journal magazine in April 1907, with an accompanying article written by the architect. The building was expressly intended to be affordable for the American middle class 5.2 Top: Fireproof House, first floor plan; bottom: second floor plan. Author: Frank Lloyd Wright, “A Fireproof House for $5,000.” April 2007 5.3 The Pegasus Fountain at the entry to the sixteenth-century Villa Lante in Bagnaia, central Italy, represents Biblical paradise, a time before man’s fall from grace where there was natural abundance on earth 5.4 The ‘garden finale’ at Villa Lante suggests a new age of hope dawning after ‘the fall,’ where man’s creativity and knowledge can be put to use offering hope and salvation 5.5 The plan of Villa Lante; the principal entry to the garden starts at the top (or south) in the diagram and follows a linear progression down a grade to the exit at the north. The garden sequencing tells the story of man’s biblical fall from grace and re-emergence into a world of rationality and hope, represented by a grand fountain centered in a large square of symmetrically arranged plantings at its base 5.6 A suburban intersection 40 km (25 miles) northwest of Boston, Kelly’s Corner in Acton, Massachusetts, just off the highway to the city 5.7 An aerial diagram of Kelly’s Corner shows its scattered building layout where planning has accommodated parking lots and cars over pedestrian needs 5.8 The winning Kelly’s Corner plan was designed by residents Janice Ward and Mark Buxbaum into an arrival point and place

of pride by focusing on building alignment and assigning a clear hierarchy that suggests an uplifting story 6.1 Back-yard arbor in Acton, Massachusetts; a predisposition for enjoying natural scenes is in our genome. Given the means, we embellish the view 6.2 The acacia tree common in a savanna is thought to have been one common element in our primal vista 6.3 Boston City Hall, at far left, and its immediate surroundings. Repetitive machine-like elevations disconnect us from nature; the buildings do not resemble the lifelike forms and landscapes we evolved within 6.4 The Great Workroom, SC Johnson, a family-owned company in Racine, Wisconsin by architect Frank Lloyd Wright, 1936, has been called “the most beautiful office space in America.” Wright called the columns, “dendriform,” or tree-shaped; some see them as lily pads. They are 5.6 meters (18.5 feet) in diameter at the top and 23 centimeters (about 9 inches) in diameter at the base. Photo credit: SC Johnson 6.5 Columns in thirteenth-century Chartres Cathedral interior, Chartres, France. The space emotionally engages us no matter our background or creed; it reads as a sacred forest 6.6 Five-hundred to seven-hundred-year-old Redwoods in Humboldt Redwoods State Park, Northern California. It has been said that nature provides the template for our most elegant and aweinspiring architecture 7.1 Stapleton Library in Staten Island, New York, with windows photoshopped away, at left; the original building, at right 7.2 Eye-tracked Stapleton Library, without and with its existing windows using iMotions biometric software 7.3 Heat maps, aggregating eye-tracking data, glow brightest where people look most; study conducted with iMotions biometric software 7.4 Weeksville Heritage Center, a museum in Brooklyn, New York 7.5 Weeksville Heritage Center, New York City, with added windows

7.6 Eye-tracked Weeksville Heritage Center, New York City; heat maps created with iMotions biometric software 7.7 Eye-tracked Weeksville Heritage Center, photoshopped; heat maps created with iMotions biometric software 7.8 Queens Library, Flushing, New York City 7.9 Heat map of street scene outside Queens Library, Flushing, New York City, analyzed with iMotions biometric software 7.10 Copley Square Boston with historic Trinity Church and iconic Hancock Tower, eye-tracked with iMotions biometric software 7.11 High Bridge, New York City with existing water tower and with it removed 7.12 Heat maps of High Bridge, New York City with existing water tower and with it removed; analyzed with iMotions biometric software 7.13 Eye-tracking data creates visual sequence diagrams, or gaze paths, which follow how viewers look at a scene; study conducted with iMotions biometric software 7.14 Queens Library,Flushing,New York City gaze sequence analysis creates a shadow study glowing white where people look most,fading gray in areas ignored; with iMotions biometric software 7.15 Perception of the wall greeting subway riders getting off the train in Somerville, Massachusetts, changes with art—a place previously ignored becomes a focal point; heat maps created with iMotions biometric software 7.16 The blank side of a parking garage in Somerville, Massachusetts directs viewers to focus down an adjacent side street; with added Matisse-like art, gaze pattern shifts to focus on garage itself, making it more of a place 7.17 Eye-tracked ‘Thatcherized’ images of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher from an official photograph. In our study, 33 test subjects looked at the image at left, in a 15-second interval; the reddest heat maps created, at right, indicate they found the most distorted right-side-up face, the most riveting, with iMotions biometric software

7.18 Suburban subdivision in Ayer, Massachusetts above left; new urbanist subdivision in Devens, Massachusetts at right 7.19 Gaze path moves skyward in a typical car-centric subdivision, at left, while it remains grounded and focused at street level in the new urbanist development, at right 7.20 Region of Interest diagrams (ROIs) indicate where viewers’ focus falls most in the first-glance at a scene; analyzed with 3M VAS (Visual Attention Software) 7.21 Gaze path studies show how people implicitly ignore the new Art Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, at bottom of image below, but are drawn to look at the sculpture at its entrance, and the adjacent nineteenth-century commercial building; analysis with 3M VAS (Visual Attention Software) 8.1 The twenty-first century: The Age of Biology, Slideshow from the OECD 2012 8.2 Eye tracking a book cover, above left, creates the heat map, at right, revealing where people initially look most 8.3 The unique capacities of the right hemisphere are the essence of the twenty-first-century paradigm shift, moving from the analytical and conscious thinking of the brain’s left hemisphere to acknowledge the unconscious, non-verbal capacities of the right 8.4 At top left, MassArt Design and Media Center (c. 2016), a public college of applied art in Downtown Boston; at top right, George Wythe House (c. 1754), a historic site in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia; both images analyzed with 3M Visual Attention Software (VAS) 8.5 Boston’s Old State House, c. 1713, eye tracked with iMotions software proves magnetic; inherently ‘approachable,’ the historic Georgian building is featured in many tour guides and postcards of the city 8.6 Biometric analysis of nineteenth-century carriage house contrasted with twenty- first-century library, using 3M Visual Attention Software (VAS); the heat map shows how the older facade inherently draws attention while the newer one does not

8.7 Evolution made us a face-centric species and the trait that secured our survival in the wild shows up in traditional building elevations, above in Greater Boston 8.8 As a social species, we rely on others to regulate our emotional state, explains research psychologist and author, Stephen Porges 8.9 Walter Gropius’ home in Lincoln, Massachusetts, center image above; at left, the neighboring, traditional New England house directly across the street; Source: Ann Sussman; at right, concrete bunker along the Western Front in Walem, Belgium 8.10 Walter Gropius’ study in Lincoln, Massachusetts, at left, replicates a WWI trench in section and layout 8.11 Gropius’ master bedroom (left) set up like a ‘trench dugout’ with sleeping quarters behind sturdy door frame; WWI trench dugout (right), showing doorway to area where men slept within a trench wall 8.12 The second floor deck’s defensive design prevents anyone on it from being seen from outside 8.13 Rooms in the Gropius house feature minimal detail and ornament, at left; haphazard wood arrangements at entryway recall trench construction; reconstructed trench at right at the American Heritage Museum, Hudson, Massachusetts 8.14 Normal view, top left, and autistic view, at right, of a kitten in a biometric study with iMotions software, people on the spectrum avoid looking at eyes where neurotypical (or normal) viewers focus 8.15 Normal view, top left, and autistic view, at right, in a biometric study we conducted with iMotions software 8.16 Normal view, top left, and autistic view, at right, in a biometric study with iMotions software 8.17 National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, Japan. Le Corbusier c. 1957 can be seen as an expression of his autism A.1 Each hemisphere of the brain is often described as having four lobes with fairly specific functions: the frontal lobe is responsible for conscious thought and mood; the parietal lobe plays a role

integrating sensory information from the various senses and manipulating objects; the occipital lobe is concerned with visual processing; and the temporal lobe is involved in retaining visual memories, understanding language processing, and the processing of complex visual stimuli such as faces. The cerebellum, responsible for coordinating movement, lies below A.2 Diagram of the encephalization quotient (EQ) in various animals. The human brain is an outlier at three times the size of its nearest relation on the evolutionary tree (the chimpanzee) when factoring in body size A.3 Diagram of the human brain in section shows the forebrain, midbrain, and hindbrain A.4 A diagram of the ‘Triune’ Brain Model, developed by physician Dr Paul MacLean, underscores the evolutionary past we share with other creatures on earth and models the brain as a series of sequential additions A.5 The ‘Triune’ Brain Model as a schematic portrait of Albert Einstein: within us are elements of animals that came before as rendered by artist Trey Kirk

Tables 2.1 Evolutionary timeline for the ‘wall-hugging’ trait thigmotaxis with the date the tendency was first documented in the scientific literature by species at right 6.1 Key elements of biophilic design A.1 Brain size and energy consumption table

Acknowledgments

This book could not have happened without the consistent efforts and energetic input of many people including research assistants at Tufts: Elza Lambergs, Caroline Geiling, Annie Levine, Margaret Wiryaman, Jingyu Tu, Gabriel Holbrow, and Acton high school senior, Julia Call. Devin Merullo, biology graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, performed a virtuoso task translating research on the brain, neuroscience, and psychology into vernacular English. Harvard architecture graduate student Nora Shull and grad Trey Kirk seemingly effortlessly produced the many black and white diagrams and figure-ground drawings that accompany the text and bring it to life. We especially call out Nora’s ‘Thatcherized Face’ and Trey’s hand-drawn ‘Einstein.’ We have it on good authority that anyone seeing those faces will never forget them. Special thanks for administrative support go to Maria Nicolau, Doug Kwartler, and Ann Urosevich of Tufts for all their help and good humor along the way. For the many photographic contributions, we thank architect Garry Harley for the professional photographs of Italy and France, Deniz Gecim for the images from Turkey, and Celia Kent for the shot of the English village. We would like to thank Professor Stephan Chalup, Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of Newcastle, Australia, for sharing his photographs of happy-looking houses on the other side of the world. We also thank Rodrigo Cardenas, postdoc at Penn State University and Lauren Julius Harris, Professor of Psychology at Michigan State University for sharing their work and, in particular, Dr Cardenas’ unique photographs of symmetrical and asymmetrical faces and pattern in indigenous craft. In Brooklyn, New York, we thank Eve Sussman and Simon Lee for providing lodging in the city, which gave us time to

explore and photograph Jane Jacobs’ remarkable old West Village neighborhood. At the Bradford Mill in West Concord, we thank Sam of Palm Press Atelier for making photoscanning a pleasure. In Melbourne, Australia, we want to particularly thank Simona Castricum of ARM Architecture for providing us with a photo of the new Portrait Building. In Philadelphia, we thank Hamil Pearsall of Temple University for helping us secure photos of Society Hill. At Architect, the Magazine of the American Institute of Architects, we thank editor Ned Cramer and Senior Graphic Designer Alice Ashe for providing a photo of the Society Hill neighborhood. We also thank the George Cserna/Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University for rights to use the photo in this book. Also, many thanks to Erica Bossier and LSU Press for permission to reprint the poem, ‘Things.’ In preparing the original text, we thank Duke University Professor Adrian Bejan for answering our several emails about the golden rectangle and the ‘constructal law,’ and Professor Holly Taylor of Tufts. We also thank Dr W. Jake Jacobs, Psychology Professor at the University of Arizona for sharing his work on thigmotaxis and responding to our early emails about this project. We thank Dr Lynn Nadel, Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science, also at the University of Arizona in Tucson, for speaking with us about thigmotaxis and its function in mammals of prey. We thank Professor Rusty Gage of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, past president of Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA) for a lengthy phone interview on this project in its incipient stages last spring. We also thank neuroscientist Dr Eric Kandel for helping us make the connection to Dr Gage. We are also indebted to Dr Kandel for his 2012 book, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain from Vienna 1900 to the Present, without which the present text would not be possible. We also must thank the Cloud Foundation and ArtScience Prize in Boston (www.artscienceprize.org/boston) for sparking creativity in young people and not-so-young facilitators. Working with students at the Cloud Foundation in 2010 provided the “seed idea” for this work, a new kind of book on the brain, evolution, and architecture.

We thank our editors at Routledge, Wendy Fuller, Emma Gadsen, and Rebecca Hogg for their support and for helping find a workable title for our ideas. We also thank Susan Schulman for her early interest. Closer to home we thank our first and extremely loyal readers Jane Ross and Celia Kent. Their interest and comments turned out to be invaluable. We thank the Nashoba Brook Bakery in West Concord for providing not only great fare, but with their brookadjacent windows, a sustaining vista, and great place to write. Lastly, but most significantly, we thank our families, specifically in Grafton, Pam, Rose, and Sam, and in Concord, Chris, Ben, and Tom for their endless (well, almost) patience. “You are the sauce on my spaghetti.” For the second edition, we have additional helpers and remarkable researchers to thank; Mengfei Wang and Brenna Trollinger for reviewing both old and new chapters, improving their accuracy and working extremely quickly under deadline. Erin Lang, for helping frame the two new chapters in this edition, from overseas, while under lockdown in Amsterdam during the Covid-19 pandemic. Thanks also go to Perri Sheinbaum and Jessica Wilson for proofreading, formatting, and helping to organize the manuscript for submission and to our partners at Routledge, Krystal Racaniello and Christine Bondira. We are also particularly indebted to the readers of Cognitive Architecture, 1st Edition, for helping us develop an international coterie of researchers interested in studying the human experience of place, allowing us to sponsor the 1st International Urban Experience + Design conference at Tufts in 2019 (https://sites.tufts.edu/urbanexperience/). Special thanks to conference speakers Don Ruggles, Misha Semenov, Peter Lowitt, Heidi Pribell, Robert Tullis, Gideon Spanjar, Frank Suurenbroek, Piers MacNaughton, Yin Jie, Adam Francey, Nikos Salingaros, Kristian Kloeckl, Andrew Mondschein, Happy Farrow, Krister Jens, and Minyu Situ, whose insight and research contributed to and encouraged us to put together this new edition. For helping delve into psychology, PTSD, and mental health, in the second edition, we are indebted to Jim Hopper, PhD, Harvard Medical School, Michael Kramer, PhD, VA NY Harbor Health System

and Ashley Doukas, PhD, World Trade Center Health Clinic, NYU School of Medicine. We also thank Dr Wendy D’Andrea, New School of Social Research, New York City, for encouraging the presentation of the first poster on Bauhaus founder, Walter Gropius’ PTSD at the 30th Annual International Trauma Conference in Boston in 2019. And we thank Rosie Greenberg at the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA) in San Diego for facilitating the same poster presentation, virtually, in 2020 and linking a video with it. Thanks also to research assistants and psychology majors Erin Lang from Georgetown and Katie Chen from Boston College for showing such perseverance and fortitude writing up the original PTSD and modern architecture story; and to Martin Pedersen, editor of the nonprofit site, Common Edge, for first publishing the article, The Mental Disorders that Gave Us Modern Architecture online in 2017; its publication would lead to the poster presentations at national conferences in following years. For help understanding the implicit human need to connect and see faces for emotional regulation, we owe enormous thanks to Stephen W Porges, PhD, for his research and work including books, videos, and conversations about the polyvagal theory which really teaches you that people are hardwired for one principal thing: seeing and being with one another. For biometric research and, in particular help with our first eyetracking architecture studies, we are indebted to iMotions’ founder Peter Hartzbech for game-changing creativity and practice; and to the fantastic team members in his Boston office, including Robert Christopherson, Nam Nguyen, Kieu Wong, Ambrose Soehn, and Francesca Marchionne. We also thank the New York City Department of Design and Construction and Devens Enterprise Commission for their financial support for much of our initial eyetracking research. And to Valerie Fletcher, Executive Director of the Institute for Human Centered Design (IHCD), in Boston for supporting our very first eye-tracking architecture study, results of which would grace the front-cover of Planning Magazine in 2016. For understanding the algorithmic nature of human vision, particularly how similarly people see things at-first-glance, regardless of age, gender, or background, we are also indebted to 3M’s Kelly Canavan

and the software, VAS (Visual Attention Software). Without access to these biometric tools, this second edition could not have happened. Also, a big shout out to STEM-supporter, design-expert, Janice M Ward, and Ann’s co-blogger on GeneticsofDesign.com who, in the past five years, has helped put together 90 posts on ‘the Biology behind Design that Delights’ actively supporting our key idea, the need to bridge the arts and sciences, to promote better place-making for all. And, finally a big thank you to theHapi.org (The Human Architecture + Planning Institute, Inc.) for supporting our work and creating a nonprofit to move it forward making its central premises more well-known and accessible for all.

1 A New Foundation: Darwin, Biology, and Cognitive Science

Whilst Man, however well-behaved, At best, is but a monkey shaved! Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859)

Evolution. It is the first and last word in this book. The thesis of this book is that the more we understand how human beings are an artifact of Darwin’s theory of evolution, the more creatively and successfully we will be able to design and plan for them. Evolution holds that all life evolved, or transformed, from a common ancestor. This holds true for modern humans, a relatively recent species believed to have been on earth about two hundred thousand years. As such, we carry significant baggage from a very long journey: our planet Earth is 4.6 billion years old and the first life appeared on it some 3.8 billion years ago. In this book, we explore how our evolutionary path can be seen at work in the ways humans function, including how we walk, think, see, and prioritize viewing things in our environment. Our sense of aesthetics is at root biological, evolving over millennia. Many books on architecture and planning refer to nature, but most do not talk about humans as evolved mammals with their perceptual systems a product of ‘natural selection,’1 the mechanism for evolution naturalist Charles Darwin defined in his most famous text, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859. This book has this idea at its core. We believe that because of the burgeoning research on the brain and cognitive science particularly happening

now in the early twenty-first century, more books like this will follow. Hardly a day goes by without some new finding in evolutionary biology, psychology, neuroscience, or genetics, reframing our understanding of what it means to be humans and how we came to be.2 There is a central paradox to architecture and planning that this book also addresses. Practitioners rarely meet the people who will be most affected by their work. Most buildings outlive their creators. Post-occupancy evaluations are expensive and infrequent. Even in residential design, with an average American staying in a house only 13 years, the building will likely long outlast its original tenants (Emrath 2009). What should the architect or planner know about the human as a generic client? How should they think about something as complex as ‘human nature,’ or establish guidelines for designing successful places for people never met? The intent of this book is to answer these questions or at least provide a basic framework for doing so, teasing out innate human responses and expectations of the man-made built world. However, here again, we run into another central paradox that provides a foundation for this book. “Our perceptual systems are designed to register aspects of the external world that were important to our survival …” wrote Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2003: 199). In other words, we see the ‘reality’ nature intends us to see, the one that led to our species’ survival in the past, which was for almost all of human history, the one outside in the natural world, and not man-made. Our oldest cities are only about 6,000 years old. We never evolved to live in the situations most of us find ourselves in today. What this suggests for architecture and planning is our subject. Twentieth-century urban observers including writer Jane Jacobs maintained that the way forward in planning and architecture would be to better understand how people are “a part of nature.” Jacobs, an outspoken critic of most mid-twentieth-century planning projects, criticized planners for treating people like cars. It certainly is easier to design for cars than people, she noted, and though it may be easy to treat people as though they were purely mechanical, proceeding this

way never produces places with lasting public resonance. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she wrote: Underlying the city planners’ deep disrespect for their subject matter … lies a long-established misconception about the relationship of cities—and indeed of men—with the rest of nature… Human beings are, of course, a part of nature, as much so as grizzly bears or bees or whales or sorghum cane. (Jacobs 1961: 443)

In the chapters ahead we outline what it means, according to our best interpretations of recent science, to consider people exactly as Jacobs would have it, as “a part of nature, as much so as grizzly bears or … sorghum cane.” It turns out that people have multiple unconscious tendencies and behaviors that govern their responses to built environments—no wonder they flummoxed mid-century planners. Jacobs was right: the planners’ work overlooked the essential aspects of human make-up. But, to be fair, these traits were not well documented at the time and, because they are unconscious, by definition can be hard to see. In the chapters that follow we outline what these hidden aspects in human nature are, each in its own chapter, culling out the behaviors that we believe are most significant for architecture and urban planning. Chapter 2, ‘Edges Matter,’ begins with exploring a phenomenon that Jacobs found curious: people avoid the center of open spaces and tend to stick to the sides of streets, even in car-free zones. Understanding the biological and evolutionary basis of this hidden tendency is critical for urban planning, particularly if planners hope to create walkable places. We discuss the recent psychological research describing the trait as a survival and orientation strategy and introduce its scientific name: thigmotaxis. We also look at thigmotaxis to demonstrate one of Darwin’s essential insights: that nature is ‘conservative,’ or traits that are successful reappear in new species again and again. We chart the research record on thigmotaxis to help us appreciate how fantastically conservative nature gets. Researchers have documented thigmotaxis in organisms 3.6 billion years old and a host of other species that have evolved over millions

of years since, including Homo sapiens, who are the relative newcomers on the planet. Chapter 3, ‘Patterns Matter,’ looks at how the human brain does not treat our senses equally. Lacking the sonar of bats or the smelling skills of bears,3 the human brain is essentially oriented toward vision. More of our gray matter is devoted to creating our visual representation of the world than anything else. The implications of this fact for design and architecture are significant, suggesting how important detail and visual diversity are for building elevations and urban layout. Once you realize that most of the sensory information going to the human brain concerns visual processing,4 no other conclusion becomes tenable. Moreover, our mental apparatus does not handle visual inputs equally either—it prioritizes the face. The evolutionary reasons for this are clear: identifying faces quickly, whether friend or foe, proved critical for survival. An apparent byproduct of our finely evolved adeptness at face-processing is that we see faces everywhere and unconsciously arrange facial features out of random data. This includes, for instance, ‘seeing’ faces in inanimate things where they are not, from the ‘man in the moon’ to a ‘Virgin Mary’ in a burnt piece of toast (BBC News 2004; Liu et al. 2014). The impact of this trait on architecture and aesthetics is something we are only beginning to appreciate. Research suggests we also see faces in many of our favorite houses and streetscapes and in so doing most easily and surreptitiously make emotional attachments and memories of these places. We review computer science literature that suggests this tendency needs to be programmed into future robots to make them more human-like, as well as more capable helpmates able to anticipate our responses to our surroundings. Further delving into the dominant characteristic of the face, in Chapter 4, ‘Shapes Carry Weight,’ we consider bilateral symmetry, which is common to animals generally. People are bilaterally symmetrical and so is much we intentionally make, including the patterns in our craft and in many of our building and city designs (see Figure 1.1). We look at why this form prevails, again from a Darwinian perspective, learning that animals and humans consistently associate the shape with power and robustness. Bilateral symmetry carries

deep, innate psychological significance. In research studies when human subjects of both sexes were asked to choose between symmetric and asymmetric faces—and even symmetric and asymmetric geometric patterns—they consistently preferred the more symmetrical. Looking at these studies is seeing natural selection at work. While the psychological traits above we share with other life, no other creature has the one discussed in Chapter 5, ‘Storytelling Is Key: We’re Wired for Narrative.’ This characteristic distinguishes humans and is the consequence of possessing complex neural circuitry unlike that of any other animal on the planet. Our brain size coupled with this story- enabling capacity contributes to making the human brain the outlier it is in the animal world. Our innate ability to invent stories and create multiple scenarios in any situation—and not necessarily act upon them—is considered highly adaptive. Our narrative proclivities, in turn, have led to the creation of new artifacts on earth: they make literature and art possible for one, and perhaps more significantly give people identity and a sense of meaning. As the narrative-telling species, we also are a passionate narrativeseeking one. Much as a horse favors an open field where it can gallop, a beaver the tree-lined stream where it can build, people love settings that engage their storytelling behavior. This can be seen in the broad popularity of books, movies, TV, Netflix, or YouTube, and when visitors travel to far-flung places around the world to take in significant and unusual histories; in some ways it does not seem to much matter whether the stories tied to place are real or fanciful. Disneyland in Anaheim, California, discussed in Chapter 2, remains one of the most visited places on earth, engaging more than 720 million visitors (or more than twice the population of the United States) since opening in 1955 with multiple made-up narratives in an obviously staged setting. Many of the world’s most famous buildings, sites, and cities also possess ‘embedded narrative.’ They contain a specific formal sequence in their design that, like a story, has a beginning, middle, and end, or similar sequence. Or, as we see when we look at the popular Italian Renaissance garden, Villa Lante, at the end of Chapter 5, a familiar biblical story is used to determine the actual layout of the plan. Humans at once inhabit a physical realm

and one that is bounded by narrative and quite immaterial. And like other animals, we favor those places and activities that most enable our species-specific abilities.

Figure 1.1 A house plan from Roman architect Vitruvius’ De Architectura (translated as the Ten Books of Architecture), prepared for the Emperor Augustus, first century BCE. The plan features nearly symmetrical men’s and women’s sections (‘men’s quarters’ [left]; ‘women’s quarters’ [right]) and in each of these areas multiple bilaterally symmetrical elements including room plans and column layouts. Source: Wikimedia Commons. People also like looking at nature and seeing landscapes that recall their species-specific past. This is the subject of Chapter 6, ‘Nature Is Our Context,’ which draws together the book’s earlier chapters. An expression of how we are ‘a part of nature’ as Jacobs noted is that we love looking at life. The eminent Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson labeled the idea that there is an innate bond between humans and all other living things, “the biophilia hypothesis,” in his book Biophilia. Our “urge to affiliate with other forms of life is to some degree innate,” he wrote (Wilson 1984: 85). Our hunter-gatherer ancestors came into their humanness in the grassy plains with

scattered trees of the African, and later European and Asian, savanna, Wilson explains. In a certain sense, no matter where we go today, tens of thousands of years later, we never leave this landscape behind. Given the possibility of living anywhere, people still “gravitate statistically” toward a savanna-like view, he noted, and “will pay enormous prices to have (it)” (Wilson, Chapter 2: The Nature of Human Nature, in Biophilic Design, by Kellert et al. 2008: 23). Biophilic design, the approach to building design rooted in the biophilia hypothesis, strives to ensure new projects recognize and meet the human need to observe and engage with nature. In this book, we seek to tease apart the evolutionary scrim that humans look through to empower designers to not only make their projects biophilic but also more ably anticipate and fit our humanness. The big idea here is profoundly simple: the more you know about human behavior, the better you can anticipate and design for it. Chapter 7, ‘Buildings, Biology + Biometrics,’ reviews key biometric tools that allow us to see our hidden evolutionary traits at work. Focusing on eye tracking, which follows conscious and unconscious eye movements, enables us to tease apart how the architectural experience begins in milliseconds and why it remains mostly outside of our conscious control. And lastly in Chapter 8, ‘The Twenty-FirstCentury Paradigm Shift in Biology and Psychology Reframes Architecture + Its History,’ we reveal how greater knowledge of how people function, and how evolution has largely preset our responses to external stimuli, has remarkable significance for architectural history and reframes the narrative of how modern architecture, postWWI, came to be. We do not expect readers of Cognitive Architecture to have prior knowledge of workings of the brain or its parts, but in the Appendix we outline different ways of thinking about its organization and its development. Enjoy what follows, we see bridging the arts and sciences as an on-going adventure and hope readers will find it that way, too.

A Note on the Title We use Cognitive Architecture to explore how research in psychology and the cognitive sciences can inform our understanding of the impact of buildings and city design on people. We recognize that the term is also used in computer science and in cognitive science, referring to the basic design of computers in the first instance, and the information-processing organization of the brain in the second, but that is not our context.

Exercise for Chapter 1: Watching People Visit a suburban or urban center and, with camera, notebook, or mobile device in hand, observe people: where do they gather; how do they walk? Preferably draw or sketch; you tend to look at things more closely then. Where is there a specifically interesting and definable response to the built environment? This is in preparation for Chapter 2.

Notes 1 How does natural selection work? It is the mechanism for explaining how transformation happens and why so many diverse species exist. Charles Darwin explains it in the introduction to Origin of Species this way: As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form. Another term for the process is “survival of the fittest,” which the English polymath Herbert Spencer later coined, and Darwin called “more accurate and sometimes equally convenient.” 2 The many new books on the brain and how it influences our actions and decision-making include more than 100 titles exploring what recent research implies for pedagogy, psychology, and sociology (exclusive of medical texts). These include best sellers: Charles Duhigg’s, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, Robert M. Sapolsky’s Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, Daniel Kahneman’s, Thinking Fast and Slow, Eric Kandel’s The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present, and Leonard Mlodinow’s Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules your Behavior. 3 Bears have been known to smell prey up to 40 miles away; bats can see in the dark by enhancing their vision using echolocation, where they emit high-pitched sounds and interpret the echo that bounces back to determine object location. 4 Per information science, 10 of the 11 million bits (or units) of information going into the brain every second are visual (Mlodinow 2013); see Chapter 7.

2 Edges Matter: Thigmotaxis (the ‘Wall-hugging’ Trait)

The needs of city planning (require) … doing away with the corridor street. Preparatory Congress for Modern Architecture, Vaud, Switzerland, 1928

People, like many animals, tend to behave differently in a room inside than when outdoors. Outside in built environments, they seem more at ease when buildings create a room-like condition that surrounds them on several sides, like in the picture on page 11 of Piazza del Campo, the historic square in Siena, Italy (see Figure 2.1). Here residents and tourists gravitate to the sides of the piazza’s medieval walls as though pulled by a magnet. “We appreciate buildings which form continuous lines around us and make us feel as safe in the open air as we do in a room,” wrote architectural critic Alain de Botton (2006: 245) in The Architecture of Happiness. In this chapter, we explore why. We review what famous urban observers saw when they watched people in cities and then look at more recent scientific findings to help make sense of their findings.

Figure 2.1 Tourists and residents gather at the edge of Piazza del Campo, Siena, Italy. Source: Garry D. Harley.

A Great Place for People-watching 555 Hudson Street in Lower Manhattan is a three-story brick building in Greenwich Village that is fairly nondescript (see Figure 2.2). Some 5 meters wide (about 16 feet), it was built circa 1901, with a storefront on the first floor and living quarters above and measures out at close to 195 square meters (2,100 square feet). The Hudson River is three blocks and less than 300 meters (a quarter mile) away. It turns out, though, that 555 Hudson and its surrounding neighborhood of lowrise storefronts is an excellent vantage point for at least one thing: people-watching. That is what writer and urban observer Jane Jacobs did after she and her husband bought the building in 1947 for $7,000. At the time the area was a culturally diverse artists’ haven and very affordable (in 2009, 555 Hudson sold for $3.5 million).

Figure 2.2 On the left, 555 Hudson Street, Jane Jacob’s narrow New York City townhouse in the West Village, Lower Manhattan (partially hidden by scaffolding from a neighboring building). Source: Ann Sussman. What Jacobs saw from 555 Hudson and its environs informed her most famous book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), which went on to become one of the most well-known titles in American urban history. The book promoted her efforts to push twentieth-century urban design and planning into a more humancentered direction, one where designers consider human behavior as well as accommodating the twentieth-century’s proliferating numbers

of new cars. Highway construction was booming in Jacobs’ time, with automobile ownership soaring. A new highway was once planned not far from her own home. In part through her efforts to alert the public, the ten-lane Lower Manhattan Expressway that would have razed historic neighborhoods around 555 Hudson never happened. One thing Jacobs realized is that people in outdoor urban spaces exhibit some unusual behaviors that typical urban plans and their originators do not take into account. No wonder the planners struggle to figure people out; car requirements really are more obvious. Pedestrians do not merely walk down the sidewalk; they perform an “intricate sidewalk ballet,” she wrote, famously describing her own routine on Hudson Street: I make my own first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out my garbage can, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the droves of junior high school students walk by the center of the stage dropping candy wrappers. (Jacobs 1961: 50–51)

This activity is meaningful: The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations. (Jacobs 1961: 50)

Significantly, Jacobs noted how the buildings and the way their firstfloor elevations are designed seem to invite the dance. The buildings need to sit in a specific way. They “must be oriented to the street. They cannot turn their backs or blank sides on it and leave it blind” or the street will not generate much of a show. She writes about how buildings seem to exert an invisible pull. When children leave a childcare center in the city, for example, they are happier and feel safer walking home alongside buildings than by a wide-open city park (Jacobs 1961: 74). On pedestrian streets, even without cars around, people avoid the emptiness in a street center: They do not sally out in the middle and glory in being kings of the road at last. They stay to the sides.

(Jacobs 1961: 374)

She observes this in Disneyland in Anaheim, California, in shopping malls, in places where cars are relegated to far away parking lots (p. 374). Even in the car-free realms, “people stay to the sides except where something interesting to see has been deliberately placed out in the ‘street’” (p. 374). She hypothesizes why: In more ordinary circumstances, people are attracted to the sides, I think, because that is where it is most interesting. As they walk, they occupy themselves with seeing—seeing in windows, seeing buildings, seeing each other. (p. 348)

Some 15 years later, another keen urban watcher made careful note of ‘edge-appeal,’ too. Christopher Alexander, an architect and a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, is much like Jacobs, a critic-at-large of twentieth-century development. In A Pattern Language (1977), he published meticulous observations of human behavior in a 1,150-page book exhaustively listing 253 ‘timetested’ patterns for guiding a project at all scales and sizes. Alexander cites “a primitive instinct at work,” the human tendency to protect our back, as the reason people shun open spaces. In Pattern 124, Activity Pockets, he wrote: The life of a public square forms naturally around its edge. If the edge fails, the space never becomes lively. (Alexander et al. 1977: 600)

And again: People gravitate naturally towards the edge of public spaces. They do not linger out in the open. … a big space will be wasted unless there are trees, monuments, seats, fountains—a place where people can protect their backs, as easily as they can around the edge. (p. 606)

Like Jacobs, he picked up on the importance of windows at street level: …unless the building is oriented toward the outside, which surrounds it, as carefully and positively as toward its inside, the space around the building will be useless and blank—with the direct effect, in the long run, that the building will be socially isolated, because you have to cross a no-man’s land to get to it. (p. 606)

In The Pattern 160 Building Edge (p. 753), he laments how in many modern buildings, “the space around it is not made for people” (p. 754). And last but not least, even Le Corbusier, the Swiss architect who helped define modern architecture in the early twentieth century—and would do so much to take buildings entirely off corridor streets—could not help but marvel at the consistently robust appeal of sidewalks in the densely populated French capital in his book, The Radiant City, first published in 1922: In Paris, I often walked through the district bounded by the Place des Vosges and the Stock Exchange—the worst district in the city and the most wretchedly overcrowded. Along the streets, on the skimpy sidewalks, the population moves in single file. By some miracle of group identification and the spirit of the city, even here people laugh and manage to get along, even here they tell jokes and have a good time, even here they make out. (Le Corbusier 1967: 12)1

Why do city streets generate this activity? How come people find streets magnetic? And why do they shun an open center? It turns out continuous edges and street corridors aid and abet our movement, and this is an artifact of our evolution, as Alexander surmised. It is also a direct and underappreciated consequence of how humans are built, move, and where they tend to look. The Danish architect and planner Jan Gehl sums up the importance of architects and designers understanding how humans move in his book Cities for People (2010: 33). One of the most fundamental

things to know about the human client, he says, is the way people naturally walk, which is summarized in the box opposite. Because danger generally lurked on a horizontal plane for our ancestors, we have evolved eyes parallel with the ground to better scan for it. There is a natural tilt to the human head while walking of about 10 degrees to take in the path in front, which through the eons has persisted since it apparently kept us out of trouble (Gehl 2010: 39). Below we have diagrammed an ‘Ambulation Man’ and ‘Ambulation Woman’ walking in their natural stance with their heads slightly bent down in this fashion (Figure 2.3).

People are bipedal, they have two feet, and they walk with eyes facing forward. People rarely look backward or up. They almost never walk sideways or backward. They dislike taking stairs.

Figure 2.3 ‘Ambulation Man’ and ‘Ambulation Woman’ walk with their heads at a natural tilt of about 10 degrees. Source: Trey Kirk.

Walking is something humans have done a very long time and our ancestors got good at. We are unique in this habit: no other mammal so successfully ambulates on 2 feet. The choice also proved fateful, enabling the development of our brain’s size and specialized circuitry, which we consider later in the book. In the Paleolithic time, it has been estimated a woman walked an average of 9 miles a day; a man, 12.2 At that rate they could cross the continental US in a year (Lieberman 2013). Ancient thinkers took note of the connection between walking and human health. “Walking is man’s best medicine,” Hippocrates, considered the father of western medicine, wrote in the fifth century BCE. Significantly, it is the lack of comparable exercise, today, that is considered to be a contributor to many modern health issues, including obesity and heart disease.

While stairs are an important tool in an architect’s arsenal (and designing them successfully makes up part of the architectural licensing exam in the United States), people usually avoid them whenever they can. We generally look to save energy if we can. Studies have shown that, given the choice of stairs or an escalator, people will pick the escalator 97% of the time. Reminded with a note that taking the stairs is actually a good way for modern humans to get exercise, people still pick the escalator 93% of the time (Lieberman 2013). People favor risk-free shortcuts and tend to shun things that require conscious effort and paying extra attention. Humans also favor feeling safe and protected, particularly as they navigate through a new space. This is where our ancestral habits come into play, too. When it comes to edges, biologists classify humans, exactly like other mammals of prey, as thigmotactic, or a ‘wall-hugging’ species. In this chapter we review the literature that correlates the trait with levels of anxiety in people and our other animal relations. Thigmotaxis is what Jacobs and Alexander observed when they watched people avoiding wide-open spaces in California or New York City. If these dedicated students of urban behavior did not use the term, it may be because mid-twentieth-century scientists were researching thigmotaxis in mice, rats, and single-celled organisms—not people yet.

Thigmotaxis: A Hidden Trait Thigmotaxis is effortless and instinctive. Many outside stimuli influence how we move and navigate without us having to stop and consciously think about it. The fact is largely unconscious mental activities govern our behavior. Indeed, to put it most accurately, all of our conscious thoughts and actions begin as unconscious brain activity first, explains neuroscientist Eric Kandel, in The Age of Insight (Kandel 2012: 461–472). Sigmund Freud summed up the overwhelming mysteriousness of our cognitive processes, with a metaphor: “The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.” Governing our behavior from these unseen depths, thigmotaxis appears to be at work consistently as we move in our surroundings, although the metrics to consider and measure the trait in design do not yet seem to exist. (The hippocampus, an area of the limbic system, or paleomammalian part of the brain, is believed to govern navigation and spatial traits such as thigmotaxis; it is on top of the brainstem, buried below the cerebral cortex, the two hemispheres at the top of our head. For more on our brain morphology and function and how it compares with other animals, see the Appendix.)

Thigmotaxis Is Old As a primal way-finding strategy, biologists call thigmotaxis ‘phylogenetically old’ or old in terms of evolution. “The remarkable thing that Darwin discovered is that evolution is very conservative,” wrote neuroscientist and Columbia University professor, Eric Kandel (2012). “If it finds through natural selection that some set of mechanisms work, it tends to retain those mechanisms in perpetuity.” Table 2.1 illustrates just how seriously ‘conservative’ biologists believe life can get. Researchers have observed thigmotaxis in bacteria 3.6 billion years old, in amphibians and reptiles 300 million years old, and in us, the relative newcomers on earth, a young approximately 200,000 years old. Looking at the chart we learn that we share the tendency with sperm, the gene that is reportedly 600 million years old according to recent research at Northwestern University Medical School (2014). If sperm were not thigmotactic, come to think of it, we might not be here to observe the trait in ourselves. Table 2.1 Evolutionary timeline for the ‘wall-hugging’ trait thigmotaxis with the date the tendency was first documented in the scientific literature by species at right Group

Example

Source

Bacteria (3.6 billion years ago)

Paramecium aurelia

Jennings 1897

Early animals (600 million years ago)

Spermatozoa

Dewitz 1886 (cited in Jennings); Massart 1888, 1889 (cited in Jennings)

Bilateria (550 million years ago)

Earthworm

Doolittle 1971

Group

Example

Source

Fish (500 million years ago)

Zebrafish

Schnörr et al. 2012

Insects (400 million years ago)

Caterpillar Fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster)

Steinbauer 2009; Besson and Martin 2005

Amphibians (360 million years ago)

Frogs

Bilbo et al. 2000

Reptiles (300 million years ago)

Snakes

Greene et al. 2001

Mammals (200 million years ago)

Rats Humans

Barnett 2003; Kallai et al. 2007

Source: Devin Merullo.

The term thigmotaxis appears to have entered the scientific lexicon at the end of the nineteenth century. Scientists looking at single-cell organisms under microscopes noticed that some cells, single-cell paramecium, or sperm for instance, traveled along the edge of a solid introduced in the slide. The words, from ancient Greek, thigma, meaning to touch, and taxis, meaning arrangement, have come to mean the direction of movement in response to an outside stimulus, or more simply ‘wall-hugging’ (Schnörr et al. 2012: 37). Studying thigmotaxis in mammals seems to have followed sometime after the creation of the first laboratory mazes to test animal behavior. The first such maze is believed to have been built at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts at the end of the nineteenth century. Very creatively, it was modeled after a human one, the famous seventeenth-century Hampton Court Maze, built as royal court entertainment in the outskirts of London and still

apparently world-renowned for amusing tourists (see Figure 2.4) (Historical Royal Palaces 2014).

Figure 2.4 The first maze for laboratory animal testing was modeled after a human one designed for entertaining English royals; later versions were used in laboratories to study animal and human thigmotaxis. Source: Janice Ward.

Researching Thigmotaxis in Animals and People Scientists have been watching rat and other lab animal behavior in mazes since, designing these in a variety of forms from T-shapes to radially shaped layouts, rather than human entertainment venues. Whatever pattern, they noticed the animals initially hugged the container sides and did not venture into its center. A recent study found that rats in a checkerboard maze where squares had one, two, or three walls preferred the squares with the most sides. The early observers of mammalian maze behavior also note that thigmotactic behavior, which is relatively easy to follow and measure, increases with anxiety and decreases with familiarity: as rats knew the maze better they become less edge-oriented. Researchers describe this as an energy-conserving strategy and a survival one; animals that were more thigmotactic were more likely to survive, passing on the behavior in their genes to the next generation, through evolving species and eventually to us. By the early 2000s studies to tease apart the specific role thigmotaxis plays in human navigation appeared in scientific publications. Not surprisingly, to analyze the ‘wall-following’ trait in people, psychologists built mazes for them. Sometimes these were real and sometimes virtual on computer screens (Kallai et al. 2007). This seems to be because humans can engage with their environment visually as well as by touch. In 2007, collaborating with psychologists at the University of Arizona and University of Southampton, psychologist Janos Kallai, at the University of Pécs, Hungary, sought to clarify the role thigmotaxis played when people move in a space: Although thigmotaxis is a well-characterized behavioral tactic commonly observed in nonhuman animals, its role in human navigation is yet to be explained … When an animal initially explores an enclosed place, it tends to stay in close contact with the perimeter of that space… One may quantify the tendency to avoid the inner zone of an open field by measuring either the time or the path length that an organism spends in close contact with the wall.

(Kallai et al. 2007: 22)

Kallai and his fellow researchers knew that thigmotaxis was genetically based in humans like animals, and that it was one of several phases to human spatial learning, but when was it used? Were some people more prone to the trait than others? To find out the team selected 106 participants, men and women, chosen from respondents to a newspaper ad. We assessed a carefully selected sample of participants with different levels of fear and anxiety. Our purpose was to examine cognitive and emotional factors that may underpin thigmotaxis in virtual and physical arena mazes and in different spatial and nonspatial learning and memory tasks (Kallai et al. 2007: 23)

The participants took a battery of psychological tests, including ones that rated intelligence and general anxiety levels. Setting out to separate their cognitive functioning from emotional responses, the psychologists gave the subjects two timed trials: one where they viewed a PC screen and the other where their eyes were covered; they could not see and had to literally feel their way around. In the visual test, participants tried to locate a target in a circular arena on a computer navigating with a joystick. Their task, to find the target as quickly as possible, was timed and tracked. In the real maze, a circular wooden structure, 2 meters high and 6 meters in diameter (7 feet high, 21 feet in diameter), participants were fitted with opaque goggles, and led to a space that had eight objects in it, each shaped differently and set on a low stand. The target, a round object on the floor in one quadrant of the arena, emitted a tone when stepped on. Participants were instructed to find the noise-emitting target using the sculptural-cues as needed within five minutes or less. They too were timed and tracked. Based on analysis of these findings and others from earlier studies, Kallai and co-authors concluded that human thigmotaxis is similar to thigmotaxis in animals: “a tendency to refrain from exploring the inner zone of a novel place”; people have a bias to avoid centers and seek safety by sticking to the sides. As is true in all species,

there is individual variation (another one of Darwin’s major observations.) Not all people rely on thigmotaxis to the same degree. Just as human cognitive and anxiety levels differ, people who can create mental spatial maps more readily do less wall-following. (Kallai et al. 2007: 27) And people who cannot form a mental image of a new space quickly will linger at the side longer. These more anxious individuals, the authors contend, tend to stay on the wall until their minds have created ‘a map’ and they feel safer. The researchers conclude: Fear…triggers a specific exploratory strategy such as thigmotaxis, which plays an essential preparatory role in the first phase of spatial learning. The use of thigmotaxis helps the individual define the borders of an enclosed space and identify escape routes from that space. Thigmotaxis also provides the individual with the elements of an egocentric frame of reference… With the elements of that frame of reference in hand, the organism can begin to construct a cognitive map. (Kallai et al. 2007: 28)

In sum, thigmotaxis has several functions; initially, it is a preparatory strategy to help a person sense the borders of a space and its escape routes. It also helps us gather necessary data to locate ourselves in a specific place and from that ‘home base’ go on to construct a mental ‘map’ of the surroundings. People may be objectdriven, too (running to the food truck in the center of a parking lot); they can use landmarks to direct their travel, such as a church steeple, mosque minaret, or turrets of a theme park castle; yet thigmotaxis remains a baseline strategy for navigation and initial exploration. Further, in an open field test, researchers Walz, Mühlberger, and Paulia found that ‘enhanced’ thigmotaxis, related to anxiety, may explain why some people have agoraphobia, or a fear of open spaces (Walz et al. 2016). We also scan our environment to understand it, but researchers believe ‘wall-hugging’ plays a key role here, too: Thigmotaxis defines the borders of space and visual scanning reframes it. We humans appear to use these strategies during

our everyday activity in novel situations. (Kallai et al. 2005: 193)

What does this mean? For one, we navigate more like rats and mice than we may like to think. It can make us uncomfortable to think this way. “Humans are not proud of their ancestors, and rarely invite them round to dinner,” the English humorist Douglas Adams wryly noted in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (1979). Indeed, yet, given that nature is ‘conservative,’ as the scientists describe, our thigmotactic behavior fits. Additionally, the research on our wall-hugging habit confirms what Jacobs, Alexander, and others observed—well-defined street corridors appeal to us, and promote all kinds of other responses, the behaviors Jacobs poetically labeled “the ballet of the good city sidewalk.” By contrast, when edge conditions are ill-defined, we instinctively go on alert. Like a train without a track, we have no way to engage, at least no easy way forward. Clear edge conditions, on the other hand, do so much: they can release us from anxiety, enable our construction of mental maps, suggest a way forward that fits our bipedal frame and our preferred way of holding our head, all the while helping us conserve energy. After all, we can hope, but we can never quite predict what might be coming around the corner. Understanding that human clients are wall-huggers or thigmotactic can also help designers develop parameters for their work and predict its impact. As an example, Figure 2.5 shows a photograph of the Edward W. Brooke Courthouse in Boston, Massachusetts, completed in 1999 (Kalmann, McKinnell and Wood). It has tall, wide piers at its base that do not reference our human scale and impede views at our eye-level near the building’s entrance. This makes it difficult for people to see the area in front of them as they enter or leave the building. As a consequence, navigation becomes more energy intensive, since we really do prefer to walk with our eyes looking straightforward, with our head in a slight downward tilt, as Gehl notes. Perceiving this space subliminally, we wonder: what might be lurking behind those sharp-edged piers, anyway? Which way is best to walk? Is there a better path? Do I have to look up here? (which takes a bit more energy and I would prefer not to). The courthouse arcade demands a high level of user alertness and psychological arousal.

Figure 2.5 The arcade of the Edward W Brooke Court House in Boston (1999, Kalmann McKinnell and Wood) does not acknowledge the way people like to walk, inadvertently promoting confusion in the urban landscape. Source: Ann Sussman.

Contrast this space in Boston with the arcade in Figure 2.6 in Paris (Rue de Rivoli), near Place de la Concorde and the Louvre. The Parisian structure provides a reassuring walking path. It takes much of the uncertainty and guesswork out of walking in a large city. Everything seems so simple here. Although grand, the arcade acknowledges our scale. Orientation is easy; the layout directs you precisely where to go. There is no need to know French. The design acknowledges how we are built, anticipates the way we like to walk. It takes care of our needs and in the process exalts them. You might imagine feeling like a king, or at least a member of the lesser nobility, strolling down this walkway in Paris. The medieval street in Figure 2.7 in Siena, Italy, enables the same effortless stroll in a simpler fashion (note how the design aides and abets Ambulation Man’s walk down the street). Fitting our wall-hugging bias, the environment and the person become one.

Figure 2.6 The nineteenth-century Rue de Rivoli arcade in Paris, designed by Napoleon’s architects, supports the ways that humans walk and encourages our movement forward. Source: Garry D. Harley.

Figure 2.7 A corridor street in Siena, Italy, invites you (and Ambulation Man) forward, encouraging an effortless stroll. Source: Garry D. Harley.

Thigmotaxis at Work in Cities Awareness of thigmotaxis can make pedestrian behavior much more understandable for today’s city designers. Here is another example from central Boston. One of the most successful pedestrian areas in Boston is Hanover Street, an old road in the city’s North End. Interestingly, it was laid out in pre-colonial times by indigenous peoples as a route to the harbor. Figure 2.8 is a figure-ground drawing of the road and its surrounding neighborhood today: Jane Jacobs called out this same street as particularly vital 50 years ago (and in The Death and Life of Great American Cities admonished planners of her time for considering it a prospective target for demolition and urban renewal).

Figure 2.8 The figure-ground drawing of Boston’s North End shows Hanover Street as the only continuous road running north to Boston Harbor, which is visible in the top-right corner. Source: Nora Shull.

Hanover Street wends northward, narrow (10 meters [32 feet] or less) with very well-defined edges. As the figure-ground diagram shows, it is the only continuous street running from the bottom to the top of the drawing. Hanover Street is bordered by the wide-open

urban park, the Rose Kennedy Greenway to the south, and to the north, at the top right (and barely visible in the diagram) Boston Harbor. Hanover Street fits our bipedal design and forward-moving and second-guessing nature. It features two continuous side walls and a cross street encountered every minute or so, walking at a leisurely pace. Not surprisingly, most older cities from ancient ports such as Pompeii to old-world capitals like Paris were built this way: in an uncertain world, people wanted to make outside places feel more secure, not less. Like many other urban designs laid out in preautomotive times, the North End features small blocks, abundant intersections, and many walking paths in and out (these can also be thought of as escape routes) (see Figure 3.28 for photo). What may be most instructive about Hanover Street, however, is its location close to (some 400 meters [1,312 feet] away) a modernist urban renewal project from the 1960s which demolished more than a dozen urban blocks. This makes comparing our old building habits with newer ones relatively straightforward. Figure 2.9 shows what used to be near Hanover Street, c. 1829, before demolition. It was called Scollay Square, and was once a bustling neighborhood with short blocks and well-defined walking corridors. It is diagrammed in its current configuration, post-1960s urban-renewal-program, below (Figure 2.10). In the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth century Scollay Square was a haven for Irish immigrants fleeing the Potato Famine (1850). It would flourish for decades as a busy entertainment and entrepreneurial zone with theaters, restaurants, residences, and in its latter decades, burlesque shows, as well as decidedly less savory enterprises. (Scollay Square also figures significantly in the history of science. Thomas Edison, the prolific American inventor, filed his first patent for a vote-counting machine developed in an attic lab here.) The gray rectangle, which is Scollay Square adjacent, serving as a reference point in both diagrams, shows Faneuil Hall, the city’s first market and meeting hall originally built in 1840. In the years following World War II, with residential flight to the suburbs, Scollay Square declined precipitously. By 1961, razing its 22 blocks was considered a swift way to promote central Boston’s urban and financial renewal in a stroke. Remarkably, even in its decline, locals recall the district as a pedestrian magnet. “My

mother-in-law always felt safe walking through Scollay Square,” says David Kruh, author of Always Something Doing: Boston’s Infamous Scollay Square (1999).

Figure 2.9 The figure-ground drawing of Scollay Square before demolition for urban renewal in the 1960s; for orientation, the gray

rectangle denotes eighteenth-century Faneuil Hall, a historic meeting and market place. Source: Nora Shull.

Figure 2.10 Figure-ground drawing of the Scollay Square area after urban renewal to create the new Boston City Hall (rectangle in center) and broad City Hall Plaza.

Source: Nora Shull.

Figure 2.10 shows Boston’s Government Center, with City Hall and the wide City Hall Plaza today: Scollay Square’s replacement would become a pedestrian void (for photo, see Figure 6.3). It represents an early modernist planning ideal: there are no small streets, blocks, or fussy intersections that slow traffic; no building front doors at the street. On the other hand, there does not seem to be any part of the redevelopment that takes into account how humans actually ambulate on two feet or use edges to navigate space or have brains perennially on alert for their safety. The few super blocks offer pedestrians no hint of where to go, no suggestion of where to seek refuge. The City Hall building itself has no ‘windows’ on the street, as Jacobs and Alexander recommend. As a consequence, as Alexander’s pattern language (Pattern #124) predicts, the urban renewal area became a ‘no man’s land.’ In the half century since construction, Bostonians have consistently shunned the Plaza, and many do not think highly of the brutalist civic building at its center. Repeated attempts at the Plaza’s rehabilitation have met without measurable success to date. Ironically, Hanover Street and Boston City Hall Plaza, so close on the map that they almost touch, could not be farther apart in terms of the public reaction they provoke. As such they provide a very useful example—a sort of living laboratory—of the human response to edge conditions. The plaza’s urban renewal history illustrates the high cost we and future generations pay when planners and architects do not appreciate their clients as evolved mammals with embedded reactions to place. What we confront in Boston City Hall Plaza might be labeled ‘a mismatch’ between our ancient genes and our modern building habits. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman describes a similar sort of ‘mismatch’ in the modern diet in his popular book, Thinking Fast and Slow (2011). Our modern dietary practices, he argues, which make processed foods, sugars, and fats readily available, give our bodies many more of these nutrients than they can healthily handle. Similarly, in architecture the early modernist tendency to do away with corridor streets and intersections in an effort to reduce congestion, or bring people closer to nature by putting high rises in park-like settings, ignores how people walk, using buildings as orientation

devices and protection screens. Ironically, modernism hampered the very populist values it intended to promote. Le Corbusier’s plan for a ‘Radiant City’ of tall buildings was daring, but did not consider how building alignment encourages our movement and gets us to dance. “Streets are an obsolete notion. There ought to be so such things as streets,” Le Corbusier maintained. “We have to create something that will replace them” (de Botton 2006: 243). We have learned in the decades since that we cannot do away with those ‘corridor streets,’ despite his pleas and the decrees of the 1928 Preparatory Congress for Modern Architecture, which he organized (and noted in this chapter’s opening quote), without erasing parts of ourselves and eons of our developmental history. Modern research is showing how much we are ‘of nature’; we are tied to earth and life processes, including evolution.

Thigmotaxis Indoors Humans rely on thigmotaxis navigating indoors, too. Given our edgesensitivity, it becomes easier to understand why indoor shopping malls can be successful, because they often duplicate the plan of an old-fashioned commercial street. They have stores on both sides or ‘double-loaded corridors’ in real-estate parlance. Perhaps from watching clients carefully, mall developers know what makes buyers happy and how aligning storefronts opposite each other keeps people busy and buying. Ancient bazaars in the Middle East use the same layout. The Grand Bazaar, or Kapalicarsi (meaning ‘Covered Bazaar’) in Istanbul, Turkey, shown in Figure 2.11, was built as a series of double-loaded corridors 600 years ago, under the Ottoman sultans and still thrives, as the name implies as a covered retail street.

Figure 2.11 Shoppers stroll in Kapalicarsi, or Grand Bazaar, an ancient market center in Istanbul, Turkey. It is essentially a covered street. Source: Wikimedia Commons; Author: espiritu_protector.

Thigmotaxis Anchors ‘Prospect and Refuge’ We suspect thigmotaxis is the trait moving us forward to seek and find ‘refuge.’ English geographer Jay Appleton proposed in his book, The Experience of Landscape (1975), the ‘prospect-refuge’ theory, which is familiar to many planners. The theory describes how people are drawn to edges to protect their backs, and also seek safe spots to take in broad landscape vistas. Thigmotaxis grounds the ‘prospectrefuge’ habit in evolutionary biology (see Table 2.1). Not only triggered when we take in vistas outdoors, as mentioned above, thigmotaxis is at work when newcomers arrive at a party or first enter an empty restaurant and instinctively stand at the edge for a while to take in the scene, and then select a seat at the periphery. Anecdotally, it is rare to find someone seated in the center of an empty restaurant; they will usually dine more comfortably off to one side, with their back near a wall or edge condition.

Thigmotaxis in Action: Three Case Studies In the three case studies that follow, we look at thigmotaxis in action in different development projects in the United States, and hone in on the impact continuous building alignment can have on a project’s success. None of the developments in the discussion that follows evolved organically. All were at one time improbable dreams in the minds of creative, visionary, and somewhat relentless entrepreneurs who had distinctly social agendas. Making money was certainly part of their plans, but it never appears to have been the only point. Each of these businessmen seems to have wanted his new project to establish a new paradigm for building, one that would enrich the lives of college students near campus, or increase the options for middle class suburban home ownership, or invent a new way for families to entertain their children on vacation. All were financially risky ventures at one point, and designed and constructed in the early to midtwentieth century. For each development, we show figure-ground drawings and photos of the final results, and then discuss how they meet, failed to meet, or exceeded anticipated outcomes. For it turns out, in new developments edges matter—more than one might think. Case Study: Palmer Square, Princeton, New Jersey Palmer Square will fool you. Located just outside the Princeton University campus, it looks like an old town center that organically evolved with a post office, shops, and residences closely clustered together. Its development most definitely did not happen this way. Palmer Square was completely planned, the brain-child of Edgar Palmer, Princeton class of 1903, who thought the university experience would be much improved by a place for students, locals, and visitors to drink, dine, and otherwise recreate, a short walk outside the school’s 350-acre (142 ha) bucolic campus. As president of the Princeton Municipal Improvement, Inc., Palmer first unveiled his scheme in 1929 (see Figure 2.12). It was to be a mixed-use project modeled after a European village, complete with a retail, office, and residential program, including a theatre and hotel. The stock market’s collapse put the brakes on his dream that year,

but Palmer was persistent and the ground-breaking for his visionary project resumed several years later, in the 1930s in the midst of the Depression. In the 75 years since, the plan has evolved and filled in along the lines he established but did not live to see realized. Today, Palmer Square is often held out as an example of urban planning excellence in the United States. “Over the years, (it) has blossomed into one of the finest examples of a commercial downtown,” a local real-estate journal noted (Vilotti 2013).3

Figure 2.12 Figure-ground drawing of Palmer Square, Princeton, New Jersey, a tight, walkable shopping district under 75 meters wide that was built off a major thorough-fare. Source: Nora Shull. Palmer’s architect, Thomas Stapleton, “assembled a ‘potpourri’ of favorite styles,” to keep things visually interesting for pedestrians, explains Jerry Ford, an architect in Princeton today, describing why the square works so well. “There is a bit of old Newport, Philadelphia, Annapolis and Williamstown,” in the facades (Holt 2012). The plan’s continuous building alignment makes for effortless accessibility. Some 20 stores are within a 150 meter (500 feet) walk along Palmer Square West, one of its principal streets (see Figures 2.13 and 2.14).

Figure 2.13 Diverse storefronts aligning along Palmer Street West in Palmer Square across the street from Princeton University in New Jersey. Source: Justin Hollander.

Figure 2.14 A park between Palmer Street West and Palmer Street East is tightly enclosed by retail buildings and restaurants, making for a quiet pedestrian realm. Source: Justin Hollander.

The designer and developer also realized how important it was to keep busy car traffic at bay. Stapleton moved the square away from the main street, doing something not usually found in a European village, but modeled after another famous urban project, Rockefeller Center, which happened to be under development in New York City at the same time (and would become that city’s largest commercial development.) “The plan of the Square,” said Ford, is a mini version of Rockefeller Center. Both were built within the decade of the thirties and both were designed to turn the commercial traffic in from a major road. In the case of Princeton that road was Nassau Street and in New York it was Fifth Avenue. The early plans for Rock Center contemplated an Opera House at the end while Palmer had the Playhouse movie theater. (ibid.)

In both, anticipating and accommodating pedestrian needs for welldefined edges and enclosed outdoor spaces have paid off financially and in the positive urban experiences the center has provided its denizens for decades. Case Study: Columbia, Maryland As a city-sized planned community, Columbia, Maryland seemed to have everything going for it. It was located in a prime spot in the Northeast corridor, half-way between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, Maryland, and had James W. Rouse, a visionary realestate developer, at its helm. Rouse, a confident innovator, wanted to create a new 100,000-person city based on an altruistic premise: enhance the quality of suburban life, promote community, and combat that new scourge in the post-war American landscape: spotty development and sprawl. With his distinctly social agenda, Rouse believed tapping into social science and the latest psychological research of his era (the 1960s) could provide a clear path forward. He explained why: There is no dialogue between the people engaged in urban design and development and the behavioral sciences. Why not? Why not bring together a group of people who knew about people from a variety of backgrounds and experience to view the prospect of a new city and shed light on how it might be made to work best for the people who live there. (Bloom 2001: 36)

So, Rouse assembled a ‘Work Group’ of social science professionals, including academic planners. They met regularly for over a year, analyzing the latest research on how to create the ideal city. The goals and design guidelines they came up with were intended to help future residents get along, embrace diversity including economic differences, and promote social cohesion. With this Work Group, Rouse laid out Columbia’s original system of nine villages, all arranged around a core ‘Town Center,’ which featured a man-made lake, indoor-shopping mall, and high-rise office buildings a mere 1,000 meters (1,093 yards) from a major highway on-ramp (see Figure 2.15). This put the new city, officially unveiled in 1967, in an

ideal location under an hour’s drive from the nation’s capital. Columbia was thus complete with jobs, schools, medical facilities, and multiple housing options including single, multifamily, and apartment offerings in one prime spot.

Figure 2.15 Figure-ground diagrams of three of Columbia Maryland’s ten planned villages at top and bottom right; bottom left ‘Town Center’ mall. All show car-dependent design, a hallmark of mid-twentiethcentury design. Source: Nora Shull. But though Rouse’s group did produce ‘villages’ with a mix of housing types each around its own shopping zone and built the Town Center at the city’s core near a lake, the urban design was in no way traditional. As the figure-ground diagrams show, Columbia’s roads are curvilinear with few intersections. They favor cars. As 2D drawings and abstract designs they are interesting, even beautiful. In their 3D iteration at full scale, however, they fail completely, particularly when it comes to anticipating the needs of an upright, walking mammal (see Figures 2.16–2.19). Even though there are sidewalks in Columbia, the open landscapes around them provide little in the way of a street wall, making it difficult for people to figure out where they are and which way to head. Pedestrians and even newcomers traveling by car perennially feel lost in Columbia. The lack of street corridors and grids became the progressive city’s Achilles’ heel.

Figure 2.16 Columbia, Maryland’s ‘villages’ carry few distinguishing features. Source: Nora Shull.

Figure 2.17 Acres of parking lots define Columbia, Maryland’s ‘Town Center.’ Source: Nora Shull.

Figure 2.18 Columbia, Maryland’s design makes navigating by car or on foot a challenge. Source: Nora Shull.

Figure 2.19 It can be hard to tell where you are in Columbia, Maryland. Source: Nora Shull.

In 2011, a Brookings Institution land-use expert warned residents that if Columbia did not “evolve to become more walkable, it risks becoming irrelevant and declining over the next century,” a local news service reported (Hazzard 2011). Christopher Leinberger, a senior fellow at the non-profit think tank in Washington, D.C., did not mince words in his talk to 450 residents, titled “21st Century Development Trends: How Will Columbia Measure Up?” “Columbia is the pinnacle of the drivable suburban option,” he said. But, in the last decade the pendulum of public opinion has swung far from this model. It is likely to move even farther out in the future. Fueling the trend, Leinberger said, is the fact that the younger adult generation, the Millennials,

postpone marriage and children, and enjoy the vitality of city life. Additionally, the high environmental cost of cars and the financial burden of maintaining a multi-car lifestyle are turning many agegroups away from the suburban option. The evidence for the shift is clear in the real-estate market, Leinberger said. “The most expensive housing in the country today on a square foot basis is walkable urban. This became the case over the past ten years and it’s the first time since the 1960s.” The problems with Columbia’s street layout came to a head, and have caused the most resident distress over the years, at the development’s core, the Town Center. Dominated by scattered high rises, parking lots, and a large indoor mall surrounded by acres of tarmac, it is not a pedestrian-friendly place. As urban historian Nicholas Bloom reported: By the 1980s, in many residents’ eyes, the town center as a whole had failed to achieve the level of urbanity envisioned in original publicity materials. The plan, like most modernist plans, had separated the community college, the shopping mall, office buildings, and public spaces into individual zones. Large open areas and sprawling parking lots diluted an urban feeling and made walking difficult. (Bloom 2001: 50)

It is this central district residents hope to now fix, more than 40 years after it opened. They approved a new Town Center development plan three years ago, which calls for denser, mixed-use buildings to replace the acres of parking lots around the mall and make it easier for people to walk. Ironically, Rouse knew how to build walkable places, at least indoor ones, all along. He designed some of the first indoor suburban shopping malls in the United States, realizing that residents in far-flung suburbs still needed quasi-centers for shopping, walking, meeting, and dining. He modeled the interior of Columbia’s indoor Town Center mall after a traditional Main Street, lining it with diverse storefronts and even fitted it out with gas-lit lamps, wood benches, and tall old-fashioned street clocks (see Figure 2.20). It would be the only part of the planned city based on a double-loaded corridor street. So, the answer to making Columbia pedestrian-

friendly was there all along. The case study illustrates the steep price residents end up paying when developers and their designers do not consider our evolutionary predispositions, and how people require well-defined edge conditions indoors and out. It is a price that Columbia’s residents are paying now, and it seems, per Brookings Institution studies, will be paying for some time to come.

Figure 2.20 The ‘Town Center’ indoor mall features Columbia, Maryland’s only plan that mimics a traditional double-loaded street. Source: Nora Shull.

Case Study: Main Street, Disneyland, Anaheim, California The only theme park designed by the cartoonist and business entrepreneur Walt Disney himself, with the help of his studio imagineers and set designers, Disneyland opened in Anaheim, California, on a 160-acre (65 ha) parcel in the summer of 1955. By 1965, it was listed as the top tourist attraction in the United States (Goldfield 2007). It has cumulatively totaled more than 720 million visits since its first day, more than any theme park in the world. Disney developed the concept spurred by disappointing visits to amusement parks with his own children, and the realization that visitors to his Burbank, California studios were eager to see more than a conventional studio tour offered. Since Disneyland’s opening, imitators and the Disney company itself have spread his concept worldwide: a Disneyland opened outside Paris in 1992 (which by 2016 became the most visited tourist site in Europe), Hong Kong in 2005, and Shanghai in 2016. A major element of the original plan for Disneyland and contributor to its success both in parks in the United States and abroad is ‘Main Street, USA.’ The 850-foot (0.16 mile) long street, less than 8 meters wide (nine yards), serves as the major pedestrian corridor linking the theme park’s entry gate to its central focal point, Sleeping Beauty’s turreted castle (see Figure 2.21). Main Street is a stylized Victorian version of the town of Marceline, Missouri where Disney grew up. The street has been critiqued as the “architecture of reassurance” (Marling 1998), a charge Disney would likely have embraced. He specifically chose the nineteenth-century style of the roadway as a historical anchor where he felt visitors, perhaps recalling a slower-paced America, would relax, and commented: For those of us who remember the carefree time it recreates, Main Street will bring back happy memories. For younger visitors, it is an adventure in turning back the calendar to the days of grandfather’s youth.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disneyland)

Figure 2.21 Figure-ground diagram of Main Street, Disneyland, in Anaheim, California. Source: Nora Shull.

Disneyland’s Main Street is narrow, and just as Jane Jacobs noted, car-free; yet pedestrians head toward its sides. The 52 building facades along Main Street are carefully detailed, employing a stagedesign technique called forced-perspective, a strategy where upper floors decrease in scale, making the structures seem more imposing and appealing. The Main Street storefronts, many with clapboard and gingerbread trim, anticipate and successfully engage the visitor’s gaze. It seems Disney intuited modern research on thigmotaxis, and also knew that a carefully detailed row of colorful shops would not only entertain but also help visitors situate themselves, feel secure inside the gates, and propel them on through the park in a happy frame of mind.4 Disney, ever the animator, also seems to have known what research discussed in the next chapter reveals that people love looking at faces. (At some level, how could cartoonists not know this? Their job depends on it.) Humans are by and large visual creatures, and as the next chapter outlines are not only drawn to intricate details in buildings but also ‘see’ abstract faces in them, even assembling them from elements in the elaborate facades of storefronts Disney designed for Main Street (Figure 2.22).

Figure 2.22 Main Street, Disneyland, in 2005. Cinderella’s Castle in the center distance provides a landmark; pedestrians tend to stick to the sides of the street even with few vehicles present. Source: Alfred A. Si, ‘Own work,’ Wikimedia Commons, July 4, 2010.

At this juncture in architecture and planning history and practice, the move to replicate Disney’s or similar versions of the ‘Main Street’ plan has moved beyond the theme park gates. Current urban planning manuals, including Pedestrian and Transit-Oriented Design by Ewing and Bartholomew, published in 2013 (by the Urban Land Institute and American Planning Association), emphasize the importance of re-introducing traditional Main Street plans in cities and towns, of laying out ‘street-oriented buildings’ and ‘grid-like street networks,’ of avoiding empty lots or dead zones in pedestrian centers. The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) has gotten into the act. Intent on promoting walkability and the development of less car-dependent neighborhoods, the USGBC’s latest guidelines award

projects more points in its rating system for increasing intersections and bolstering suburban and urban connectivity (the USGBC recommends 140 intersections per square mile). Urban design theory has moved on from its earlier twentieth-century predisposition for limiting intersections and pulling doors and windows off the street. While this chapter looked at thigmotaxis, our wall-hugging tendency, as a hidden driver of human navigation and movement through space, Chapter 3 explores our principal sense: vision and the significant visual pattern we arrive in the world prepared to seek. The central premise here is that human beings evolved in nature to see things that were most important for their past survival and that there is one main object for our species: the face. We have evolved to seek it without conscious effort, and this built-in behavior affects not only how we behave socially but also how we feel about our surroundings, behave in public places, and even how we choose cars or houses and evaluate and price our art.

Exercise for Chapter 2: Thigmotaxis Thigmotaxis is thought to have survived for millennia because it provides animals with a way to engage with their environment. What other benefits may have promoted the trait’s success across species? In the drawings, sketches, or photographs taken of urban or suburban areas for Chapter 1 exercise, where can you hypothesize thigmotaxis may be at work? When designing a building or urban plan, what advantages do double-loaded corridors carry in general over a single-loaded plan? Why? Jacobs, Alexander, and other urban observers write about the significance of ‘windows on the street,’ meaning usually the first floor; what might be the reasons that this is a hallmark of successful pedestrian urban environments?

Notes 1 To understand where Le Corbusier is coming from, it is useful to know that he witnessed a city whose population had more than quadrupled in a century; Paris went from 650,000 people in 1800 to 3 million by 1910. France at the turn of the twentieth century also led the world in automobile production; the city’s congestion with vehicles and people seems to have been unparalleled. At the time, doing away with streets may have seemed to some a straightforward solution, at least in theory. 2 The Paleolithic time, considered to have been 2.5 million years ago to about 10,000 years ago, depending on the source, is also referred to as the Old Stone Age. Early hominids living during this pre-historic time included Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalis, and emerging some 200,000 years ago, Homo sapiens. 3 Palmer Square is also held out as an early example of gentrification, highlighting tensions and trade-offs endemic to planning. Edgar Palmer forcibly dislocated a black community living next to the University to build the square. Their housing was destroyed, and although replaced elsewhere, it was further from the university where many residents worked, making their commutes more difficult. The project could be viewed as pitting one class’s interests against another’s, an aspect of the development now acknowledged in town archives and Historical Society of Princeton’s website. 4 The official slogan for Disneyland is ‘The Happiest Place on Earth.’

3 Patterns Matter: Faces and Spaces

The face is a picture of the mind with the eyes as its interpreter. Cicero (106–43 BC)

Faces. We do not look out at the world as though all things in it are of equal value. We look through an evolutionary scrim that prioritizes faces and people. We are a social species, after all, which spent more than 99% of our time on earth in the wild and not in man-made environments (Kellert 2012: 3). The importance of perceiving and connecting to faces in our lives and in our evolution, whether those of humans or other animals, is hard to overstate (see Figure 3.1). The theory goes that if we had not evolved to prioritize faces to this extent, we would not have survived until now—at least not in our current form.

Figure 3.1 One-year-old Thomas connecting to his grandfather Martin; humans have evolved to prioritize vision and, within that same category, the face. Source: Ann Sussman.

This chapter discusses the science around human face-sensing abilities. It argues that modern research in face-perception is significant for the humanities and, particularly, architecture, planning, and aesthetics. It suggests that these findings provide a new type of foundation for the building-disciplines with implications for understanding why people favor certain buildings over others or even why they head to certain streets and city squares and avoid others. To design successful places for people it is important to have a basic

understanding of how people work, and one of the prime things people do, it turns out, is look at other people.1

The Senses Are Not Equal To appreciate the extent we prioritize seeing faces it is critical to understand that the human senses are not equal or they do not carry equal weight in our perceptual apparatus. We have five basic senses: smell, hearing, touch, taste, and vision, and the human brain expressly prioritizes one of them: vision. Our brain works hardest at creating our visual view of our surroundings, explains Eric Kandel, the neuroscientist and Nobel Prize winner in The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain from Vienna 1900 to the Present (2012). “We are intensely visual creatures and live in a world oriented to sight,” he wrote, which he goes on to say can explain why paintings can have such an emotional impact on viewers (Kandel 2012: 238). We are very good at seeing and interpreting faces, and portraits wordlessly acknowledge that talent. In a way, we behave like kids in a classroom, always ready to do what we are good at.

The Brain’s ‘Rules’: We See What Our Brain Wants Us to See A major point Kandel makes is that the brain “reconstructs reality according to its own biological rules” (Kandel 2012: 301). While the ‘eye is a camera’ may be a popular way of explaining how light reflected off objects enters the eye where it stimulates the lightsensing nerve cells (rods and cones) at the back of the eye (the retina), this camera model does not account for the fact that the processing of what we see and feel happens in our ‘gray matter,’ or cerebral cortex—not the eye. The brain particularly appreciates portraits because they show faces that it has evolved highly specialized circuitry to interpret. “Neuroscientists found that one reason the face is so important for perception is that the human brain devotes more area to face recognition than to the recognition of any other visual object” (Kandel 2012: 333) (italics ours). That sentence bears repeating. We are face readers, par excellence. Nature determined long ago what pattern would be most important in our visual view of the world, the one that, not coincidentally, was also most important for survival. Knowing this bias, neuroscientists note, with some amazement, how each of our individual mentally synthesized versions of a face, and of reality generally, is able to mesh with someone else’s. “Each of us is able to create a rich, meaningful image of the external world that is remarkably similar to the image seen by others,” Kandel wrote (2012: 234). Our brains create “a fantasy that coincides with reality,” the English psychologist Chris Firth elaborates, explaining that inputs from our senses to the brain produce something “much richer” than what is actually there: “a picture that combines all these crude signals with a wealth of past experience” (Kandel 2012: 234). The fact that we enjoy portraits hints at the tremendous amount of work the human brain does outside of our awareness. The reality that art engages us —and not your pet cat, for instance—speaks volumes about the human brain’s uniqueness. Artists are able to emotionally involve the human viewer and enable him or her to empathize with their work by incorporating and stimulating the ‘beholder’s’ mind, Kandel writes.

Somehow artists know how to get to the pieces of our brain we do not see or even realize we have, for that matter, and then manipulate them, arguably for mutual benefit. Thus, a painting exists in the moment when viewed, creating an impression that occurs as an effect of cognitive processing, all occurring without the viewer’s conscious control. From this perspective, visual art exists as a telltale artifact broadcasting our mind’s mysterious functioning (see Figure 3.2).

Figure 3.2 Self-portrait, Grimacing, 1910, by Austrian painter Egon Schiele (1890–1918); Austrian artists like Schiele worked at revealing the inner states of their subjects, argues neuroscientist Eric Kandel. The paintings engage the viewer instantly and our involvement can be understood as an artifact of our brain’s unique architecture. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The Brain’s ‘Rules’: A Template for the Face In the past 25 years, researchers have started to untangle some of the complex processing that occurs in these secret reaches. Until relatively recently, whether facial processing itself was learned or innate was debated. From the 1970s to the 1990s a dominant view in the scientific community was that children required years of experience to attain adult-like facial-recognition capabilities (McKone et al. 2012: 2). However, the consensus now has emerged that we arrive in the world more or less ready to process faces, or “experience is less important than previously believed,” as McKone et al.’s 2012 article in Cognitive Neuropsychology noted. “The evidence clearly indicates that the ability to encode faces is present very early in life,” particularly, when presented right-side up, writes scientist Elinor McKone and her colleagues. “Babies discriminate faces upright but fail to discriminate the same stimuli inverted” (p. 7). In fact, researchers have since determined that even third-trimester fetuses in utero respond to upright but not inverted faces when images of them are projected through the uterine wall (Reid et al. 2017). Later in this chapter, we look at this inversion effect as a way to appreciate some of the brain’s ‘rules’ of perception. Nature has preset not only the principal pattern for our visual field but also set its expected orientation. Evolution brings to the present what worked out in the past. And, this turns out to be very significant, something to emphasize; to put it in a nutshell: before we are ever architects, we are ‘face-i-tects.’ The advent of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in the 1990s proved a game changer in terms of uncovering more of the brain’s tactics for face-processing. By charting the change in magnetic fields, fMRI tracks blood flow to specific brain areas. Since neurons require more energy when activated, delivered by the blood supply, the increased blood flow can show what happens in the brain as people view different things, such as when they look at faces as opposed to other objects (Chatterjee 2014). Results from early fMRI brain scans led researchers to discover a specialized module for faces (in the temporal lobe of the cerebral

cortex) that became known as the fusiform face area (FFA). Scientists have since theorized this dedicated processing place may be present in all mammals, enabling speed and more: “it makes evolutionary sense to have a face system capable of rapid, accurate face recognition from an early age to support social development, and ultimately survival” (McKone et al. 2012: 31). An early and current leader in face-perception research includes neuroscientist Nancy Kanwisher, now at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In a 1997 experiment, she gave 20 test subjects fMRIs while they quickly looked at faces and other objects including scrambled visages. She found that only one specific region in the brain’s temporal lobe “produced a significantly higher signal intensity during epochs in which faces were presented than during epochs in which objects were presented” (Kanwisher et al. 1997: 4304). This region, the FFA, “responds more strongly to faces than objects” (Kanwisher et al. 1997: 4308). Further, the existence of the FFA suggests “qualitatively different kinds of computations” occur in facial processing than for other objects in our visual field. In other words, faces are so significant that the brain evolved a specialized program and place for dealing with them. Kandel calls this the brain’s ‘template-matching’ approach. Since faces, and to a lesser extent hands and bodies, can give us so much information quickly—they tell us about the age, health, sex, attitude of an individual, at a glance—the brain does not put facial or body inputs from “a pattern of lines,” or the part-based processing that it uses with other visual inputs (Kandel 2012: 287). Because part-based processing is relatively slow, face-processing evolved using a different technique, a pre-existing pattern. Kandel labels this the “figural primitive,” and describes it as an oval, right-side up, with two points for the eyes: a vertical line for a nose, and a horizontal line below for the mouth (see Figure 3.3).

Figure 3.3 ‘Figural Primitive’ of the face used in human visual processing from infancy on as rendered by artist Trey Kirk. Source: Trey Kirk.

Recent fMRI research has also found the location of other regions of the brain believed to be preset for viewing the body2 and a specialized area for viewing natural landscapes or interiors.3 There appears to be more evolutionary logic at work here. “It is crucial to recognize and interpret information conveyed by the bodies of other members of one’s species,” according to Cognitive Neuroscience, a current college text (Banich and Compton 2010: 201). “This involves recognizing not just their facial identities and expressions, but also their bodily movements, postures, stances and gestures.” The fact that the brain comes pre-equipped to respond to several classes of objects has led some neuroscientists to describe it as a biological

‘Swiss-Army knife,’ ready to efficiently process specific inputs once these present themselves in our visual field, much as a jackknife’s corkscrew anticipates a cork or its screwdriver is ready to fit a screw (Kanwisher 2014).

The Brain’s ‘Rules’: Faces and Bodies Right-side Up Researchers also note how human body-processing by the brain appears to resemble face-processing in its sensitivity to orientation. “(I)inversion disrupts the recognition of bodies, just as it does for faces; in fact, the effects of inversion are similar for body postures as for faces, with both showing a larger effect than nonbiological categories” (Banich and Compton 2010). One way to observe the brain’s bias for viewing faces right-side up easily is to look at the work of the sixteenth-century painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527–1593). A painter to the Viennese court, Arcimboldo worked in a creative ‘Mannerist’ style, a late Renaissance approach known for creatively exploring man’s place in nature. The paintings on the following page (see Figures 3.4 and 3.6) appear to be a bowl of fruit or some sort of fruit pile. Flipped 180 degrees, or right-side up, displayed the way they were intended to be seen, the images snap into place as a human face and profile (see Figures 3.5 and 3.7). These oil portraits were also apparently likenesses of real people, illustrating Arcimboldo’s considerable skill.

Figure 3.4 The Gardener, c. 1590, viewed upside down, by Italian painter, Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527–1593), is harder to read as a face than when turned right-side up. A Mannerist, Arcimboldo worked in a transitional style between High Renaissance and Baroque, one known for intellectual playfulness as we can observe here. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 3.5 The Gardener, right-side up, is immediately easier to take in as a face. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 3.6 The Summer, c. 1593, upside down, by Arcimboldo takes more effort for the brain to process than the painting rightside up, see Figure 3.7. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 3.7 The Summer, c. 1593, rightside up. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Another example of how our brain wiring prioritizes faces right-side up is the ‘Thatcher Effect’ or ‘Thatcher illusion.’ In 1980, Peter Thompson, a psychologist at the University of York, observed that it was difficult for people to interpret expressions in an upside-down face and that other researchers had noted similar findings. So, Thompson obtained a photograph of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the leading and controversial UK politician of the decade, and turned her features right-side up and then placed these on her upside-down photo (see Figure 3.8).

Figure 3.8 ‘Thatcherized’ images of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher by artist Nora Shull from an official photograph. Human subjects will focus on the face on the lower-right-hand corner, even though the one directly above it, in the top right, is, except for its orientation, identical. Our processing mechanism prioritizes the rightside-up face with the most distorted, frightening features. Source: Nora Shull.

Would her upside-down face be easier to read with her features right-side up? he wondered. No, he found out. It did not much matter whether the lips were right-side up or upside-down on the inverted face: “such transformation makes little difference to Mrs. Thatcher’s expression (Thompson 1980: 483).” Turned right-side up, however, the viewer is in for a shock. With its upside-down eyes and mouth on her upright photo, she became unexpectedly “grotesque” and strangely riveting (Dahl et al. 2010). It appears “we have been cruelly deceived by the smiling Mrs. Thatcher,” Thompson noted wryly (ibid.: 483). Though the photographs in the left and the right columns are indeed identical, we do not ‘see’ them that way. Our wiring is not set up to process the inverted image the way it is set up to process the upright one. We have been fooled; nature had us again. Over the next 30 years, Thompson’s one page article in Perception would become one of the most referenced articles in the English psychology journal. It would influence research in related species. Scientists studying rhesus macaques found that these primates “rely on the same mechanism of face perception as humans do, i.e. holistic processing for upright faces,” Dahl et al. wrote in a 2010 article in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. The investigators presented monkeys with ‘thatcherized’ monkey faces, tracked their eye movements, and discovered the primates spent more time looking at monkeys with ‘thatcherized’ features than those without them; the monkey responses, in other words, parallel our own, as might be expected of a related species. Neuroscientists have since uncovered why Thatcher’s upsidedown features on her right-side up face proves riveting; we have specific regions in the brain, called face patches which ‘go wild’ when they see distorted eyes or mouth. “Cells in our middle face patches

set of a strong emotional response to exaggerated facial features,” the neuroscientist Eric Kandel explains, “because they are connected anatomically to the amygdala, the brain structure that is critical for orchestration emotion, mood, and social reinforcement” (Kandel 2012: 299). (For more on the morphology of the brain and role of the amygdala in emotional regulation, see the Appendix.) Our eyetracking studies found the same. See Figure 7.17 in Chapter 7, which discusses biometrics and shows how study subjects couldn’t help but focus on Maggie’s most distorted face just as the science predicts, without any conscious awareness or control.

The Brain’s ‘Rules’: Faces out of Random Data, ‘Pareidolia’ The human brain’s adeptness at processing faces appears to contribute to quirks in our perception where we easily see faces in places they are not. We find faces in clouds, the moon, a tortilla chip, or the burnt markings on a piece of toast. This phenomenon is called pareidolia and comes from the Greek words meaning ‘wrong’ and ‘shape.’ It refers to how we effortlessly make illusions from random data. A well-known pareidolia example from outer space is at right, the photograph taken by NASA’s Viking 1 Orbiter as it flew over Mars in 1976 (see Figure 3.9).

Figure 3.9 The photograph of a Martian hill or mesa, taken from NASA’s Viking 1 Orbiter as it flew over Mars in 1976, seems to show a human face.

Source: Viking 1, NASA; Wikimedia Commons, December 27, 2010.

Was this the work of Martians? The image caused such buzz that NASA sent a follow-up mission to the site on Mars a decade later to take higher resolution, close-up photos and—spoiler alert—reveal this Martian ‘mesa’ or hill had no human or actual facial attributes whatsoever. Yet outside of fueling conspiracy theories, biologists consider pareidolia evolutionarily advantageous. It is better to be able to recognize a face in poor visual conditions than to miss out on one entirely. If you do not recognize the snake in the grass it may prove fatal; mistake a blade of grass for a snake and much less harm done. The astronomer and popular science writer Carl Sagan hypothesized why humans may have such propensity for pareidolia in his book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995): As soon as the infant can see, it recognizes faces, and we now know that this skill is hardwired in our brains. Those infants who a million years ago were unable to recognize a face smiled back less, were less likely to win the hearts of their parents, and less likely to prosper. These days, nearly every infant is quick to identify a human face, and to respond with a goony grin. (Sagan 1995: 45)

Infants over generations have been ‘selected’ for facial-recognition to such an extent that today members of our species are not only faceexperts, but they see visages everywhere, well past their early childhood and throughout adulthood. Kato and Mugitani found that infants as young as eight and ten months appreciated pareidolia when shown images of blobs with face-like attributes (Kato and Mugitani 2015). Natural selection can be seen at work, once again. The extent to which our facial-processing templates are also used to process face-like non-living objects is a matter of on-going research. According to one recent study the same FFA that permits us to quickly process our mom’s or our mate’s face may be used in processing inanimate objects such as car grills (Banich and Compton 2010: 200). Researchers studying car experts, for example, found that when the auto aficionados were briefly presented (for three hundredths of a second) with images of car fronts and profiles, the

same FFA responded as for human faces. How generalized this effect is for other objects is open to debate and further study.

The Brain’s ‘Rules’: Faces Engage Emotions and Memory What is clear is that even when the object is not human, a face-like object engages us emotionally without conscious effort. We distinguish an animate face from an object’s face; yet we still have feelings toward it. By design we remember faces, although not necessarily names, and this trend spills over to face-like objects of all kinds. The visual illusion is not trivial, research from Palmer and Clifford (2020) demonstrates. It turns out “we process these ‘fake’ faces using the same visual mechanisms of the brain that we do for real ones,” a report on the research explains (Gilbert 2020). “Our brain has evolved to facilitate social interaction, and this shapes the way that we see the world around us.” Pareidolia researcher and neuroscientist and the lead author of the study, Dr. Colin Palmer of the University of New South Wales (UNSW), further elaborates: We know that the object doesn’t really have a mind, but we can’t help but see it as having mental characteristics like a ‘direction of gaze’ because of mechanisms in our visual system that become active when they detect an object with basic face-like features. (italics ours)

Motor vehicle manufacturers learned early on to exploit the face-bias. The tractor on the following page (see Figure 3.10), for instance, from 1957, seems to have an alert wide-eyed youthful gaze; one might find it attractive and lovable, even. The machine’s face is memorable. The tractor’s owners, no surprise really, gave it a name, and treat it as a family member.

Figure 3.10 ‘Robert the tractor,’ a 1957 Ford 661 Workmaster is a beloved member of the family for owners in Duchess County, New York. Source: Ann Sussman

Car manufacturers know people form emotional attachments to automobile ‘faces’ and use the fact to guide their design and marketing efforts. “In today’s hyper-competitive car market, designers are focusing on faces as part of a broader effort to design cars that appeal to buyers— tapping psychologists, anthropologists and other experts in human behavior, and even monitoring the brain waves of focus-group participants,” the Wall Street Journal reported in a 2006 article entitled, ‘Why Cars Got Angry.’ Automotive research shows “70% of drivers identify and judge vehicles by the headlights and grille,” the article reported. In the first years of the twenty-first century, the trend was toward angrier, scarier vehicles visages. Perhaps, the article hypothesized to help drivers feel safer in heavier traffic amidst more oversize SUVs. Reflecting our tumultuous times, the ‘scary look’ shows no sign of abating in the new millennium. “Buoyant sales of cars with styling which suggests power or bad temper seem to confirm that customers are happy with the macho-look,” CarSifu, an international automotive site, reported in 2017. “Arrogant, aggressive and mean – modern car styling often evokes negative human emotions and many of today’s models are looking angrier than ever” (DPA 2017). A different but also familiar example of how faces quickly connect to emotions can be found in email messages that use emoticons like the typographical notations shown below: :)

happy

:-(

sad

;-)

wink

When a writer adds the marks to an email text, we instantly have a clear idea how she or he feels about the subject. The fragmentary lines appear to us as facial features and work like emotional shorthand. Scott Fahlman, the Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor credited with inventing emoticons in 1982, did so to

help readers distinguish serious posts versus silly ones on the then new computer message boards. (Before emoticons, he explained, people had no way of quickly knowing whether a post was written seriously or as a joke, resulting in many unfortunate and unnecessary misunderstandings.)

Faces Are Everywhere in Art and Marketing Knowing our brain is designed to prioritize faces, perceives them from the earliest age, and engages our emotions quickly as it does so makes it easier to understand why creative directors of all kinds use faces everywhere. Faces abound in art. The most famous painting in the world, and arguably most valued, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, is appraised at more than $750 million and depicts an attractive, mysterious face. Faces also lead the evolving list of the most expensive paintings sold worldwide. Eight of the ten most expensive paintings ever sold portray faces, with Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi topping the list at $450 million, becoming in 2017, the most expensive painting ever sold at auction (Figure 3.11). Cezanne’s The Card Players, going for $267 million in 2011, and Modigliani’s seductive Nu Couché, fetching $170 million in 2015, round out the list (Holland 2018). Faces dominate in advertising and retail. Figure 2.13 shows an Apple store outside Boston in 2013 and another in the city five years later, in 2018. Note how very similar the interiors are.

Figure 3.11 Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi (c. 1500) appears to look right at you; in 2017, at $450.3 million, it became the most expensive painting ever sold at auction.

Figure 3.12 The interior of Apple stores in Greater Boston promotes products with posters displaying large faces on its devices (2013 and 2018). We cannot look away, and subliminally will be directed to move into the store, toward them. The display feeds our neural circuitry precisely, metaphorically fitting our face-orientation like a glove. Source: Ann Sussman.

Every single new iPhone featured in the store posters shows a large image of one or more faces. Apple, like other retailers, knows that we cannot look away: the multinational company, without irony, deftly leverages the most essential aspect of our animal nature to sell us its sophisticated high-tech products. So, too, we find the face on billboards, in movies, and corporate logos. Corporations are not people; yet faces dominate branding, from Amazon’s smiley logo, which suggests a face, to KFC’s (Kentucky Fried Chicken) which shows an actual one. Faces provide most of the content on YouTube and TV. Influential movie-makers, including the American, Steven Spielberg, and Italian, Sergio Leone, gained fame for a steadfast focus, pans and close-ups of faces, which helped secure their names and fame as directors.

Faces Are in Buildings What about buildings? Not surprisingly, a building designed to look like a face grabs our attention and can hook our emotions much like a billboard papered with one does. The Lampoon Castle opened in 1909, just outside of Harvard Yard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The brick building is the home of The Harvard Lampoon, a satirical college-student newspaper. Designed by architect and Harvard graduate, Edmund M. Wheelright, one of the newspaper’s founding members, the front of the building looks like a wide-eyed youth sporting a Prussian helmet on his head (see Figures 3.13 and 3.14).

Figure 3.13 The Lampoon Castle, home of a satirical Harvard student newspaper has caught the eye of pedestrians walking down Mount Auburn Street in Harvard Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts

since its 1909 opening and is a frequent stop for international tour groups today. Source: Ann Sussman.

Figure 3.14 The side elevation of The Lampoon Castle, designed by architect Edmund Wheelwright, reads like a face, too. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Walking toward it today, the Castle grabs your attention more than anything else in the vicinity, particularly when viewed from the front. An early critic commented the structure was “laughing at every turn with freakish gayety and beauty” (Wald 1983: 40). For people we have talked to, it still makes them smile. In 1978, the Castle was added to the National Register of Historic Places. A similar approach, designed recently, is taken in The Portrait Building, in Melbourne, Australia, by architectural firm Ashton Raggatt

McDougall (also known as ARM Architecture, Melbourne) (see Figure 3.15).

Figure 3.15 The Portrait Building, Melbourne, Australia, by architectural firm Ashton Raggatt McDougall, opened in 2015, memorializing the face of aboriginal leader William Barak (1824– 1903). Source: ARM Architecture.

The Portrait Building, which opened in March 2015, carves out the facial features of William Barak, a nineteenth-century aboriginal leader, in the concrete balconies of a 32-story, 100-meter high, residential tower. The design pays homage to the first Australians and aims to figuratively, as well as perhaps literally, cement the link between the modern city and its original inhabitants. Like the Lampoon Castle, The Portrait Building intends to get your attention and succeed. It works particularly well viewed from a national war memorial about 2 miles down the road. Like the billboard it essentially is, The Portrait Building speaks most clearly at a distance, its message disappearing at close range or oblique angles.

Facial Expressions in Buildings Our face-sensing capability is so strong and present that faces also appear to be put into building elevations or facades unintentionally. We call the tendency ‘face-i-tecture’ (and as noted earlier refer to humans as ‘face-i-tects’). It reflects the fact some researchers believe pareidolia, the unconscious tendency to assemble faces in random objects, plays a much more significant role in design, aesthetics, and our appreciation of buildings and cityscapes than is generally realized. Consider the vernacular buildings on the following pages (Figures 3.16 and 3.17).

Figure 3.16 The Dunker Church, c. 1852, Sharpsburg, Maryland seems to be ever observant and even mournful; it stands on Civil War battlefield of Antietam. Source: Ann Sussman.

Figure 3.17 Bavarian Inn, a tourist stop in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, looks friendly. Source: Ann Sussman.

These elevations resemble Kandel’s ‘figural primitive’ discussed above (see Figure 3.3). Bilaterally symmetrical windows with shutters look like eyes, just as in the template, while the doors, centrally placed, appear to be a nose and/or mouth. It is almost as though the designers of these buildings—and there are many structures like this around the world—were copying the pattern they knew best, the one pre-programmed into our brains and so significant for survival: the face. We know from anecdotal experience that streets lined with facelike elevations appeal to people and seem preferred over streetscapes that lack them. Movie scouts chose Lacock Village in Wiltshire, England (see Figure 3.18) with its corridors of friendly looking houses as a film location multiple times, twice as a backdrop in Harry Potter films, and two more times as settings for BBC television series including Downton Abbey. Lacock Village dates from

the Middle Ages, is owned by England’s National Trust, which preserves historic sites, and remains one of the country’s most visited tourist destinations.

Figure 3.18 A street in Lacock Village, Wiltshire, England, owned by the UK’s National Trust, presents a row of face-like fronts and appeals to tourists. Source: Celia Kent.

Not only film scouts and travelers are drawn to its streets: some computer scientists see its popularity as significant for their field. The way people unconsciously create faces from random inputs may need to be programmed into robots, they argue, to make the machines more closely approximate our responses in our surroundings, and then, in theory at least, predict our behavior and become better helpmates. Our minds detect diverse facial expressions in buildings all the time, report Stephan K. Chalup and Kenny Hong, computer science researchers, and Michael J. Oswald, architecture professor, all of the University of Newcastle, Australia. These visual inputs likely contribute to making places appealing to people, they write. In a 2010 paper, ‘Simulating Pareidolia of Faces for Architectural Image Analysis,’ the researchers discussed how to use computer analysis to track the possibility of perceiving a wide range of feelings in architectural elevations including “sad, angry, surprised, fearful, disgusted, contemptuous, happy, (and) neutral” (Chalup et al. 2010: 268). Their computer program demonstrated how multiple emotional interpretations were possible in different buildings and sometimes within the same facade, depending on the way the windows, doors, and other building elements were arranged to make the face (see Figure 3.19). Since “the perception of faces is qualitatively different from the perception of other patterns,” they explain, it can contribute to understanding why “(f)aces frequently occur as ornaments or adornments in the history of architecture in different cultures” (Chalup et al. 2010: 262). They conclude:

Figure 3.19 Building faces can have diverse dispositions, sometimes within the same facade, which influences us subliminally; the top image is from the city of Newcastle, Australia, and the bottom is from Ruit, near Stuttgart, Germany. Source: Chalup et al. 2010.

Faces, in contrast to non-faces, can be perceived nonconsciously and without attention. These findings support our hypothesis that the perception of faces or face-like patterns, may be more critical than previously thought for how humans perceive the aesthetics of the environment and the architecture of house facades of the buildings they are surrounded by in their day-today lives. (Chalup et al. 2010: 273)

If significant for computer science and robot development, these findings are important for architecture and planning. They expand our understanding of how existing or proposed built environments are or will be perceived. Irrespective of architectural style, epoch, or culture, humans have evolved to be face-sensors. Our proclivity to seek, find, and remember faces, both real and imagined, is not going away. Indeed, our face-processing bent has a strange way of reasserting itself wherever we are, no matter the place or project, nor how new or note-worthy a building’s designer or initial intent. Figure 3.20 is artist Jeff Koons’ 13-meter-high (43 foot) floral sculpture Puppy, which dominates the entrance to the new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning California architect, Frank Gehry. The puppy’s enormous face is more than 4 meters high (14 feet) and became part of the museum’s permanent installation, outside its front door in 1997, the same year the building opened. The sculpture adds critical detail and visual interest to the museum’s otherwise abstract and streamlined facade. Because Puppy fits our brain’s face-processing predisposition like a hand to a glove, the sculpture makes the Bilbao Guggenheim much more accessible than it would be otherwise. It draws its human visitors in “without attention”. They simply cannot look away. Arguably, any other sculpture or poster of a large face in its place would do the same, particularly a baby face, which we have evolved to adore. Abstract shapes may be evocative and appealing— the preference of humans for curves over sharp, jagged shapes is discussed in Chapter 4—but they can never take precedence over the primal pattern.

Figure 3.20 The appealing face of Puppy, by American artist Jeff Koons, both dominates and draws visitors to the front door of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, by architect Frank Gehry (1997). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Faces and Spaces For urban design and planning, the significance of face-processing in our mental apparatus has much broader implications. It suggests one reason why dimensions in urban planning—for streets, parks, city squares, building setbacks, and the like—carry emotional weight and how scale and size come into play in determining a project’s public response. Dimensions are numbers, obviously, but our perceptual apparatus does not experience them neutrally. Because people are so important to us, the extent to which we are able to recognize another person’s face in a place, and a human body more generally, may act as a de facto marker for the space’s impact. This theory is elegantly explained by Danish architect and urban designer Jan Gehl in Cities for People (2010). “Man is man’s greatest joy,” Gehl writes, quoting an ancient Icelandic poet and underscoring what Gehl feels should be a clear tenet in urban planning: people delight most in seeing other people (Gehl 2010: 23). Designers and planners who accommodate this client predisposition will make cities, towns, and public places much better for people. The dimensional parameters for human vision that determine how well we can see each other are outlined below.

Main Visual Thresholds for Reading the Human Body and Face Depending on light conditions, our eyes can distinguish another human from a background object or animal at about 300–500 meters (330–550 yards). But this distance is too far to be considered the “social field of vision,” per Gehl’s research: Only when the distance has been reduced to about 100 meters (110 yards) can we see movement and body language in broad outline. Gender and age can be identified as the pedestrian approaches, and we usually recognize the person at somewhere between 50 and 70 meters (55 and 75 yards) … At a distance of about 22 to 25 meters (24–27 yards) we can accurately read facial expression and dominant emotions. (Gehl 2010: 34)

Keeping in mind that ‘man is man’s greatest joy,’ the 100-meter mark, where we can make out the movement of another human, turns out to be crucial; it underlies athletic fields, stadiums, and the plans of some of the world’s most visited monuments and urban sites. Figure 3.21 illustrates a sports field, typically about 100 meters long, which also is the maximum viewing distance, approximately, from its stadium seats.

Figure 3.21 Plan and section of Allianz Arena, Munich, Germany, 2005, by Herzog and de Meuron, show the 100-meter threshold at work; the dimension sets the limit for viewer and player participation alike, establishing the distance of the furthest seats and approximate length of the sports field. Source: Trey Kirk.

One-hundred Meters: The Limit of the ‘Social Field of Vision’ Popular monuments across cultures use the 100-meter dimension. In the examples featured in Figure 3.22, it shows up in the Taj Mahal Garden in Agra, India; St Peter’s Square in Rome; and Places des Vosges in Paris. The 100-meter distance marks the radius length from the plan’s central point as in the sports stadium in Figure 3.21.

Figure 3.22 The 100-meter threshold is embedded in the plans of many of the world’s most famous civic and religious places. From the left, The Taj Mahal Garden in Agra, India; St Peter’s Square in Rome, Italy; and Places des Vosges in Paris, France. One hundred meters mark the radius length from the plan’s central point to its edge. Source: Trey Kirk.

More intimate civic spaces have 100 meters as a scale maximum, more or less. Figure 3.23 is a diagram of Piazza del Campo, the popular medieval square and tourist attraction in Siena, Italy. Note, the rectangle drawn inside the diagram for scale measures 100 × 60 meters.

Figure 3.23 Piazza del Campo, the popular medieval square in Siena, Italy makes for a great civic and social space. A resident walking into its center is likely to easily find and recognize a friend or acquaintance in the same space. (The rectangle delineated inside the piazza for scale is 100 × 60 meters.) Source: Trey Kirk.

It is interesting to compare this medieval Italian square with a modern American iteration, Boston City Hall Plaza, c. 1968, discussed earlier in Chapter 2. Both civic places are shown in the following page as figure- ground diagrams showing the same 100 × 60 meters (328 × 197 feet) rectangle in each for scale. (The Boston City Hall building is represented by the large black rectangle with a white square inside in the bottom drawing.) At a glance, we can see that Boston City Hall Plaza is far outside the parameters of our social field of vision, which Piazza del Campo,

on the other hand, wraps tightly around and embraces. The Boston City Hall Plaza suffers the consequences of its large amorphous shape; people avoid it, as noted in Chapter 2. The city residents suffer, too; they have a civic Plaza in name only, which the Boston Globe described as a ‘windswept urban wasteland’ in a 2013 editorial. The lesson is clear: it becomes very costly for residents to fix an urban plan when it was originally laid out without regard to what people like to see (other people) and their built-in visual limits (Figures 3.24).

Figure 3.24 Compare and contrast how the limits of our social field of vision mesh with the Piazza del Campo (Siena) on the left, but not with Boston’s City Hall Plaza, on the right. The ability to see faces helps define spaces and is a consequence of the primacy of faceprocessing in the human animal. Source: Trey Kirk.

Thirty-five Meters: The Threshold for Reading Emotion Another important threshold is 35 meters (38 yards) or the outer limit for reading facial expressions and emotion (without screen amplifications). The dimension comes up in theater design— particularly in seating arrangements (see Figure 3.25). And, it turns out to be tremendously significant for laying out city streets—which, as Jacobs noted, are perennial spots for unscripted performance.

Figure 3.25 Section of the Grand Canal Theatre (2006) in Dublin, Ireland. Thirty-five meters is considered a maximum threshold for reading facial expression without electronic amplification. Source: Trey Kirk.

Facial expressions get more distinct and richer closer in. We can take in more information from 22–25 meters and under, a threshold sometimes referred to as the ‘emotional field of vision.’ As Figure 3.26 shows, the closer you go the more dramatically interesting things get because you see—and your mind is more preoccupied in processing—more of the face.

Figure 3.26 We find things become increasingly interesting when we can use all of our senses; this happens for humans at close range of about 7 meters (7.5 yards) or less. At about 3 meters or under, we can engage in personal conversation. In the photograph, the woman’s image on the far right is where our eyes will linger; the figure at far-left center, whose form is barely visible, represents the 100meter limit, and is the least interesting. Source: Trey Kirk.

Seven Meters and Under: More of the Senses Come into Play At 7 meters (7.5 yards) and under, things become the most interesting when it comes to viewing another human, as we are more easily able to hear someone and use all of our senses. At 3 meters (3.2 yards) and less we can engage in conversation and the visual processing is most rich. Many successful streets, the ones where people instinctively gather, are well within this ‘emotional field of vision’ of 25 meters and under. “When in doubt, leave the meter out,” Gehl advises designers, reminding them how people cannot naturally exchange information and visually assess each other—which is what they most enjoy doing, as per the ancient poet—if they are too far apart. A good example of a street that fits within our emotional field of vision is Hanover Street in Boston’s North End (see Figures 3.27 and 3.28), discussed in Chapter 2.

Figure 3.27 Narrow Hanover Street was laid out in pre-colonial times and has been attracting people since—its consistently changing and

mostly narrow storefronts keep things interesting for pedestrians today. Source: Ann Sussman.

Figure 3.28 At under 20 meters (65 feet) wide, Hanover Street offers us a range of visual and emotional experiences without our having to expend much effort. Its dimensions make it easy to see others, something we innately enjoy. Source: Trey Kirk.

This chapter has suggested how face-processing plays into our sense of aesthetics, via pareidolia or sometimes outright face

copying, and helps create buildings and places where our brain instantly engages without conscious effort. Understanding our faceprocessing predisposition gives designers far greater control over their creative palette and a better idea of how their work will be perceived by people, who, as discussed, are a face-obsessed set. In Chapter 8, we review further findings in psychology that reinforce the importance of the face, for it turns out that humans implicitly need to see them to regulate their emotional and physiological states. Faces not only make places; seeing them governs our well-being and overall health. This makes a good deal of sense, once you think about it; evolving as a social species, we are hardwired for living, working and playing together, or interrelating by looking at each other’s visages. And the quality of these interactions, in turn, impacts everything else in our lives, both inside and out. Faces are not the only pattern evolution set us up to see. Next, we look at something arguably more geometric, the rectangle (see Figure 3.29), which comes up frequently in the history of architecture. In this case, however, we look at it as a biological phenomenon which happens to fit parameters that are set by the face. In Chapter 4, Shapes Carry Weight, we examine the face’s principal attribute, its symmetric shape. Bilateral symmetry predominates in life, and this biological imperative significantly influences architecture, planning, and us.

Figure 3.29 The golden rectangle. Source: Trey Kirk.

Our Viewport Is Rectangular The golden rectangle, referred to in architectural history since the ancient Greeks, is a rectangle where the length to the height of the shape is roughly in an 8/5 proportion. (The precise relationship is Length/Height equals l.618, also known as the golden ratio, diagrammed in Figure 3.29) Sometimes revered as having near mystical powers, the shape’s defining feature is that when one side is split off into a square, another golden rectangle and square appears ad infinitum, as shown in the drawing above (and, drawing an arc within each successive square, creates a golden spiral) (see Figure 3.30).

Figure 3.30 The ‘golden spiral’ forms within the golden rectangle; in a golden rectangle, a square cut from the rectangle produces another golden rectangle… ad infinitum generating successive fractal scales along one direction as 1.62, 0.618, 0.236, 0.090... Source: Trey Kirk.

In architecture, rectangles of varying aspect ratios, including the golden, have been overlaid on the elevations and/or plans of many of the world’s iconic monuments, from the Parthenon in Athens, c. fifth century BCE, to Notre Dame in Paris, built from the twelfth to fourteenth century, to Le Corbusier’s early twentieth-century villas, although how these were used in the generation of all buildings where the proportion fits after the fact is uncertain (see Figure 3.31) (Herz-Fischler 1984; Salingaros 1998). The historical record is not always clear.

Figure 3.31 Elevations of Le Corbusier’s Villa Stein in Garches, France and the Parthenon in Athens appearing to fit within the golden rectangle, now considered likely applied after the fact (Herz-Fischler, Salingaros). Source: Trey Kirk.

What is clear is that rectangles matter because they efficiently fit how we see our surroundings. It starts with the layout of our eyes and entails the physics of the flow of information from the image to them (Bejan 2009). Humans have binocular vision. In most cases, we see with two eyes and our fields of vision overlap, as indicated in Figure 3.32. In this diagram, each circle represents the approximate area each eye sees, illustrating how the two eyes together create a predominantly horizontal field of view. From an evolutionary standpoint, this certainly makes sense: danger in man’s past generally lurked from the sides, not from the top or bottom. What is quickly apparent is that the rectangle made by our visual field approximates a 1.47 proportion (or 3/2).

Figure 3.32 The human viewport, evolving for fast horizontal scanning, approximates a rectangle of 3/2 proportions. Source: Trey Kirk.

Explored in more detail, Figure 3.33 indicates the limits of this visual field. We cannot see very far up without tilting our head, which requires exerting more effort on our part, and our binocular vision does not work at the periphery.

Figure 3.33 Each eye can sweep between 100 and 120 degrees in the vertical (see diagram above) and horizontal directions. Humans are bifocal (which enables our depth perception), and the horizontal range of both eyes overlap, creating a rectangle where the Horizontal/Vertical (H/V) approximates 1.5. Source: Trey Kirk.

What the above shows is how a rectangle easily meshes with us visually, fitting both our viewport and energy-conserving habits. As mentioned earlier, we tend not to do extra work if we do not have to (conservation of expended energy). If you want people to read something quickly—without requiring they exert extra effort—make it

that shape. This can help explain why many familiar objects and media from paragraphs in textbooks, to credit cards, to standard paper sizes, to TV sets, to digital displays come in rectangular proportions, as illustrated in Figure 3.34.

Figure 3.34 The human field of vision superimposed over various rectangles shows its relationship to common media dimensions. Note

how 35-mm film with ratio 3/2 = 1.50, first used for movies then adopted for still pictures in the early twentieth century, closely fits our viewport. Things sized this way require less effort to see. Source: Trey Kirk.

When we scan our environment, different neurons activate depending on the orientation of what is in front of us. Some brain cells specialize in reading lines that are vertical, others fire for horizontal, others when the line is at a slant. Or, as neuroscientist Kandel writes, cells respond ‘selectively’ depending on linear orientation (presenting more evidence for how the mammalian eye is not like a camera (Kandel 2012: 26)). The horizontal scans we make are faster than the vertical; they must cover the longer horizontal distance in the same time-frame to present us a coherent image of the world. So, we now better understand how shapes determine how fast an image is ‘perceived, understood, and recorded.’ Adrian Bejan, Duke University professor of mechanical engineering, takes the golden rectangle analysis a step further, arguing why the shape is efficient for humans to see. When something has its shape, “the horizontal sweep takes just as long as the vertical sweep” (Bejan 2009: 99). Due to the way we evolved, Bejan proposes that the golden rectangle shape requires the minimal scanning time and is thus maximally efficient. Moreover, according to Bejan, the golden rectangle follows his ‘constructal law,’ a phenomenon of physics he defined in 1996. Nature, whether creating a tree with many branches, vascular patterns of a lung, or channels in a river bed, relies on similar patterns to increase the flow of nutrients, air, and/or water. Frequent branch-like patterns occur with larger and larger channels leading to major arteries, like in a highway or a biological organ, such as the lung. Rather than viewing this pattern as arbitrary or simply a curiosity, Bejan explains it as a consequence of physics, specifically the ‘constructal law,’ which he defined as follows: For a finite-size system to persist in time (to live), it must evolve in such a way that it provides easier access to the imposed currents that flow through it. (Bejan 1997: 399)

Bejan holds that the ‘constructal law’ can help us better understand our evolutionary history and in particular the significant interrelationship between the way we see, think, and walk (Bejan 1996). In an evolutionary time-frame, the eye emerged after animal locomotion, not before, he notes. Better vision in humans permitted our faster, more efficient, and directed movement. Why is this significant for architecture or planning? New understandings of how the brain takes in visual stimuli, revealed by biometrics and discussed further in Chapter 7, suggest the importance of making cities consistently visually compelling on the ground floor (see Figure 3.35). Visual stimulation engages our brain and makes us move. Viewing and ambulating evolved interdependently: they are of apiece. Innately, we may already know this at some level; today’s science makes it explicit.

Figure 3.35 Visually compelling windows in Lower Manhattan propel people down the street; the low window frames accommodate the natural tilt of the human head when the body is walking. Our vision and locomotion are interdependent, a consequence of our evolution. Source: Ann Sussman.

Case Study: Society Hill, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Philadelphia, the second largest city on the East Coast of the United States after New York, has the largest collection of eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century architecture in the country. Society Hill, its central neighborhood, is named after the Free Society of Traders, a company that was chartered by the state’s founder, William Penn (1644–1718). The neighborhood, part of Penn’s original plan for the city, features blocks of brick row houses in the Georgian and Federal style, some still with old cobblestone streets. Adjacent to the docks on the Delaware River and close to historic Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution both were adopted, Society Hill was home to Philadelphia’s merchant and upper classes for generations. Like many American urban centers, however, the neighborhood fell into decline in the mid-twentieth century with the city’s expansion and middle-class flight to the suburbs. It was labeled a slum, considered a shell of its former self, riddled with empty buildings and vacant lots. Targeted for federal urban renewal funding in the late 1950s, Philadelphia’s City Planning Commission, under the authoritative leadership of architect Edmund Bacon, selected a development team for the retrofit, including rising architectural star, I. M. Pei (b. 1917). Rather than completely raze the neighborhood, as happened in Boston’s Scollay Square, and had been a distinct possibility here, the group evolved a distinctively unorthodox hybrid approach. They saved salvageable row houses; the city sold some 600 to buyers inexpensively with strict guidelines on how to restore them; they created dozens of new three-story town houses, many designed by Pei, to fill in the vacant parcels in the neighborhood; and lastly, to increase density and broadcast the city center’s resurgence from afar, they built three 31-story residential towers, also designed by Pei, in an area park (see Figure 3.36). In the figure-ground drawing (see Figure 3.37), the towers are in the

center right of the diagram, and a group of Pei’s low-rise town houses arranged in a large square footprint are directly to the west (or left).

Figure 3.36 Society Hill, Philadelphia. The central city neighborhood has the highest concentration of eighteenth and early nineteenthcentury architecture in the United States, and includes three 31-story

residential towers, at center right in the figure-ground drawing, built as part of a federally sponsored urban renewal effort completed in 1964. Source: Nora Shull.

Figure 3.37 Redeveloped low-rise town houses mitigate the transition to I. M. Pei Towers in Society Hill, Philadelphia, and were constructed

as part of the urban renewal project. Source: George Cserna/Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.

In the fifty years since construction, history has favored Society Hill’s redevelopment approach, but in different ways, revealing urban planning’s own transformation. The project, which won a Progressive Architecture (P/A) award in 1961, was called out as exemplary again in 2014, by Architect. In an article titled ‘Philadelphia Resurgent’ the urban renewal team is lauded for cleverly marrying old and new. While the 1960 critics seemed most impressed by the idea of building 31-story apartment buildings in a historic city center, today’s critics marvel at something else entirely, the plan’s respect of old street patterns and scales. Society Hill’s redevelopment: … blends sensitively into the pre-existing urban pattern. Dozens of new townhouses designed by Pei echo in both scale and materials the many historic houses that were also restored under the plan. The gaps between these preserved structures became infill sites for sympathetic new construction. (Dixon 2014)

The new Society Hill kept a lot of the factors, the multiple blocks and intersections that made the neighborhood so successful for walking over generations; it fit the needs of a bipedal forward-looking mammal. Interestingly, the towers, while lauded originally, have come in for criticism in the decades since opening, particularly for how they meet—or fail to meet—the street. Even Pei conceded in later years, in a book reconsidering his work, that the towers had disappointing elements: The towers’ weakest points were where they met the ground: the arcades formed by the slender columns at the bases were unrelieved by any windows or other inviting detail and as a result were rather chilly spaces. (Wiseman 2001: 65)

The strength of the recreated town houses, we would argue, is not only that they encourage ambulation because they make for street alignments, or are made of brick (a factor frequently cited in their

popularity), but because with their big windows and doors on and/or at street level, they recreate faces (see Figures 3.38 and 3.39). The faces in the mid-twentieth-century row houses are more abstract than in their eighteenth and nineteenth-century iterations, but they are nevertheless there and that impact, as this chapter has tried to convey, should not be understated.

Figure 3.38 The windows and doors of I. M. Pei Town Houses in Society Hill, designed to repair the old neighborhood fabric, can easily be assembled to make abstract faces. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 3.39 Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century row houses in Society Hill give the area its historic charm and seem face-like. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Exercise for Chapter 3: Faces and Spaces Go to a popular town or city square; get a map or create a figureground drawing of the area; is the square within the ‘social field of vision’ or outside it? Visit a shopping center or mall and explore how the more intimate visual thresholds mentioned above are at work in the store or restaurant plans and their interior layouts. Find an iconic house, building, or tower in your area. Can you find visual primitives of the face in its elevations? Do the same thing for continuous building elevations along popular shopping or walking streets. Also note where there is statuary portraying people as part of the building elevation or near the buildings, and how this impacts human behavior in the space. Fix a blank wall or building elevation. Note how adding an actual face, or windows and doors arranged as a ‘figural primitive,’ changes how people take in the scene. Place both images side by side; ask people where they would rather stand or wait.

Notes 1 Acclaimed urbanist Holly Whyte (1980) strongly made this point in his popular book and accompanying film, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. 2 The extrastriate body area, or EBA, is specialized for perception of human body and its parts. 3 Parahippocampal place area, or PPA, is believed to be specialized for recognizing landscapes or places.

4 Shapes Carry Weight: Bilateral Symmetry, (Hierarchy), Curves, and Complexity

Eurythmy is beauty and fitness… found when the members of a work are of a height suited to their breadth, of a breadth suited to their length, and, in a word, when they all correspond symmetrically. Vitruvius (Chapter II, Sec. 3) (c. 15–20 BCE)

Shapes carry weight. We do not look out at the world around us as though all things are equal. We have evolved to register and investigate and prefer certain forms over others in fractions of a second. Neuroscientists studying our responses to specific objects and shapes design experiments for subjects to view things in milliseconds. In those brief moments, our brain can determine whether or not to flee or step forward well before our conscious mind gets into the act. If this were not the case, the theory goes, we could not have survived until now. In the previous chapter, we looked at faces, one pattern we evolved to process quickly. A key design feature of faces is their bilateral symmetry. In nature, and the world of architecture and design, bilateral symmetry occurs with regularity. Appreciating why this arrangement has such staying power and importance is explored here. To do so, we briefly take a side trip to Anatolia, the central region of Turkey, and, specifically, to the high plains of Cappadocia. There are fantastic medieval churches hidden in plain sight in a lunar-like landscape made up of unusual limestone formations in this sparsely populated region of Turkey. The stone has eroded over time creating cone-like shapes sometimes called ‘fairy castles’ (see Figure 4.1). Meticulously carved inside a few of these cones are Byzantine churches that date from the tenth and eleventh century (see Figure 4.2). Those in the small town of Göreme are famed for their bright-colored frescoes, intricate architectural detail, and traditional church plans.

Figure 4.1 The ‘fairy castles’ of Göreme, a village in Cappadocia, Asia Minor, Turkey. Source: Deniz Gecim.

Figure 4.2 The Interior of Karanlik (Dark) Church, Göreme, Turkey, dates from the end of the twelfth and early thirteenth century. It has a cruciform plan much

like a traditional freestanding medieval church and multiple bilaterally symmetric elements. Author: Karsten Dörre. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Structurally, these early churches could have taken any shape; yet the religious imperative of creating churches with familiar interiors appears to have been strong. These inside spaces try to mimic those of their conventional masonry cousins even when this meant carving out freestanding columns that are not actually needed to hold anything up. The cave churches have cruciform layouts and bilaterally symmetric naves leading to a traditional half-rounded apse. Tourists gaze in wonder at the ancient religious architecture so carefully executed inside such remote and unexpected places. Cappadocia’s medieval buildings illustrate how creativity can flourish in adversity, how people can respond creatively when facing challenging topography or limited materials, intent on promoting a cultural and religious vision. Fundamentally, the churches also offer a study in the power of a shape. The bilateral symmetric form has a history like none other in our built environment and in our own human history. Significantly, the two domains are linked. Looking at bilateral symmetry provides a telling example of how our sense of aesthetics is, at root, biological. Beyond the churches carved into stone in Göreme, bilateral symmetry prevails in traditional architecture elevations and plans around the world: it is in seventeenth-century Chinese temples, the fifthcentury BCE Parthenon in Athens, the fifteenth-century Aztec temples in Mexico, and the nineteenth-century Trinity Church in Boston’s Back Bay (Figure 4.3).

Figure 4.3 Trinity Church in Boston’s historic Back Bay neighborhood, designed by architect Henry Hobson Richardson, and is a study in the power of bilaterally symmetric shape. Source: Ann Sussman.

Across civilizations, the bilaterally symmetric plan and facade is often used to evoke power and convey worldly as well as spiritual might. Sometimes it combines both. For example, the Martha-Mary Chapel, in Sudbury, Massachusetts (see Figure 4.4) was built by the American industrialist Henry Ford in the early 1940s in memory of his mother and mother-in-law. The fact he could afford to build such a shrine obviously reflected his considerable wealth.

Figure 4.4 Martha-Mary Chapel in Sudbury, Massachusetts built by industrialist Henry Ford to honor his mother and mother-in-law, c. 1941. Source: Garry D. Harley.

The form is often connected to showing off wealth. Below is the largest chateau in the Loire Valley, Chateau de Chambord, built for the sixteenth-century

king of France, Francois I, as a hunting lodge (see Figure 4.5). Today, it is the most visited tourist attraction in the Valley. (It was never completed, and on careful inspection is not perfectly symmetrical but close.)

Figure 4.5 Chambord Castle in the Loire Valley, France, designed as a hunting lodge for the French King Francois 1st (1494–1547) and never completed. It is the most visited estate in the Loire Valley today. Source: Garry D. Harley.

Bilateral symmetry is found in much the same way in interiors, such as in the living room of a Dutch Colonial house from the early 1920s, which a wealthy American businessman had built for himself at the age of 27 (see Figure 4.6, the Webster S, Blanchard house, Acton, Massachusetts). What greater way could a young man display his power? The room has a far simpler style, but similar approach, a bilaterally symmetric plan adorned with multiple, repeating bilaterally symmetric shapes.

Figure 4.6 Symmetry conveys power in interior architecture: this craftsman-styled living room, designed as public entertainment space for the Webster S. Blanchard house, was built for a young businessman in 1922 in the outskirts of Boston. Source: Ann Sussman.

Humans are bilaterally symmetrical more or less, as is much of life around us. The link between our form and Classical building tradition is well known and is often examined in architectural texts. Ancient Greeks modeled the columns in their temples directly after the human body, for instance, the capitals representing the head, the shaft the body, and the base the feet. The Roman architect Vitruvius wrote that the architect’s work should reflect the body’s proportions and its symmetry. His treatise, De Architectura (c. 15 BCE), is one of the earliest known texts to link the design of buildings with the architecture of the human body. Leonardo de Vinci famously celebrated the connection in his drawing ‘Vitruvian Man,’ c. 1490, depicting ideal proportions and their basis in the human form and crucial connection to perfect geometries, the circle, and square (see Figure 4.7).

Figure 4.7 Vitruvian Man, by Leonard da Vinci, c. 1490, with his text surrounding it, illustrates a Renaissance ideal: man’s perfection within nature and embraces the classical notion of nature’s perfect geometries. To get this to work, da Vinci ingeniously places the center of the circle in the man’s navel and the center point of the square in his genitals. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

“Both of these shapes—the circle and the square—were symbolically important in the design of temples because of their geometric purity,” explains the writer Hugh Aldersey-Williams in Anatomies: A Cultural History of the Human Body (2013: 26). “It was important to connect them with the human figure in order to demonstrate its divine proportions.” Author Maria Karagianni explains that these depictions of the human body as divine beings in art throughout history point to the significance of the body as a cultural product (Karagianni 2017).

In the Renaissance, sixteenth-century architect Andrea Palladio, influenced by Vitruvius, took this appreciation of bilateral symmetry and divinity literally to new heights and lengths, mandating it in the construction of villas as he explains in his famous architectural treatise, The Four Books of Architecture (1570): The rooms ought to be distributed on each side of the entry and hall: and it is to be observed that those on the right correspond to those on the left, that so the fabrick may be the same in one place as in the other... (Palladio [reprint 1965]: 27) Palladio practiced what he preached, as can be seen in his plans for his most famous architectural legacy, the Villa Almerico Capra, also known as ‘La Rotonda,’ begun in 1566 and completed in 1585, five years after his death (Figure 4.8). In 1994, it became part of a UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site.

Figure 4.8 Villa Capra, ‘La Rotonda’, Vicenza, 1566, by Andrea Palladio (1508– 1580) from Planta de “i quattri libri” (1570). In the hands of the high Renaissance master Andrea Palladio, symmetric plans and elevations reach an apotheosis. Publicacion de Ottavio Bertotti Scamozzi, 1778. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Bilateral Symmetry and Biology Bilateral symmetry in plans and architecture today has become common to the point that it may seem predictable, tedious, or something to avoid. From the biological standpoint, however, the shape itself is anything but. Without bilateral symmetry, biologists note, the possibility of our existence as human beings is moot. Moreover, the science suggests bilateral symmetry has within it key efficiencies that help us navigate our world, both animate and inanimate. It turns out that it is not at all coincidental that much of the architecture depicted above uses bilateral symmetry to evoke power, prestige, and might.

In the Beginning … Early life forms were not necessarily bilaterally symmetrical. Sea sponges, some 650 million years old as a species, root to the ocean floor, do not have a brain or circulatory system, and are asymmetrical (Figure 4.9). But following the Cambrian Explosion, 540 million years ago, where there is rapid appearance of multiple species in the fossil record, bilateral life dominates. Researchers argue that our oldest common bilateral ancestor was in fact an animal with tentacles or ‘tentacular appendages’ (Temereva and Tsitrin 2015). Today, “99% of modern animals are members of the evolutionary group Bilateria” (Finnerty et al. 2004: 1335), biologists note.

Figure 4.9 Asymmetrical pink lumpy sponge. Sponges are considered the foundational species for all life that followed including our own. Recently pushed back in age, they are now thought to have emerged 550–750 million years ago. Author: Nick Hobgood. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Bilateral symmetry conveys significant advantages for its species, including us. The form is ranked as “an important advance” because “it opened the way for the development of directed motion, improved organs of sense and, eventually, the enlarged and highly complex mammalian brain” (Prosser 2012).

In bilaterally symmetric organisms, an axis, in humans, the vertical, has halves that are approximate mirror images. Things naturally come to a head in this geometry, the way they do not in an asymmetric or other arrangement. This permits movement in one direction and the centralization of the nervous system in one place, a brain. Promoting directional locomotion, this form of symmetry also encourages the development of vision and cognition interdependently. It is intriguing to hold on to the idea that all of our three key abilities (vision, cognition, and locomotion) are interconnected (also mentioned in Chapter 3) and a consequence of a bilateral symmetric layout. Bilateral symmetry not only influences the way we walk or how we see but also appears to deeply connect to our emotions and inform what we like and find attractive in people and other animate and inanimate things in the world. The evidence indicates that humans prefer symmetry, a tendency which biologists refer to as “an evolved preference” (Cárdenas and Harris 2006: 11; Pecchinenda et al. 2014). Here is how Charles Darwin relates our bias toward symmetry in humans and other species in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, his second book on evolutionary theory (published in 1882). … the eye prefers symmetry or figures with some regular recurrence. Patterns of this kind are employed by even the lowest savages as ornaments; and they have been developed through sexual selection for the adornment of some male animals. (Darwin 1882: 93) More recently, psychologists have tried to tease apart the extent preferences for symmetry that appear to be hardwired in us, independent of our cultural or ‘savage’ heritage. Recent psychology studies, for instance, have explored whether adding symmetrical patterns to faces and craft objects enhances their appeal. They do, the studies reported: people consistently prefer symmetrical additions over the asymmetric (Cárdenas and Harris, 2006). Researchers also note that symmetrical patterns prevail in arts and crafts cross-culturally, whether it is in pottery, fabric design, tile ornamentation, or body decoration. Significantly, the tendency in crafts also seems to have arisen independently throughout the world, suggesting its primal place for our species. Bilateral symmetric objects are found in diverse, far-flung regions, ranging from the Navajo in the American West, to the Aonikenk, tribes of Patagonia, South America, to the Yoruba tribe of Nigeria (Cárdenas and Harris 2006) (see Figure 4.10).

Figure 4.10 Bilaterally symmetric rams appear in Antioch Culture, House of Ram’s Heads Floor Mosaic (detail), late fifth or early sixth century CE, marble and limestone tesserae, 76.2 × 208.3 cm, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts, Excavation at Antioch, 1936. 33. Photo credit: Ann Sussman.

There seems to be a persistent tendency in this research to link how we see faces to how we see other things (an instance, again, of the significance of faces and how human perception is relational, as noted in Chapter 3). Men and women find symmetrical faces more attractive than non-symmetrical ones, research has confirmed. “Preference for symmetry, while perhaps acquirable through cultural processes, is rooted in our evolutionary history,” a recent paper in the field noted (Cárdenas and Harris 2006: 3). One frequent explanation for the symmetry preference is the “good genes” hypothesis,1 which holds that more symmetrical faces were and still are seen as healthier and fitter, at a glance signifying resiliency in a mate. A symmetrical face and body advertises its ability to withstand and overcome the vicissitudes of life and, hence, is more likely to reproduce. In a study reported in the journal

Evolution and Human Behavior in 2006, “Symmetrical decorations enhance the attractiveness of faces and abstract designs” psychologists Rodrigo Andres Cardenas and Lauren Julius Harris at Michigan State University gave 40 undergraduate students a series of symmetrical and asymmetrical patterns selected from different indigenous cultures (Cárdenas and Harris 2006). They told them to pick the ones they preferred; the students consistently chose the symmetrical pattern (see Figure 4.11). Given designs that were symmetric around the Y-axis versus those that were asymmetric, they again tended to pick symmetry around the vertical axis as preferable.

Figure 4.11 Photographs like the ones above were used in psychological research to show the innate symmetric preferences in humans. The research found that test subjects preferred a symmetrical face (left) with added symmetric decorations over an asymmetric face (right) applied with asymmetric paint. Source: Rodrigo A. Cardenas.

The authors concluded, “the preference for symmetry extends to the cultural products of facial paint and the decorative arts.” But, they caution, “although symmetrical art is very common, the preference for symmetrical facial features is more likely to be constant than the preference for symmetrical art” (see Figure 4.12) (Cárdenas and Harris 2006: 16). They also hypothesize why the preference prevails: “One possibility is that the adaptive value of detecting symmetry in potential mates generalizes to other objects” (ibid.: 16). Capuchin monkeys also have a similar proclivity for symmetry of face shape, a recent study concludes (Paukner et al. 2017).

Figure 4.12 In psychological tests, subjects consistently picked a pattern symmetrical around a vertical axis as more attractive than one symmetrical about a non-vertical axis. Source: Rodrigo A. Cardenas.

Perhaps because we like looking at faces and have evolved to take in and emotionally read them quickly, we also favor the main facial attribute, bilateral symmetry, in things we make and place around us. Faces ground and orient us in a random world from infancy onward. One might hypothesize there is a certain efficiency and predictability to designing buildings that reflect this arrangement not only because we are predisposed to take the form in, but because such new constructions may more likely reassure us, too (see Chapter 3 for more details). Psychologists studying symmetry perception have found that people process vertical bilateral symmetry (oriented around the vertical axis), in objects more quickly than other forms of repetition or symmetry (Makin et al. 2012: 3250; Bertamini and Makin 2014). One theory for the vertical bias is that it is built-in, an artifact of the way our eyes sit in our head, parallel to the horizontal plane. (Perhaps, if our eyes were perpendicular to the horizon our bias would be in that direction.) Researchers have also learned that looking at symmetrical objects activates our smiling muscles more than looking at random patterns (Makin et al. 2012: 3255). And when we smile, we are more likely to feel calm or reassured. “We have a built-in aesthetic preference for symmetry,” surmises neuroscientist VS Ramachandran, in The Science of Art: A Neurological Theory of Aesthetic Experience, his 1999 paper with William Hirstein. The authors label symmetry one of the eight theoretical ‘laws’ of aesthetic experience (Ramachandran and Hirstein 1999). They suggest the key reason the shape resonates is because of its survival link: “Since most biologically important objects—such as predator, prey or mate are symmetrical, it may serve as an early-warning system to grab

our attention to facilitate further processing of the symmetrical entity until it is fully recognised” (Ramachandran and Hirstein 1999: 27). Studies also show that symmetric objects have redundancy inherent in their design that appears to contribute to faster mental processing of the form. It appears once we’ve read half of a symmetrical shape, our mind has predicted the other. Finally, no discussion of symmetry is complete without mentioning how historically it is consistently linked to beauty as well as order and organization. “Beauty is bound up with symmetry,” the German mathematician and philosopher Herman Weyl (1952) summarized in his book, Symmetry. “Symmetry, as wide or as narrow as you may define its meaning, is one idea by which man through the ages has tried to comprehend and create order, beauty and perfection” (Weyl 1952: 5). From a biological standpoint, we can surmise that beauty is connected to symmetry for one good reason mentioned in earlier chapters, it is bound up and cannot be teased apart from survival.

Curves In terms of innate preference for shape, humans also have a clear bias for curves over straight or sharp lines. Aesthetic judgments are a complex matter engaging many part of the brain. Studies in the field of aesthetics more than a century ago found that when it comes to 2D and 3D objects, curves elicit feelings of happiness and elation, while jagged and sharp forms tend to connect to feelings of pain and sadness (see Figure 4.14). “Curves are in general felt to be more beautiful than straight lines. They are more graceful and pliable, and avoid the harshness of some straight lines,” psychologist Kate Gordon wrote in her book Esthetics, published in 1909 (Gordon 1909: 169). Even “the most simple abstract line… may have an emotional effect and meaning of its own” (Gordon 1909: 160). Numerous psychology research papers have documented these findings since. Measuring student responses to angular versus curved typefaces in 1968, psychologist A. J. Kastl found feelings such as “sprightly, sparkling, dreamy and soary,” arose viewing curving fonts, while moods of sadness went with “angular, bold and perhaps serif type.” Similarly, when psychologist Rudolf Arnheim (1969) asked students to describe a “good and bad marriage” using a simple line drawing alone, he found that a continuous undulating smooth curve was seen as representing the loving union, and an irregular spiky line the bad one (Arnheim 1969: 125).

Hierarchy Helps Many bilaterally symmetric forms also boast clear hierarchy. They have a top, middle, and bottom— frequently tripartite. If symmetry suggests organization and intentionality, hierarchy does too. We see this in the human form, with its head, body, and feet; the human face, with its eyes, nose, and mouth. In traditional architecture cross-culturally, the tripartite hierarchy also tends to dominate on building elevations. It suggests an order and intention we can easily and intuitively understand. Perhaps the fact we have such familiarity with the arrangement, and are built to interpret it wordlessly, accounts for its frequency. A building with a clear roofline, middle section, and articulated base looks complete, resolved, familiar, much like an articulated or simply rendered figure or face. It stands at the ready for relationship – with you – the viewer (see Figures 4.13).

Figure 4.13 The Taj Mahal (c. 1653) in Agra, India has a clear, hierarchical shape with a tri-partite arrangement, a top, middle, and bottom not unlike a face; it can also be seen, not incidentally, as a study in curves, another form humans innately prefer. Source: Wikimedia Commons; Author: By Yann.

Figure 4.14 Dancing Maenad, Roman, c. 27 BCE–14 CE, Metropolitan Museum of Art, portrays a mythical dancing devotee of the Roman god of wine, Bacchus, and can be viewed as a study in the appeal of curvaceous shapes. Image source: Art Resource, New York; Image copyright: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The curve bias carries over to our reaction to art and can even affect patient feelings and recovery rates according to hospital design expert, Robert Ulrich. In one study of 160 intensive-care patients in a Swedish hospital in 1993, he monitored the patient responses to six different views: two of nature, two of abstract art, and two of a blank wall. “… A rather surprising finding was that an abstract picture dominated by rectilinear forms produced higher patient anxiety than control conditions of no picture at all,” Ulrich wrote (2002: 7). Later studies, including by Bertamini et al., have corroborated the human preference for curved over angular lines and shapes and the fact we find the former “visually pleasant” (2015). The impact of our preference for curves transfers to our feelings about architecture according to a more recent study using fMRI, psychologist Oshin Vartanian and colleagues (2013) determined. In this test, 24 subjects were given 200 pictures of architectural spaces to look at. Half of the images were rectilinear; half curvilinear. “As predicted, participants were more likely to judge spaces as beautiful if they were curvilinear than rectilinear,” the report said (Vartanian et al. 2013: 1). The results suggest that the well-established effect of contour on aesthetic preference can be extended to architecture. Furthermore, the combination of our behavioral and neural evidence underscores the role of emotion in our preference for curvilinear objects in this domain. (Vartanian et al. 2013: 1) In other words, we like things plump and round. Bolstering the preference, too, is the new understanding that other arrangements, in particular the repetitive parallel lines common to most modern built environments, stress the brain. “Over tens of thousands of years, the human brain evolved to effectively process scenes from the natural world. But the urban jungle poses a greater challenge for the brain, because of the repetitive patterns it contains,” explains Arnold J Wilkins, psychologist at the University of Essex, who studies visual stress. As a rule, repetitive parallel lines do not occur in nature, so our brain has not evolved to efficiently take them in, requiring more oxygen uptake to the visual processing part of the brain (visual cortex in the occipital lobe at the back of the head) to do so. Researchers have found that as more and more stripes in building facades appear decade by decade, the buildings become less and less comfortable to look at (Wilkins 2018). The point is humans evolved to assess their environment, the natural one, quickly and not the modern industrial or post-industrial one. Pointed shapes, such as barbs, thorns, quills, sharp teeth, were ever-present threats in our evolutionary past, so it was advantageous to sense them fast and be able to flee if one had to. Psychologically, part of our brain still feels a lion could be at the gate, even as we sit in the living room of a high-rise or suburban tract house. We evolved for this past environment, and remain designed for it. Or, as UK psychologist Nigel

Nicholson puts it pithily: “You can take the person out of the Stone Age… but you can’t take the Stone Age out of the person” (Nicholson 1998). Case Study: The Oval Office, The White House, Washington, D.C. Our bias toward curves suggests why the design of the ‘Oval Office,’ the traditional seat of power of the American president, may carry a psychological advantage for its occupant; not only is it bilaterally symmetrical with the desk centered on its longer axis, indicative of psychological power, but its rounded walls are of an innately preferred shape (see Figure 4.15). “Humans like sharp angled objects significantly less than they like objects with a curved contour,” neuroscientists Moshe Bar and Maital Neta conclude in a 2007 paper summarizing a study that scanned participants as they observed more than 200 different shapes (p. 2300). “This bias can stem from an increased sense of threat and danger conveyed by these sharp visual elements.” The researchers noted an area of the brain engaged in the fearful responses, the amygdala (sometimes called our ‘lizard brain’), “shows significantly more activation for the sharp-angled objects compared with their curved counterparts.” They also proposed “that the danger conveyed by the sharp angle stimuli was relatively implicit.” It appears, then, we do not even have to learn much about some things, part of our brain is set up to have us run from a sharp shape. (For more on the amygdala in human brain morphology and function, see the Appendix.)

Figure 4.15 Curves define the character and help magnify the power of the Oval Office, seen here with President Barack Obama in 2013. Source: Wikimedia Commons; Author: Pete Souza.

“We are still innately drawn to settings whose characteristics hold some survival advantage,” wrote Grant Hildebrand (2008), architect and University of Washington professor emeritus “[E]ven though that survival advantage may no longer have any practical value for us” (p. 263). Our present responses reflect a past trajectory that we cannot rewrite.

Order and Complexity Favoring curves and symmetry, we also enjoy complexity. “Order alone is monotony,” Hildebrand wrote in a chapter in Biophilic Design, “complexity alone is chaos” (Hildebrand 2008: 264). He explains how this architectural attribute asserts itself in other arts, including music and dance: … there is substantial empirical evidence that we are genetically programmed to respond positively to complexly ordered sound (music) but not to chaotically complex sound (noise). One might argue, similarly, that consciously or unconsciously, we distinguish architecture from “just building” by the evident order and complexity of its materials and spaces. (p. 265) Architecture’s connection to music was perhaps most famously penned by German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) who wrote: “Music is liquid architecture; Architecture is frozen music” (1829). We by design enjoy processing complex aural and visual stimuli, when presented with an order inherent. In Living with Complexity (2016), psychologist and user-experience guru Donald A. Norman elaborates on why we favor complexity across the arts: We seek rich, satisfying lives, and richness goes along with complexity. Our favorite songs, stories, games, and books are rich, satisfying, and complex. We need complexity even while we crave simplicity… Some complexity is desirable. When things are too simple, they are also viewed as dull and uneventful. Psychologists have demonstrated that people prefer a middle level of complexity: too simple and we are bored, too complex and we are confused. Moreover, the ideal level of complexity is a moving target, because the more expert we become at any subject, the more complexity we prefer. This holds true whether the subject is music or art, detective stories or historical novels, hobbies or movies. And the trait, of course, extends to architecture. In Chapter 7 we reveal how biometric research, particularly eye tracking, shows how people implicitly ignore blank facades, and instead, our brain without our conscious awareness or control makes us fixate on buildings that present organized complexity. Adding sensors, for facial expression analysis, for instance, provides additional data on just how much more pleasurable the complexity can be for our brain and body to take in (see Chapter 7, Figure 7.15). Why does this happen? It again appears to offer a survival advantage. “The brain seeks meaningful ordering (subliminally) so as to make sense of multiple phenomena facing us at any moment,” mathematician Nikos Salingaros explains in Urban Experience and Design (2021). A “uniform

environment with no complexity has very little information to help us interpret (the world) and navigate it…The eye seeks organized complexity, and its absence generates either detachment or alarm in the viewer who cannot (easily) navigate….” Additionally, high complexity, without organization, proves exhausting, Salingaros explains. “Randomness overwhelms our sensory apparatus, which tries to interpret every single unrelated detail of the environment —becoming a cognitive burden that uses up the brain’s energy. Symmetries and connections organize components and reduce randomness” (pp. 65–66). Organized complexity is so important, in the end, because it promotes survival, helping the body efficiently maintain a state of homeostasis or equilibrium (Salingaros 2021). Fractals in Landscape, Art, and Architecture Evidence of nature’s own embrace of order and complexity is evident in fractals, recursive patterns that occur repetitively in smaller and smaller scales and abound in nature. We find them in snowflakes, leaves, coastlines, and vegetable patterns, such as in the beautiful shape of the cauliflower, a romanesco calabrese, shown in the photograph in Figure 4.16.

Figure 4.16 Fractal beauty in a romanesco calabrese cauliflower. Self-replicating forms fascinate us: our interest in these patterns has been linked to our evolution and observation of similar arrangements, such as tree patterns, in nature over eons. Source: Wikimedia Commons; Author: AVM.s.

Fractals appeal to humans innately according to Richard P. Taylor, a University of Oregon physicist who studies them extensively, and has investigated the human response to the patterns for more than a decade. Humans appear to have innate preferences for fractal patterns that are not too dense, but not too sparse, Taylor reports, re-iterating points Norman and Salingaros make. Patterns in the ideal range “generated the maximal alpha response in the frontal region, consistent with the hypothesis that they are most relaxing,” he explains (Taylor et al. 2011: 18). This also happens to be the range of the particular pattern of trees common to the African savanna, suggesting how our biology and aesthetics coevolved and became intertwined. (The importance of the savanna landscape and specifically acacia trees for aesthetics are outlined further in Chapter 6, Nature Is our Context.) Taylor has also studied the appeal and power of fractals in art and architecture. The fractal patterns embedded in the work of modern abstract painter Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), for example, who is renowned for his drip-paintings on large canvases, may be part of the reason the pieces today fetch prices up to $200 million each, he explains. Our response to fractals is physiological and we like it. Fractals have also been found in famous architecture, including in the design and decoration of medieval Gothic cathedrals, the Eiffel Tower (the landmark in Paris, created by French architect and engineer Gustave Eiffel [1832–1923]), and in Frank Lloyd Wright’s (1867–1959) later works including the Palmer House, built in Michigan in the 1950s. Since fractal patterns can induce relaxation, Taylor believes their further study can not only help us learn more about human perception but also contribute in improving our built environment. He and his co-authors of the paper, “Perceptual and Physiological Responses to Jackson Pollock’s Fractals” (2011), conclude: Scientific experiments might appear to be a highly unusual tool for judging art. However, our preliminary experiments provide a fascinating insight into the impact that art might have on the perceptual, physiological and neurological condition of the observer. Our future investigations will explore the possibility of incorporating fractal art into the interior and exterior of buildings, in order to adapt the visual characteristics of artificial environments to the positive responses. (Taylor et al. 2011: 19)

Embodied Cognition Shapes carry weight. The fact that fractals and other forms implicitly influence us matters for design, particularly for those looking to assess and improve placemaking. This thinking also informs the new, developing paradigm for understanding the human experience of place, known as “embodied cognition.” The big idea? Because we understand the world through our bodies, and can now even measure implicit physiological impacts (see Chapter 7), considering humans as primarily logical beings no longer suffices. “(M)uch of what and how people think is a function of our living in the kind of bodies we do,” writes architecture critic Sarah Williams Goldhagen in Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes our Lives (2017). The paradigm “reveals that most– much more than we previously knew–of human thought is neither logical nor linear, but associative and nonconscious” (Goldhagen 2017, xii). A theme of this book, too, we discuss an additional impact of human subliminal brain architecture next, in Chapter 5: ‘Storytelling Is Key: We’re Wired for Narrative.’

Exercise for Chapter 4: Shapes Carry Weight Look for symmetry, curves, and complexity in a favorite landmark and/or building elevation. Do these traits show up only in plan, elevation, or both? Trinity Church, in Figure 4.3, has elaborate elevations that draw visitors’ attention and seem to engage viewers more than any of the neighboring structures viewed in the photograph. Analyze why this may be the case using the concepts presented above. Designers claim that intentionally asymmetric arrangements, such as of windows on a building facade, can draw increased attention to the structure. Why might this be the case? People evolved to see other people. As mentioned in Chapter 3, we perceive significantly more information as we come closer to another person; the approach has increasing psychological impact. Alone or with a partner, find a building designed to do the same thing. Record your responses—visual and emotional. As a contrast, find a building that presents as a blank and portrays less information the closer you get: record its impact on your emotions and state of mind.

Note 1 The “good genes” hypothesis was first proposed in 1982 by British evolutionary biologist William D. Hamilton and American behavior ecologist Marlene Zuk.

5 Storytelling Is Key: We’re Wired for Narrative

On Narrative: “We came to see that the search for attachment— to a person, an object, a work of art, an idea—held open the possibility of feeling not alone… of knowing the meaning of expansive connection between self and world.” – Kay Young (2010), Imagining Minds: The Neuro-Aesthetics of Austen, Eliot, and Hardy: ix

Just as the human brain is primed to find faces, favors symmetry, and enjoys ordered complexity, it runs on narrative. How we see our world and how we see ourselves ultimately involves a story. Narrative is the unusual ability of the mind to create stories and, in the process, find multiple ways of linking to the environment and securing a place in it. Biologists consider our adeptness at coming up with stories highly adaptive. While we share many other traits with other animals, whether it is thigmotaxis, as in Chapter 2, or a symmetry-bias discussed in Chapter 4, no other creature has the capacity to create and continually elaborate its own story. Narrative makes us human, wrote Roland Barthes, the French philosopher and literary theorist (as quoted in Young and Saver 2001): (N)arrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and nowhere has there ever been a people without narrative … (it) is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself. (Barthes, as quoted in Young and Saver 2001: 79)

Narrative not only tells our mind stories; it tells us something about the organization of our mind. In The Neurology of Narrative (2001), Kay Young, PhD, and Jeffrey Saver, MD, Professors of English and neurology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, respectively, describe narrative as “the inescapable frame of human existence” (Young and Saver 2001: 79; Hydén 2017). They note how diverse thinkers over 2,000 years, from Aristotle to Barthes, have deduced the centrality of narrative to human cognition without actually knowing the biology or neuroscience behind it. Now, that is changing. Researchers recently have identified the distributed neural network that creates narrative in the human central nervous system.1 The work shows how these pathways are critical for story-making and for something more critical: our sense of self. An old adage goes: you are what you think. Less elegantly, but more accurately, we might now say, you are because of the way you are enabled to create, remake, and remember stories. Studies frequently look at people with brain damage to better determine what specific regions of the brain do. As a result of certain injuries, for example, someone may lose her ability to speak or see. Even if struck mute or blind, a subject will remain “recognizably the same person,” the authors note. On the other hand, when individuals sustain damage to the neural network involved in story-making, they lose “the ability to construct narrative… (and) have lost their selves.” “Narrative is deeply human.” It is the mind’s organizing force. “To desire narrative reflects a kind of fundamental desire for life and self that finds its source in our neurological make up” (Young and Saver 2001: 80). It turns out Roland Barthes’ thinking would prefigure the scientific findings by decades; he was right, narrative is the dynamic, living process that gives us ourselves. Imagining scenarios or stories and not actually acting on them is a significant attribute of the human narrative capacity. The term for this behavior is “decoupling,” or “the separation of mental action from physical action” (Young and Saver 2001: 82). Biologists again consider it highly advantageous. Decoupling allows us to imagine multiple narratives without “engaging the motor apparatus” (p. 82); its existence has a huge role in allowing us to lead rich and diverse lives. Decoupling permits the creation of imaginative work which makes

possible the foundation for the arts. Or as Young and Saver write, research suggests “… the evolutionary origin of the human abilities to imagine literature and the arts may be traced to this functionally advantageous capacity” (p. 82). Why does this matter for architecture or planning? It suggests one more way people consistently look for orientation oiiand connections to their environment. Much as we seek out faces from infancy on, we look for ways to make attachments and derive meaning from our physical surroundings. Every plan and urban design has the potential to acknowledge and respond to this trait in some way or another, or as is frequently the case in built environments today, ignore it. One could make the argument that it is the inherent lack of a narrative quality in many of the post-war American suburbs (as opposed to the earlier nineteenth-century street-car versions) that gives these areas their feelings of placelessness and anomie. (A case study at the end of this chapter looks at how one group of suburban residents attempted to address the ‘placeless’ problem at their town’s entry point.) Narrative can be addressed in different ways: people connect to historical events and figures linked with a location. George Washington’s home in Mount Vernon, Virginia, for instance, with more than 85 million visitors to date, remains “the most popular historic estate,” to visit in the United States, according to the non-profit that runs it (Mount Vernon 2021). People travel there to develop a greater understanding of the nation’s first president and his time. Narrative can also be embedded wordlessly, expressed in the spatial sequencing of a plan, for example, including its room layout, orientation, and size. Some architects’ plans are famous for this type of narrative quality, and appear to have been intentionally made to increase our ability to connect, both to nature outside and internally, to our narratively inclined mind. Frank Lloyd Wright’s house plans, for example, are known for their clear sequencing: a small entryway with a low ceiling leads to a tight anteroom and then crescendos in the large public living space with high ceiling, a fireplace (‘the hearth’), and a broad view of nature outside (see Figure 5.1). Wright could have designed the homes for

residents to walk straight into the main living space but never did. The careful ordering of spaces instead gives the house a story-like flow, magnifying a sense of arrival in the largest rooms and celebrating the home as a significant, dignified, place. By acknowledging our needs for both internal and external connections, Wright’s plans ennoble beholder and occupant alike (not surprisingly, he is frequently labeled a ‘romantic’).

Figure 5.1 The drawings for Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘A Fireproof House for $5,000’ were published in the Ladies Home Journal magazine in April 1907, with an accompanying article written by the architect. The building was expressly intended to be affordable for the American middle class. Source: Wikimedia Commons; Author: Frank Lloyd Wright, http://www.stockmanhouse.org/lhj.html, April 1907. The Wright’s plan in Figure 5.2 first appeared in the Ladies Home Journal in 1907. In an article entitled ‘A Fireproof House for $5,000,’ Wright explains the design is for the “average homemaker” looking for an “inexpensive” alternative to the “overtrimmed boxes” of the time. Wright presents this house not as a palace for the rich, though it may seem high-end, but a home for every man or woman. It uses the upto-date construction techniques of the time (cast-in-place concrete), and does away with superfluous rooms like butler’s pantries and attics to minimize cost and maintenance, he wrote. The first floor, with a ceremonial trellis-covered walkway leading to the front door and its tight entry, makes its big statement upon arrival at the hearth centrally

located in the building’s 42 square meter (450 square feet) living room. Wright even specifies how the house should orient to the street, with a principal view illustrated in the drawing above. We cannot help but note how face-like the elevations are and how Wright made do with unusual asymmetrical arrangements of windows in the second floor bedrooms to maintain the outside symmetry. The facades are vertically and bilaterally symmetrical and designed with a distinct top, middle, and bottom. The roof overhang looks a bit like a hat. There is a narrative quality to the entire exterior of the building; it can easily be read as a face, casting a steady gaze at passersby on the street.

Figure 5.2 Top: Fireproof House, first floor plan; bottom: second floor plan. Author: Frank Lloyd Wright, “A Fireproof House for $5,000.”

April 2007. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Centuries ago, the idea that narrative has a central place in creating memorable landscape was familiar to architects and garden planners. Designed in the Renaissance, the Villa Lante, 50 miles north of Rome in central Italy, is “regarded by most authorities as the finest of all Cinquecento villas” (Newton 1971: 99) and is essentially a garden folly that uses the biblical story of Noah’s Ark and the Flood to frame its layout. Conceived originally as a social playground for Italian clerics and their peers, its recreational value has endured for more than 400 years. In 2011 it was voted the “most beautiful park in Italy” (see Figures 5.3 and 5.4). If Frank Lloyd Wright’s use of spatial sequencing is prosaic, Villa Lante’s use illustrates the dramatic.

Figure 5.3 The Pegasus Fountain at the entry to the sixteenthcentury Villa Lante in Bagnaia, central Italy, represents Biblical

paradise, a time before man’s fall from grace where there was natural abundance on earth. Source: Tom Toft, ‘Own Work,’ Wikimedia Commons, May 11, 2007.

Figure 5.4 The ‘garden finale’ at Villa Lante suggests a new age of hope dawning after ‘the fall,’ where man’s creativity and knowledge can be put to use offering hope and salvation. Source: Robert Ferrari, ‘Giardano #2,’ Wikimedia Commons, April 26, 2007.

Case Study: Villa Lante, Bagnaia, Italy Villa Lante was begun in 1511 and completed around 1566. It is famous for its formal plantings on a hillside and an overall plan that steps down four levels, each with a distinct personality. Bilaterally symmetric with a watercourse running down its center and embellished with dramatic fountains, the villa is in the Mannerist tradition,2 a Renaissance style known for a certain playfulness, and in this instance, particularly in its final sequence exploring the power of

Palladian squares and circles laid out on a grid (see Figure 5.5). It showcases the power of organized complexity at its best.

Figure 5.5 The plan of Villa Lante; the principal entry to the garden starts at the top (or south) in the diagram and follows a linear progression down a grade to the exit at the north. The garden sequencing tells the story of man’s biblical fall from grace and reemergence into a world of rationality and hope, represented by a grand fountain centered in a large square of symmetrically arranged plantings at its base. Source: Trey Kirk with permission.

“For most observers, what makes the Villa Lante such a compelling experience is probably the handling of spaces in a wonderfully comfortable rhythmic sequence from level to level,” wrote landscape architect Norman T. Newton in Design on the Land: The Development of Landscape Architecture (Newton 1971: 106). Here, visitors seem to agree: the linear layout of surprising spaces makes the place—as does its underlying biblical story. The experience of walking through the garden was significant enough to be documented in Pope Gregory XIII’s 1578 visit (Lazzaro-Bruno 1977: 555). Today visitors walk along essentially the same path. First, “(t)he Fountain of Parnassus at the entrance to the park identifies the whole villa as a place of contemplation under the inspiration of nature, and also as the ideal realm, the earthly paradise which Parnassus is as well,” explains Cornell art historian, Claudia LazzaroBruno. Then, as the visitor passes through the gardens, he or she comes to the Classical myths of the Golden Age, including the Fountain of Acorns, representing the Garden of Eden, “the time when men ate only acorns and honey” (p. 555). But things sour quickly during this Golden Age “during which man became increasingly evil until finally Jupiter decided to destroy him completely by means of a flood” (Lazzaro-Bruno 1977: 556). The flood itself happens as the visitor proceeds to the formal garden, at the “Grotto of the Flood.” With the end of the flood, a new Age of Jupiter dawns and it is expressed through the symmetrical square garden replete with squares and circles (see Figure 5.4). “The serial idea builds upon the sense of progression that often characterizes the experience of the linear space,” Alexander Purves,

Yale architecture professor emeritus, concludes in The Persistence of Formal Patterns. The essence of the idea is incremental change. The watercourse at the Villa Lante in Bagnaia bursts from a spring in the side of a hill and drops from terrace to terrace through a series of delightful hurdles until it finally comes to rest in a formal pool. The journey of the water from high to low, from natural spring to artificial basin, parallels a transformation of the landscape from artful nature to rational geometry. (Purves 1982: 154)

The study of Villa Lante suggests how narrative, in this case orchestrated in carefully rendered steps, can increase people’s ability to enjoy place. On the other hand, randomness and a lack of serial progression can lead to discomfort and feelings of placelessness, particularly from the pedestrian perspective (Crankshaw 2012: 12). An entry intersection to a post-war suburb of Boston, Massachusetts offers an example of the diametrically opposite experience to Villa Lante and is explored next. Case Study: Kelley’s Corner, Acton, Massachusetts Acton, Massachusetts is a mid-sized town, 25 miles northwest of Boston, which tripled in size from 1960 to 2000, a relative latebloomer in American post-war suburban development (see Figures 5.6 and 5.7). Until the twentieth century predominantly agricultural, it is a bedroom community of mostly commuters now, known for its public schools and for wrestling with how to best manage new growth (von Hoffman 2010). Not unlike many metropolitan towns outside of Boston’s inner ring-road (Route 128) the town has more registered vehicles (cars, trucks, SUVs, etc.) than actual residents (Sussman 2011). Another tell-tale sign of its recent rapid development is its lack of a town center with stores and cafes. The entry intersection off the highway greets visitors instead with acres of parking lots, an empty McDonald’s, a gas station, a strip mall, and a few scattered retail establishments, all car-oriented and set back from the street.

Figure 5.6 A suburban intersection 40 km (25 miles) northwest of Boston, Kelly’s Corner in Acton, Massachusetts, just off the highway to the city. Source: Ann Sussman.

Figure 5.7 An aerial diagram of Kelly’s Corner shows its scattered building layout where planning has accommodated parking lots and cars over pedestrian needs.

Source: Justin Hollander and Amanda Garfield.

The sprawling entry point, called Kelley’s Corner, is a short distance from the public school campus, and has been a source of embarrassment for townspeople for more than three decades. In a community outreach project organized with the Town Planning office in 2009, we asked residents what they wanted to see there instead. To encourage the widest response, we made relatively new computer simulation tools as well as old-fashioned art and craft supplies available for free. The citizens were then invited, literally, to redraw the map. We were surprised by how many people took an interest in this project. Several hundred residents participated in open meetings and more than 50 took the time and made the effort to create and submit an original plan (Sussman 2010). Not surprisingly, we learned that locals wanted Kelley’s Corner to be walkable and family-oriented, with stores at the street, featuring commercial uses (like ice cream shops) that gave people reasons to linger. We learned that residents wanted focused activity specifically at the intersection that would mark it as a significant arrival point (Hollander et al. 2010). At the end of the exercise, we displayed all the citizen designs at a town forum and asked residents to vote for their preferred vision (see Figure 5.8). The citizens overwhelmingly preferred this one:

Figure 5.8 The winning Kelly’s Corner plan was designed by residents Janice Ward and Mark Buxbaum into an arrival point and place of pride by focusing on building alignment and assigning a clear hierarchy that suggests an uplifting story. Source: Janice M. Ward.

Significantly, not only does the winning scheme have the commercial and social spaces reflecting local wishes, but it also gives residents something more, something desired but not always clearly articulated—a sense of positive narrative. The plan that won is arranged hierarchically with the most important building (a large blue circle representing a community center with an arts and theater component) dominant on one side of the central intersection and a fountain surrounded by trees on the other side. It builds to an arrival point. The townspeople, it turned out, preferred not just more walkable retail or wider sidewalks, but something harder to specify— pride of place, a positive town identity, a winning story. The preferred scheme told anyone passing through Kelley’s Corner that culture, education, and the arts mattered to people here, all placed in a

thoughtfully arranged green setting. It would be hard to miss the way the narrative sequencing in the plan said that. This case study shows how important narrative is in giving a sense of importance to a site without one. People crave meaning in their built environments and, when given the option, innately select for it.3

The Need for Narrative Expressed Poetically The enduring need of our human species to make sense of our place in the world, and develop a story that secures it, is elegantly expressed in the poem, ‘Things’ by Lisel Mueller (b. 1924), a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet. In the poem, reprinted below, she shows how we appropriate words that apply to our bodies to objects that surround us, and in so doing enable the creation of stories to help us frame our experience. Things by Lisel Mueller What happened is, we grew lonely living among the things, so we gave the clock a face, the chair a back, the table four stout legs which will never suffer fatigue. We fitted our shoes with tongues as smooth as our own and hung tongues inside bells so we could listen to their emotional language, and because we loved graceful profiles the pitcher received a lip, the bottle a long, slender neck. Even what was beyond us was recast in our image; we gave the country a heart, the storm an eye, the cave a mouth so we could pass into safety.4 Much as we anthropomorphize ‘things’ in our world, to make sense of it, we similarly look for our buildings and our urban places to reflect us

and satisfy needs including our singular and voracious narrative appetite.

Exercises for Chapter 5: Storytelling Is Key Select a favorite building or plan or monument and interpret it in terms of narrative sequencing. It may be useful to review a religious building this way. Choose a favorite building elevation; does it have a compelling hierarchy or suggest a narrative sequence? A 2013 New York Times article highlighting the popularity of eating smoked turkey legs in Disney theme parks, concluded: “Boiled down, Disney parks are about selling memories,” and “story-telling” (Barnes 2013). Describe how and why this attribute is critical for theme parks and successful place-making in the built environment generally. In the 20-line poem ‘Things’ by Lisel Mueller, how many lines reference the face or human head? Is any body part named more often? Why might this be the case, particularly, given the research reviewed in Chapter 3?

Notes 1 Its elements include: 1) the amygdala-hippocampal system, responsible for initial encoding of episodic and autobiographical memories, 2) the left peri-Sylvian region, where language is formulated, and 3) the frontal cortices and their subcortical connections, where individuals and entities are organized into real and fictional temporal narrative frames.

(Young and Saver 2001: 188) 2 The Mannerist style originated in Florence and Rome and spread north to Italy and then to central and northern Europe. The term is used to define sixteenth-century artists who followed Renaissance masters. 3 According to the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, construction on improving the community entry point is set to begin, finally, in 2021 (Mallio 2019). 4 ‘Things’ by Lisel Mueller. Reprinted by permission of Louisiana State University Press from Alive Together by Lisel Mueller. Copyright © 1996 by Lisel Mueller.

6 Nature Is Our Context: Biophilia and Biophilic Design

With each new phase of synthesis to emerge from biological inquiry, the humanities will expand their reach and capability. – Edward O. Wilson (1984: 55)1

The earlier chapters singled out several unconscious tendencies that govern our response to the built environment. Humans are thigmotactic, a ‘wall-hugging’ species. We are innately self-protective and tend to avoid the centers of places. We are a social species, visually attuned to take in other people, and specifically interpret their faces quickly. We tend to favor symmetrical shapes, curving forms, and visual complexity. We also love a good story to such an extent that we can appreciate one silently in the sequential flow of a building plan or garden design and conversely get upset by a place that seems without one. This chapter focuses on something different: our context, specifically the natural world we evolved in and how we love looking at that too (see Figure 6.1). It also reviews recent literature that reveals our inherent need to be connected to our context to nurture our mental, physical, and spiritual health, and well-being.

Figure 6.1 Back-yard arbor in Acton, Massachusetts; a predisposition for enjoying natural scenes is in our genome. Given the means, we embellish the view. Source: Ann Sussman.

We have an innate “tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes,” biologist E. O. Wilson explains in his 1984 book Biophilia (p. 1). Wilson, now a Harvard professor emeritus, defines biophilia as the “urge to affiliate with other forms of life…” (p. 1). Our evolutionary past resonates daily with how we respond to our present environment, he persuasively argues. Evolving in the African and later European and Asian savanna, places with grassy plains with scattered trees, our hunter-gatherer ancestors (estimated to have lived from 1.8 million to 10,000 years ago) were consistently in contact with the natural world. The complexity of nature is the matrix where we, our genes, and our brains came into their humanness. At the end of the day, we cannot be healthy, think well, and flourish by abandoning or ignoring our primal context.

“We stay alert and alive in the vanished forests of the world,” Wilson wrote (1984: 101). Significantly, given the possibility of living anywhere, people still, so many thousands of years later, “gravitate statistically” toward a savanna-like environment, he noted (see Figure 6.2). The habitat preference suggests how our distant past lives on in our present. Wilson, later writing with co-author Stephen Kellert, isolates three features that impact modern views of an ideal setting; tellingly, all derive from our ancestral vista:

Figure 6.2 The acacia tree common in a savanna is thought to have been one common element in our primal vista. Source: Wikimedia Commons; Author: Neelix.

… people want to be on a height looking down, they prefer open savanna-like terrain with scattered trees and copses, and they want to be near a body of water, such as a river or lake, even if

all these elements are purely aesthetic and not functional. They will pay enormous prices to have this view. (Wilson and Kellert 1993: 23)

The case Wilson makes is that we can never leave our evolutionary past behind and that we hurt our species’ prospects if we try to. What we can do is work to understand, celebrate, and promote our connections and dependence on nature. This is the tack taken by practitioners of biophilic design. “(T)he human mind and body evolved in a sensorial rich world,” which remains significant for our “health, productivity, emotional, intellectual and even spiritual well-being,” wrote Stephen Kellert, Judith Heerwagen, and Martin Mador (2008) in their introduction to Biophilic Design: The Theory, Science and Practice of Bringing Buildings to Life (p. vii). Advocates of the biophilic approach, such as Kellert, who had been a professor at Yale’s School of Forestry, and colleagues critique most modern building practices for promoting a sense of ‘placelessness’ in the built world: too many new buildings contribute to the visual impoverishment of our cities and towns; too many urban centers heedlessly replicate the concrete canyons of Boston City Hall environs or worse (see Figure 6.3 and Chapter 2). While obviously meeting basic habitat requirements, these structures betray us in the end. The consequences of their construction include “sensory deprivation, where monotony, artificiality and the widespread dulling of the human senses are the norm rather than the exception,” Kellert (2012) wrote in Birthright: People and Nature in the Modern World, as though channeling Jane Jacobs a half century ago (p. 161; Clemenson et al. 2015; Papale et al. 2016).

Figure 6.3 Boston City Hall, at far left, and its immediate surroundings. Repetitive machine-like elevations disconnect us from nature; the buildings do not resemble the lifelike forms and landscapes we evolved within. Source: Ann Sussman.

Aesthetics matter, biophilic designers say. Indeed, they criticized the early green-building movement, which was galvanized by the formation of the non-profit USGBC (US Green Building Council) in Washington, D.C. in 1993, for not going far enough and mentioning aesthetics. The sustainability movement’s work to encourage resource conservation is critical, Kellert wrote. Green building has changed the conversation about construction in the United States in the past two decades, but the movement needs to embrace the significance of personal contact with nature, and of building within a “culturally and ecologically relevant context” (Hosey 2012; Kellert 2012: viii). Without considering how people relate to buildings and appreciate certain forms over others, green building hobbles its own chances of future success. The green movement cannot achieve its

goal of sustainability, Kellert elaborated, because it fell short of nurturing the physical and mental benefits that create emotional attachment to place in the first place, which motivates people to care for their constructions and retain them over the long term (Kellert 2012: 162). Since then, however, sustainability standards have indeed evolved, and continue to do so, embracing the fact people are of nature and need to connect with it. In 2018, the USGBC created its first LEED pilot credit for “Designing with Nature, Biophilic Design for the Indoor Environment” (USGBC 2018; Jiang et al. 2020; USGBC 2020). The trend appears to be gaining a broad foothold. As the Wall Street Journal notes, “buildings are becoming literally green, cities and companies around the world embrace biophilic design,” and are more frequently constructed with some sense of conservation in mind (Wells 2018). What makes the biophilic advocates’ argument powerful is their consideration and dedication to science, including both new research and older evolutionary theory. Acknowledging that nature can also be harsh and scary (people across cultures have a fear of snakes and spiders, for instance), biophilic designers explain that setting out to control the environment is a hallmark of many species, not only human beings. “The urge to master nature is a normal and adaptive tendency,” Kellert wrote in Birthright. “Keystone species,” including elephants, beavers, sea otters, termites, and H. sapiens, are adept at “reshaping their world” (Kellert 2012: 81). However, “no other creature has so mastered and controlled its environment as have modern humans, arguably to an excessive and dysfunctional degree.” It is imperative for all life that our constructions align more carefully and better recognize our place within the natural world. In support of the biophilic approach, its advocates have mined the historical record. They note how 2,000 years ago, Chinese Taoists noticed gardens carried health benefits (Wilson 2006: 326; Scott et al. 2015). In Medieval Europe, monks created elaborate monastery gardens, in part understanding that these soothed the sick (Ulrich 1984: 2). In England, famed nurse Florence Nightingale wrote in her book Notes on Nursing, published in 1860, that “variety of form and brilliancy of color in the objects presented to patients are an actual means of recovery” (Nightingale 1860: 59, as quoted in Wilson 2006:

326). These early observers laid the foundation for the biophilic approach. Now modern research is demonstrating the validity of some of these old insights. Studies show that experiencing nature and its visual complexity, even for a few minutes, even represented in a painting or photograph, reduces stress and has other benefits. In one research study, for instance, anxious patients in a dental clinic were measurably less nervous on days when “a large nature mural” showing a leafy scene decorated the waiting room than on days when the wall was blank (Heerwagen 1990). Another frequently cited research paper by Roger Ulrich, of Texas A&M University, carefully monitored the recovery rates of patients after gallbladder surgery. It found that those patients with hospital windows facing trees “had shorter hospital stays and suffered fewer minor post-surgical complications” than those whose windows faced a brick wall (Ulrich 2002: 7). The lucky patients with green views also requested and took less pain medicine. This type of research obviously has huge implications for the multi-billion-dollar health-care industry and has led to the growing adoption of ‘evidence-based design’ in health-care facilities. Bratman et al. (2012) make the link explicit, arguing that we can harness the “healing power of nature that lies in an unconscious, autonomic response to natural elements that can occur without recognition and most noticeably in individuals who have been stressed before the experience” (p. 122). Simply being close to nature is associated with being happier and experiencing an increased sense of well-being (Nisbet et al. 2011). In a meta-analysis of data from 30 studies on this topic, Capaldi et al. (2014) concluded that people who are more connected to nature “tend to be happier” (p. 10). Studies show exposure to outdoors is particularly important for child health and development (Wilson 2006; Bento and Dias 2017) and link the lack of it to a rise in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in American children. Researchers also report adopting the biophilic approach in office interior design can generate a quantifiable boost in worker productivity (Yin et al. 2018; Bower et al. 2019).2

Beyond increasing our work output, researchers have pinpointed how exposure to nature can enhance our cognitive abilities. Mayer et al. (2009) have their research subjects walk in either a natural setting or an urban setting for 15 minutes and found a meaningful difference, those walking in nature were better able to reflect on a life problem. Likewise, sunlight has been shown to improve attendance and academic achievement for students (Peters 2017). These benefits of nature go beyond individual improvements; they can generate broader community cohesion and welfare. Overall, researchers have found that high levels of greenery in an urban area is correlated with perception of health, where that relationship is strongest among those in vulnerable socio-economic groups (Maas et al. 2006). The primary mechanism appears to be tree plantings. Peters (2017) report that “planting trees, even only ten on a city block, improves health perception in residents in ways comparable to adding $10,000 to their personal salaries, and being seven years younger” (Peters 2017: 26). Planting trees in public housing “increased opportunities for social interactions, monitoring of outdoor areas, and supervision of children” (Coley et al. 1997: 468). Similarly, bringing natural elements into prison facilities has been shown to help inmates get along with each other (López 2014) and to “improve mental health, cognitive functioning and learning; reduce recidivism and increase receptivity for behavioral change and restorative justice opportunities” (Söderlund and Newman 2017: 750). Kellert and other biophilia advocates believe the way forward, elaborating somewhat on Jacobs’ insight that man was “a part of nature,” is for humans to seek “reconciliation if not harmonization with nature” (Kellert 2012: 5). To promote the biophilic approach, Kellert outlines six key elements and more than 70 attributes, suggesting a diversity of feasible approaches and styles in the built environment. In abbreviated form, these are outlined in Table 6.1. Table 6.1 Key elements of biophilic design 1

Environmental features, such as plants, water, sunlight;

2

Natural shapes and forms, including botanical and animal motifs, shells, and spiral forms;

3

Natural processes and patterns; similar forms at different patterns and scales; sensory variability;

4

Light and space; natural light; inside-out spaces;

5

Place-based relationships; geographical connection to place; historical connection made manifest;

6

Evolved human relationships to nature; prospect and refuge, order, and complexity.

Source: Kellert 2012: 171–172.

Figure 6.4 The Great Workroom, SC Johnson, a family-owned company in Racine, Wisconsin by architect Frank Lloyd Wright, 1936, has been called “the most beautiful office space in America.” Wright called the columns, “dendriform,” or tree-shaped; some see them as lily pads. They are 5.6 meters (18.5 feet) in diameter at the top and

23 centimeters (about 9 inches) in diameter at the base. Photo credit: SC Johnson. This book promotes the biophilic approach and focuses on our unconscious human responses to places to most effectively do so. By embracing the fabric that made us, we acknowledge how we are wired to stay connected with the natural world despite a plethora of man-made technologies surrounding us today that detach us from it. “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology,” E. O. Wilson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of On Human Nature, has said (“An Intellectual Entente” 2009). Until we acknowledge this gap between our technical proficiency and animal nature, and work to bridge it, we remain on thin ground. Biophilic design forms part of the platform to healthily structure the path forward. Successful, sustainable design acknowledges the complex systems within us. And, in the twenty-first century we have remarkable tools to help us see them, actually tracking our implicit experiences, as outlined next, in Chapter 7, ‘Buildings, Biology + Biometrics: Collecting Empirical Data for Evidence-Based Design.’

Figure 6.5 Columns in thirteenth-century Chartres Cathedral interior, Chartres, France. The space emotionally engages us no matter our background or creed; it reads as a sacred forest. Source: Rama, ‘Own work,’ Wikimedia Commons, August 11, 2009.

Figure 6.6 Five-hundred to seven-hundred-year-old Redwoods in Humboldt Redwoods State Park, Northern California. It has been said that nature provides the template for our most elegant and aweinspiring architecture. Source: Jason Sturner (www.flickr.com/photos/50352333@N06/4644487863/), Wikimedia Commons, June 28, 2008.

Exercise for Chapter 6: Nature Is Our Context In the photographs on preceding pages (see Figures 6.4–6.6), analyze how the natural world provided a template for each design; also describe aspects of the design that specifically address human needs and are not found in nature. Select a favorite building or urban plan and analyze it in terms of the four principles articulated earlier in this book that describe human responses to the built environment: Edges Matter, Patterns Matter, Shapes Carry Weight, and Storytelling Is Key. How is this approach useful? Could it be improved? What might it overlook?

Notes 1 Copyright © 1984 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. 2 In one study of employees at the Herman Miller office furniture company, it was found that adding interior vegetation, natural light, and outdoor seating to an office measurably increased worker productivity and well-being (greenplantsforgreenbuildings.org/greenplant-benefits/).

7 Buildings, Biology + Biometrics: Collecting Empirical Data for Evidence-Based Design

“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology… until we answer those huge questions of philosophy…—Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going? —rationally,” we’re on very thin ground. – Edward O. Wilson, ‘An Intellectual Entente,’ 2009

Some quotes are so good that they deserve repeating, like the one above which ended the last chapter and starts this one. We use it here to emphasize the remarkable times we are in, in the first decades of the twenty-first century. On the one hand, we have astonishing technologies that let us create and communicate in ways unimaginable in earlier eras. They are, indeed, “godlike,” as Wilson notes above. On the other hand, when we use these tools to better understand ourselves, teasing apart the way stimuli impact our bodies and brains, determining our behavior without our conscious input or control, we confront something else entirely: our intrinsic animal nature. So, ironically, our new modern devices can get us to face something we tend to brush aside, the fact we are bipedal primates—truly animal. They help us see how often behaviors that we don’t even realize we carry, such as how our eyes instinctively move at first glance, are preset, an artifact of a long evolutionary trip in the wild. A theme of this book, delved into more deeply here, is how

astute designers today acknowledge the gap, mind it, and work to bridge it. How we can get hard data on our unconscious behavior and our actual physical responses as we experience buildings is the subject of this chapter. It helps us ‘see’ who we are, reviewing tools that reveal the ‘unseen,’ and changes our understanding of how architecture impacts people and gives designers and planners new terms to describe the human experience, new ways to assess projects before they’re built, and even new metrics for determining how and what to build in the first place. We can now get the facts on how edges, patterns, shapes, biophilic elements, mentioned in earlier chapters impact us, and the way adjusting them changes experience, allowing us to predict whether a new environment will soothe or stress, prove inviting or repel. Another theme of this book is how unconscious brain and body behaviors direct us whether we like it or not. The UC San Diego design-research guru Don Norman (2013) reiterates the same point in his book, The Design of Everyday Things. “We have to accept human behavior the way it is,” Norman writes, “not the way we would wish it to be” (Norman 2013: 6). Norman coined the term UX, or user experience in 1998, “to cover all aspects of the person’s experience with the system” (Hellweger and Wang 2015). He has further elaborated human-centered design (HCD) as putting “human needs, capabilities, and behavior first, then design(ing) to accommodate those needs, capabilities and ways of behaving,” (Norman 2013: 8) and ensuring design starts with “a good understanding of people” (2013: 8). A Vice President at Apple (and its first user experience architect from 1993 to 1996), Norman’s expertise is product design which encompasses shaping everything from door handles to digital devices. And, since we do only have one brain, his thinking can be applied to everything we design, plan, and build. Design is hard, Norman notes, because so much of human behavior occurs subliminally, or “without conscious awareness – we often don’t know what we are about to do, say, or think until after we have done it” (2013: 47). Further clarifying the issue, he elaborates the key reason designs fail—designers never consider the central aspect of the human experience: emotions.

Emotion is highly underrated. In fact, the emotional system is a powerful information processing system that works in tandem with cognition. Cognition attempts to make sense of the world: emotion assigns value. It is the emotional system that determines whether a situation is safe or threatening, whether something that is happening is good or bad, desirable or not. Cognition provides understanding: emotion provides value judgements. (Norman 2013: 47)

Whether we talk about it or not, all architecture and planning creates an emotional experience. The best buildings and urban planning, like the best product design, work well and become timeless, by providing a positive emotional experience. “Cognition and emotion cannot be separated. Cognitive thoughts lead to emotions: emotions drive cognitive thoughts,” Norman notes, which explains why the best design makes for “pleasurable experiences” (2013: 47). On a similar note, seeking to reverse our entrenched cultural bias to diminish emotion, renowned neuroanatomist Dr Jill Bolte Taylor says, “Although many of us may think of ourselves as thinking creatures that feel – biologically we are feeling creatures that think,” in her popular 2008 TED Talk, ‘My Stroke of Insight,’ which has had 26 million views as of 2020. This ability to really look at how human experience happens and include emotions and feelings and tease them apart is how twentyfirst-century design thinking separates itself from twentieth century. It embraces the body and the fact all design is about ‘interaction,’ as Norman explains between people and technology when it comes to product design (Norman 2013: 5), or between people—that is, real human bodies—and their surroundings, as this book elaborates. Today’s cognitive scientists study how these interactions happen in microseconds, incorporating information theory, the field that studies data communication in systems. Encyclopedia Britannica (2017) reports that “the human body sends 11 million bits (units of information) per second to the brain for processing, yet the conscious mind seems to be able to process only 50 bits per second,” revealing the astonishing extent that the workings of the brain lie almost completely outside our awareness (Markowsky 2017).

One simplified way of dealing with this torrent of stimuli, understanding how it creates our experience, including emotion, unconsciously, is by viewing it as tripartite, or as “three levels of processing: visceral, behavioral and reflective” (Norman 2013: 50). Visceral, meaning in the physical body, is the most basic and immediate, coming from the most antique part of the nervous system, sometimes called reptilian (see Appendix). Unconscious visceral responses make instant assessments of our surroundings, form the root of emotions, and link to our muscles, enabling our survival: they get us into fight, flight, or freeze mode depending on encountered stimuli: think of a deer ‘freezing’ in headlights. Behavioral processes are mostly unconscious too. They get our muscles to reach for a coffee cup without consciously being aware of how we got our arm, hand, and fingers to do it. This is “the home of learned skills” (Norman 2013: 51). It is when we get to the third, slower, reflective processing level that we are in the realm of conscious thought. Here we plan, assess, decide about actions. All three processing levels continually interact, of course, work together, influence each other, and determine our response to place. Twenty-first-century designers separate themselves from twentieth- century ones by acknowledging and designing for this subliminal reality. They can use the astonishing tools alluded to at the start of this chapter that make our invisible behaviors visible, including eye tracking, which follows our conscious and unconscious eye movements, facial expression analysis software, which decodes our facial expressions, keying into our shifting emotional states, and EEG or electroencephalogram which measures our brain waves. Others include galvanic skin responders (GSR), or electrodermal activity (EDA), which track our sweat gland activity and offer insight into how quickly emotional arousal happens, both positive and negative (Boucsein 2012). The global market for these tools, known as biometrics, is expected to explode from 2.0 billion U.S. dollars in 2015 to 14.9 billion U.S. dollars by 2024 (Villa et al. 2018: 348). Automotive, computer, advertising, AI, and movie-making industries take advantage of them to better understand the client, predict our behaviors, and make for smoother user experience. You don’t need a

password to open your iPhone anymore, because since 2017, the phone using biometrics can be configured to recognize you! Of all the metrics, the one with particular salience for architecture and urban planning is eye tracking (Duchowski 2007; Hollander et al. 2020). Given that vision is the pre-eminent human sense, as noted in Chapter 3, and that more of our brain is devoted to visual processing than any other sense, this make sense. Information theory revealing that 10 million of the 11 million bits of data going into your brain every second are visual emphasizes the significance of this biological bias. Touting eye-tracking benefits in research, a computer scientist notes, We may presume that if we can track someone’s eye movements, we can follow along the path of attention deployed by the observer. This may give us some insight into what the observer found interesting, that is, what drew their attention. (Duchowski 2007: 3)

Given this reality, it fits that business schools in the twenty-first century, including American University in Washington, DC, since 2011, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, since 2016, offer eye-tracking labs. These centers allow students to study the impact of advertisements, product designs, or logos on human experience and see how ‘invisible’ behaviors, like the way our eyes move without our conscious control, drive our experience and subsequent actions.

Eye Tracking is Key Eye-tracking studies in architecture and urban planning are becoming more common (Hollander et al. 2019, 2020). Researchers at Amsterdam University use eye tracking to understand the attributes of healthy urban density in the Dutch capital, which is under pressure to build housing (Hollander and Sussman 2021). In Melbourne, Australia, landscape architects eye-tracked urban parks to discover the natural features which prove most eye-catching (Amati et al. 2018). A study at the University of Sheffield, UK demonstrated the importance of ground-floor detail on buildings and how these drive visual engagement with street edges, noting this attribute is frequently missing in new developments (Simpson et al. 2019). Our first eye-tracking study done at Tufts University, for the City of New York, helped us quickly appreciate why the technology is gamechanging (Hollander et al. 2021a). A bit like looking at a slide of pond water under a microscope the first time, eye tracking makes you reassess the ‘reality’ of the built environment, and changes how you see yourself and the world around you. In our New York study, we eye-tracked photos of building facades and streetscapes, using a lab setup with an eye tracker in front of a monitor (Hollander et al. 2020). Sixty-three volunteers filed into our lab over several days to take part; we split them into two groups and each volunteer spent about ten minutes viewing 40 different images on screen. In the following pages, we review key findings from this eye-tracking architecture project and others that followed.

People Ignore Blank Facades We learned quickly how the brain directs a viewer to take in a building very differently depending on the placement of its windows and doors. Below are two elevations of the Stapleton Library, a public facility in Staten Island, New York. One, on the right, shows the actual library; on the left is a photoshopped version with arched windows removed (see Figure 7.1).

Figure 7.1 Stapleton Library in Staten Island, New York, with windows photoshopped away, at left; the original building, at right. Source: Ann Sussman and Justin Hollander.

In a 15-second testing interval (Figure 7.2), the brain made viewers focus on the entire facade with windows, and effectively ignore the building, save its door, when it did not have them. In the images above, the bright yellow circles above represent “fixations” that show where eyes rest as they take in the scene; the lines between are the “saccades” that follow the movement between fixations. On average, viewers moved their eyes 45 times per testing interval, with little to no conscious effort or awareness on their part, and no direction on ours. With this simple study, we saw how windows made people spend more time focusing on the building, literally taking it in. And this turns out to be quite consequential, as spending more time focusing on the facade makes people more likely to make a memory of the place,

with the brain more actively engaged in creating a sense of the space. Eye tracking helps us understand the truth behind the adage, ‘Out of sight, out of mind.’ And the Italian one, ‘Lontano dagli occhi, lontano dal cuore,’ far from the eye, far from the heart (Schwedes and Wentura 2016).

Figure 7.2 Eye-tracked Stapleton Library, without and with its existing windows using iMotions biometric software. Source: Ann Sussman and Justin Hollander.

Aggregating the data from multiple viewers, the photos above show heat maps, key and very useful eye-tracking output. (see Figure 7.3) Glowing bright red where people look most, then fading to green, and showing no color at all over areas ignored, the heat maps indicate at a glance how people visually engage with what is in front of them. They suggest, again, why fenestration patterns matter: the windows keep subjects fixating on the facade, providing areas of contrast the eyes seem to innately seek and keep sticking to. Our New York study and follow-up ones found that buildings with punched windows or symmetrical areas of high contrast perennially caught the eye; those without did not (Hollander and Sussman 2021). Intriguingly, in follow-up preference surveys where people were asked where they would rather stand or wait, in front of the blank building or the one with windows, they consistently picked the facade with windows. It appears that the unconscious behavior tracked here, fixations made without awareness, implicitly directs this outcome.

Figure 7.3 Heat maps, aggregating eye-tracking data, glow brightest where people look most; study conducted with iMotions biometric software. Source: Ann Sussman and Justin Hollander.

Very different architecture, also from our New York study, produced similar results. Here is the Weeksville Heritage Center (c. 2013) in Brooklyn, New York, a multi-disciplinary museum dedicated to preserving the history of a local nineteenth-century African-American community (Figure 7.4).

Figure 7.4 Weeksville Heritage Center, a museum in Brooklyn, New York. Source: Ann Sussman.

We photoshopped in some windows to the facade as it exists, above, to create the one below and then eye-tracked both (Figure 7.5).

Figure 7.5 Weeksville Heritage Center, New York City, with added windows. Source: Ann Sussman.

We again found that blank facades got little attention and that discrete areas of contrast, even on a high-rise tower a block away, instantly drew the eye (Figure 7.6).

Figure 7.6 Eye-tracked Weeksville Heritage Center, New York City; heat maps created with iMotions biometric software. Source: Ann Sussman.

Windows added, even dark ones, increase engagement with the front facade, apparently drawing views away from the high-rise. Note how the heat map on the tower, below, loses its red glow once the lower elevation gets windows (Figure 7.7).

Figure 7.7 Eye-tracked Weeksville Heritage Center, photoshopped; heat maps created with iMotions biometric software. Source: Ann Sussman.

Like the featureless wood facade, one that is all glass does not engage viewers either. Below is the Queens Library at Flushing, New York City (c. 2008) (Figure 7.8).

Figure 7.8 Queens Library, Flushing, New York City. Source: Ann Sussman.

Eye tracking reveals that people barely gave the enormous glass façade here a glance, despite its size. It is the white-contrasting bus roof, the people, both real and in advertisements and banners, that caught their eye in the scene, along with the red traffic light and flag (Figure 7.9).

Figure 7.9 Heat map of street scene outside Queens Library, Flushing, New York City, analyzed with iMotions biometric software. Source: Ann Sussman.

People Seek Out People Continually Remarkably, even though the Queens Library is centrally placed in the image and takes up most of it, with contrasting reflections of adjacent buildings on its glassy front, viewers barely looked at it, with the exception of the letters spelling out its name above the bus. Instead, they fixated on people crossing the street, waiting on the sidewalk, or the banner and poster displaying faces by the road. Secondarily, they seemed to focus on areas of high contrast in the image such as the flag at half-mast. As noted in Chapter 3, the human brain is hardwired to look for and focus on other people, even mere suggestions of them in profile or shadow. Eye tracking helps you ‘see’ how this hidden people-bias directs our lives, happening very quickly, subliminally, all the time. An earlier pilot-study we did at Boston’s Institute for HumanCentered Design drove home the people-bias point, too (Sussman and Ward 2016). The photos in Figure 7.10 show Boston’s famous Copley Square with its historic Trinity Church (c. 1877) and iconic Hancock Tower (c. 1976). The glass tower, changing hands in 2010, is now called 200 Clarendon, and in 2015 featured a temporary art installation of a man standing on a raft. Guess what detail grabbed viewers’ attention most? If you chose the small silhouette of the floating man on a raft, you are right. Richardsonian Romanesque has its appeal, and people did look at the church first, but when it comes to the human form, the brain couldn’t help but go for it, creating the reddest heat map around him. Otherwise, people hardly looked at the skyscraper; it simply could not provide fodder for focus from the brain’s 3.8 billion-year perspective.

Figure 7.10 Copley Square Boston with historic Trinity Church and iconic Hancock Tower, eye-tracked with iMotions biometric software. Source: Ann Sussman and Janice M. Ward.

Ironically, eye-tracking studies of architecture continually reveal how much our brain is hardwired to look for and at other people without our conscious awareness, making real, and more accessible, the science discussed in Chapter 3. We’re a social species and so this makes sense. Human perception is relational; in other words, it is specifically designed to look for and take in others. Or, put another way, we are hardwired for social engagement, built to see and interact with others. Eye-tracking studies bear this out. Yes, architecture matters, but from our brain’s perspective, people matter more, no matter where they are, even when plastered on an image between the 44th and 50th floor of a high-rise (Hollander and Sussman 2021) (Figure 7.11).

Figure 7.11 High Bridge, New York City with existing water tower and with it removed. Source: Ann Sussman and Justin Hollander.

People Look to Orient + for Edges Eye tracking is also excellent for appreciating other hidden human biases, including our innate vigilance, a vestige of our long evolutionary trip. Surviving in the wild more than 95% of our time on planet promoted the development of the human brain as “the most advanced surveillance system you will ever find,” as the Nobel Prizewinning neuroscientists, Mary-Britt and Edvard Moser, put it (Moser and Moser 2014). With eye tracking you start to ‘see’ how this is true, appreciating how hard the brain works subliminally to orient and keep us safe in a space. For instance, above, we studied how people take in The High Bridge, the oldest bridge in New York City, which was renovated as a walkway between Manhattan and the Bronx in 2015. At left is the bridge today, and at right is the same scene with the distant water tower and closest street lamp photoshopped away. Eye tracking both images shows how people on the bridge instinctively use the tower as a prime orientation point (Figure 7.12).

Figure 7.12 Heat maps of High Bridge, New York City with existing water tower and with it removed; analyzed with iMotions biometric software. Source: Ann Sussman and Justin Hollander.

With the tower removed, the brain does not let viewers focus on the other side of the bridge as much, directing their attention instead to close-in surroundings, the railings and patterned walkway; note how these glow greener in the image, at right, and the red heat map shrinks in size. With their attention dispersed, the brain gets people to look more at edge conditions, suggesting any movement forward would be hampered, and pedestrians would be less likely to even consider crossing the bridge.

Why Gaze Path Is Everything A superpower of the technology is its ability to make the invisible visual sequence your eyes make in fractions of a second visible. This critical metric for advertisers, decoding how visual stimuli enters the brain and how it chooses what part of an ad to make our eyes focus on without our awareness or control, can help us understand and predict human behavior around buildings (Figure 7.13).

Figure 7.13 Eye-tracking data creates visual sequence diagrams, or gaze paths, which follow how viewers look at a scene; study conducted with iMotions biometric software. Source: Ann Sussman and Justin Hollander.

For instance, returning to the Stapleton Library study, eye tracking indicated that people find the front door in under a second when it is without windows. The image at left shows the TTFF (or Time to First Fixation) is 0.9 seconds for the door. It takes just a fraction-of-asecond longer to find the door when the library has windows, TTFF: 1.2 seconds, see image at right. However, without windows, by the second fixation (TTFF: 12.6 s) almost half of viewers focus beyond the building (Ratio: 12/30). With windows, the brain does not let this happen. Note how fixations 2, 3, and 5 keep people focusing back on the front facade. No wonder, in preference surveys, as mentioned earlier, participants said they would rather stand and wait for

someone in front of the building with windows rather than the one without them. With eye tracking we ‘see’ the invisible actions anchoring them to a place, understanding why twenty-first-century designers root their work in the unconscious, instinctual experience (Figure 7.14).

Figure 7.14 Queens Library,Flushing,New York City gaze sequence analysis creates a shadow study glowing white where people look most,fading gray in areas ignored; with iMotions biometric software. Source: Ann Sussman.

So gaze path, by revealing subliminal fixation sequences, not only tells us how quickly people find a front door, it lets us predict ‘lingerability’—whether people will hang out around a building, giving us a new tool for basic architectural and planning evaluation. It allows us to ask really key questions such as, will people subliminally attach to this building? The study of the Queens Library, above, for instance, which aggregating eye-tracking data glows bright white where people look most, suggests not. The glassy library provides almost no engagement. While Fixation 1 is on the building (and bright white bus), Fixations 2, 3, 4, and 5 fall on people or images of them nearby

(a woman in a yoga pose, a face on a banner); Fixation 6 is on a traffic light, Fixation 7 on the flag. From the brain’s at-a-glance perspective, the Queens Library isn’t there. Nothing of import lies ahead. Put another way, eye tracking can help us forecast imageability, the term Kevin Lynch (1968) coined for how well a building “evokes a clear mental image” in the mind of the observer. This matters because it suggests that the biometric tool can create metrics for predicting how well a new building will help people orient and make a coherent sense of place.

Evidence-based Design Giving us the hard data on how engagement and human-building interactions happen, eye tracking can help improve the public realm. By eye tracking design interventions before they are made, we can determine how and whether they engage people (Figure 7.15).

Figure 7.15 Perception of the wall greeting subway riders getting off the train in Somerville, Massachusetts, changes with art—a place previously ignored becomes a focal point; heat maps created with iMotions biometric software. Source: Dan Bartman, Janice M. Ward, and Ann Sussman.

For instance, in the pilot-study above using photos provided by the City of Somerville, we tracked the human experience of a blank, unwelcoming concrete wall (at bottom left) that greets train riders as

they exit the transit station at Somerville’s busy Davis Square, near Boston. No acknowledgment of the human need for orientation or connection exists in this place. The heat map shows the biggest, reddest dots at its edges, suggesting the first thing people do arriving at the Davis stop is literally avoid looking at what greets them. Add a design intervention, however, such as a blue Matisse-like art to the blank concrete, and behavior shifts; people will fixate in the center of the wall (image at top right) no longer paying as much attention to its edges. Combine this metric with preference testing and/or biometric tools that track arousal or facial expression, and you begin to get the hard data on how stressful the current subway surroundings are, and how soothing and delightful they could become with simple interventions. Our physical responses to the environment matter and to design healthy places for people we need to take them into account.

People Favor Organized Complexity Eye-tracking studies also reveal the importance of fractals and biophilic elements discussed in Chapters 4 and 6. Research has shown people favor taking in organized complexity rather than disorganized, random, or blank arrangements (Taylor 2011; Salingaros 2014), something our preliminary studies and preference surveys support, too (Figure 7.16).

Figure 7.16 The blank side of a parking garage in Somerville, Massachusetts directs viewers to focus down an adjacent side street; with added Matisse-like art, gaze pattern shifts to focus on garage itself, making it more of a place. Source: Dan Bartman, Janice M. Ward, and Ann Sussman.

For instance, in the project above, we looked at the impact of adding art to a blank wall dominating an urban scene in Somerville, Massachusetts. We found that people went straight to focus on the

colorful Matisse-like mural on the side of a parking garage when it had the fractal-like art; note the heat map glows reddest there (see image at right). In contrast, the actual existing blank wall could not draw the eye in the same organized fashion, so people spent more time looking away from the building and down a side street (see red heat map at left) (Sussman and Ward 2017). Studies like these make real the three-part science behind human behavior that Don Norman describes: the visceral, behavioral, and finally conscious and reflective processing. They allow us to ‘see’ the immense significance of our unconscious activity and again how it creates the foundation of architectural experience.

Biometrics Reveal Internal Brain Design Biometrics can help us better grasp new findings in neuroscience, too. Take the image of the ‘Thatcherized face’ from Chapter 3, also in Figure 7.17; we eye-tracked the image and learned, just like the psychologist Peter Thompson, that people found Maggie’s most distorted face the most riveting (see the reddest heat map). They couldn’t help but focus on it. Here you ‘see’ the impact of having specific regions in the brain, called face patches, which ‘go wild’ when they take in contorted expressions, determining where we focus without our conscious awareness or control.

Figure 7.17 Eye-tracked ‘Thatcherized’ images of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher from an official photograph. In our study, 33 test subjects looked at the image at left, in a 15-second interval; the reddest heat maps created, at right, indicate they found the most distorted right-side-up face, the most riveting, with iMotions biometric software. Source: Nora Shull and Ann Sussman.

Biometrics for Assessing Walkability Biometrics can help us understand our experience of the built environment in other ways too, by giving important insights into questions such as why some streets invite walkability more than others (Figure 7.18).

Figure 7.18 Suburban subdivision in Ayer, Massachusetts above left; new urbanist subdivision in Devens, Massachusetts at right. Source: Ann Sussman.

For example, in the images of suburban streets in western Massachusetts, above, which catches your eye? Where do you think you are more likely to find people walking? The subdivision at left, or the one at right, with the residences close-in and aligned?

If you chosethe street with denser residences on the right, you’re correct! We used biometrics to predict these outcomes, in this instance with 3M VAS or Visual Attention Software, which emulates an eye-tracking study algorithmically, simulating how people view things in the first 3– 5 seconds, during pre-attentive processing, or before conscious viewing begins. Like eye tracking, VAS creates heat maps and other outputs to reveal the way we unconsciously take in our surroundings (3M, 2020; Hollander et al. 2021b) (Figure 7.19).

Figure 7.19 Gaze path moves skyward in a typical car-centric subdivision, at left, while it remains grounded and focused at street level in the new urbanist development, at right. Source: Ann Sussman.

Making the invisible visible, VAS predicts how the eye will take a very diverse gaze path, or visual sequence, when viewing these scenes. In this study, prepared for the Devens Enterprise Commission in central Massachusetts, we learned how typical streets in U.S.-car-centric-subdivisions, such as at left, make viewers implicitly look straight ahead and then skyward, up at trees (Hollander et al. 2021a). This makes a great deal of sense once you think about it; it is the optimal view of a driver, preoccupied with getting somewhere fast, needing to focus on the road out front. New urbanist or more old-fashioned housing on the right, however, including newly constructed Chance Street in Devens, produces the opposite, a gaze path along the street, following the building edges, directing the

viewer to stay focused at grade level. This reveals the secret behind why the new urbanist street will always invite people to walk, and why the car-centric development can’t. Even with sidewalks, it will always be harder for pedestrians to move through a typical car-centric subdivision, because the brain keeps them focusing skyward, away from their immediate surroundings which they actually need to subliminally fixate on to most effortlessly move forward (Hollander et al. 2021a) (Figure 7.20).

Figure 7.20 Region of Interest diagrams (ROIs) indicate where viewers’ focus falls most in the first-glance at a scene; analyzed with 3M VAS (Visual Attention Software). Source: Hollander et al. 2021.

VAS also creates regions of interest (ROIs) diagrams, outlined in red and yellow above, which predict where viewers likely look most, and supports the visual sequence results. We discover here how much the houses with porches and columns really grab attention (85% of views). Again, distinctly different than the car-centric suburban street where the views to the horizon, sky and trees, not the street edges, dominate: see the red circle at left, showing where 79% of views are predicted to fall. Biometric studies like this reveal a lot about us and our behavior in the built environment, including the hidden process behind walkability, looking at how we ‘fixate’ without conscious awareness, and then move our attention and/or our bodies toward the fixation points our eyes have settled on. Walking on two feet turns out to be quite complicated for a primate and is most easily done with automaticity,

or without having to put much conscious thought into it (Clark 2015). And so, streets that provide the requisite, at-grade visual sequencing promote walking, while car-centric subdivisions cannot. Your brain, not seeing a consistent close-in edge on the typical suburban street, won’t consider walking there, and doesn’t let you imagine it, and so, people don’t. Why should this matter? Because people need to walk; it’s what we’re built to do. For health and well-being, walking is actually ‘a superpower,’ neuroscientists report; it makes us “healthier, happier and brainier” (Fleming 2019), something that sitting in a car, no matter how much it may move us, can never do. In sum, we really do need to keep putting one foot in front of the other, and build places that create the right string of subliminal fixation points to make that happen (Figure 7.21).

Figure 7.21 Gaze path studies show how people implicitly ignore the new Art Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, at bottom of image below, but are drawn to look at the sculpture at its entrance, and the adjacent nineteenth-century commercial building; analysis with 3M VAS (Visual Attention Software). Source: Ann Sussman.

The Power of Biometrics for Post-Occupancy Evaluation Revealing the secret behind walkability, biometrics can also add insight into how and why building changes over time. For example, in the study above, we find old and new buildings in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio. The top shows a nineteenth-century commercial one, and at bottom, a new museum, the Cincinnati Arts Center, c. 2003, next door. VAS studies of both indicate that the new arts center does not draw the eye. So, it fits that a decade after its opening, in 2014, Metrobot, a sculpture in the museum’s collection by Nam June Paik, was installed permanently outside the center’s front door (Engebrecht 2014). This gives the facade an identity, captures views, and would help visitors locate the door, making it more likely that they enter, or think about the museum as they pass by in a car. The notion that architects should study the impact of buildings on how we function in and around them, or perform post-occupancy evaluations, has grown since the 1960s (Preiser et al. 2015). The chapter outlines a potential new role of biometrics in these evaluations, showing how to get hard data on how the built environment actually invisibly impacts us. Armed with these facts it is easier to build more appropriately for people. As Don Norman notes, understanding implicit responses drives successful product design. Similarly, acknowledging and paying close attention to our invisible behaviors in the built environment, such as where our eyes fixate without our conscious control, promote successful, sustainable design in architecture and urban planning. In the next chapter, we elaborate how significant these findings actually are, for it turns out by reframing our understanding of how architectural experience happens, biometrics promotes something more: reframing the history of how modern architecture came about itself.

8 The Twenty-First-Century Paradigm Shift in Biology and Psychology Reframes Architecture + Its History

We cannot command Nature except by obeying her. Frances Bacon (1561–1626)

In 2012, the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) in Paris announced that the twenty-first century marked the dawn of a new time. In a compelling 13-slide PowerPoint, lead OECD scientist Anne Glover explained, “Each century has been coined by scientific and technological progress.” The nineteenth century was the “Age of Engineering,” the twentieth century, the “Age of Chemistry and Physics,” and in the twenty-first century we are in another new time: “The Age of Biology.” Her slides presented shifts with emblematic inventions of each period, whose one-time novelty is often forgotten; the nineteenth century with images of a train and telegraph, the twentieth century, with an X-ray and plastics, and the twenty-first century with DNA sequences and a photograph of a famed sprinter, an amputee who, in a historic first in 2012, made the Olympics. The point is that paradigm shifts, or changing the assumptions that underlie how we think, are transformational. They change not only what we do, like enter a running race on blades, listen to recorded music, or store soda in plastic bottles, as Figure 8.1 shows, but how

we think about and see ourselves. Paradigm shifts mark an inflection point; they make previously unimaginable behaviors feasible. They rewrite narratives about who we are and how we came to be and reframe how we see our own history including even how we understand the history of modern architecture itself, as this chapter will elaborate.

Figure 8.1 The twenty-first century: The Age of Biology, Slideshow from the OECD 2012. Source: https://www.oecd.org/sti/emerging-tech/A%20Glover.pdf.

This book, Cognitive Architecture, is an artifact of the latest shift from the Age of Chemistry and Physics to the Age of Biology. The biometric technologies reviewed in the last chapter allow us to understand the impact of new buildings on our nervous system in new ways, with eye tracking making them visual, helping us more easily ‘see’ how designs impact behavior and influence health and well-being. The increased availability of these tools allows us to do remarkable new things too, like determine how people actually look at a book when they first pick it up! Figure 8.2 is the eye-tracked paperback version of the first edition of this book, showing how the faces on the cover at the top left draw the most attention—note the location of the reddest heat map.1 This demonstrates the science reviewed in Chapter 3, ‘Patterns Matter,’ in an efficient way, showing how much looking at and for faces frames our experience without our conscious awareness or control. By eye tracking a book cover, we can predict how future readers will look at the book too, knowing their brains, in most instances, will never let them do otherwise.

Figure 8.2 Eye tracking a book cover, above left, creates the heat map, at right, revealing where people initially look most.

The Twenty-First-Century Paradigm Shift in Psychology A theme of this book, how subliminal processing, responding to environmental stimuli in ways we don’t control, directs our behavior in the built environment, is also part of the twenty-first-century paradigm shift in psychology, moving the field from prioritizing conscious to unconscious behaviors and responses (Cortina and Liotti 2007). Psychologists, including Alan Schore, explain how the advent of neuroimaging technologies in the 1990s “allowed for studies of the rapid processing of cognitive and emotional information by brain systems in real time,” leading to new appreciation of our brain architecture (Schore 2011). We have two hemispheres, left and right, and the paradigm shift emphasizes the role of the previously underappreciated right hemisphere. Schore explains the unique intuitive capacities of the right hemisphere as the essence of the current shift, from the ‘analytical’ and ‘conscious’ thinking of the brain’s left hemisphere that dominated thinking in the twentieth century to the ‘integrative, unconscious, non-verbal’ right hemisphere that defines its parameters today (see Figure 8.3).

Figure 8.3 The unique capacities of the right hemisphere are the essence of the twenty-first-century paradigm shift, moving from the analytical and conscious thinking of the brain’s left hemisphere to acknowledge the unconscious, non-verbal capacities of the right. Source: Alan Schore, Image Wikimedia commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cerebral_lobes.png.

The Twenty-First-Century Paradigm Shift in Architecture + Planning Paradigm shifts by definition express themselves simultaneously in unrelated fields, occurring across disciplines, as philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn says (Kuhn and Hacking 2012). In architecture and planning, the shift makes for radical transformation. Significantly, this new way of thinking acknowledges that designing for people has essential, or built-in, limitations. Unconscious processing, the responses our bodies and brains make to visual and external stimuli without our awareness, sets the stage for our responses and behaviors—whether we walk down a street or hurry into a car, linger in front of a building or feel too scared to think of doing so. Responsible designers accept how these hidden traits determine our experience and well-being, acknowledging their existence, and build to meet them. Here we confront a fact that car companies and advertisers have successfully capitalized on for years, that humans always look for people and have a face-bias that defines the species, as discussed in Chapter 3. These consumer experts understand that human reality is a ‘construct’ between eye and brain, and our hidden brain architecture, which is ancient and unchanged for some 40,000 years, subliminally directs our behavior (Neubauer et al. 2018). They know evolution sets parameters for design; it is important architects and planners accept this reality, too. When they ignore this fact, and go outside its parameters, there is generally a cost; streets become ‘avoidant,’ less walkable, and more stressful for our nervous system to take in. Buildings become hard to look at and our habitats more inhumane; we create places for people that are placeless, where we don’t really feel comfortable or want to be. Biometric tools, including eye tracking, as reviewed in earlier chapters, create a great window to see how these instant, subliminal behaviors begin and set the foundation for architectural experience. Take the photos, for instance in Figure 8.4.

Figure 8.4 At top left, MassArt Design and Media Center (c. 2016), a public college of applied art in Downtown Boston; at top right, George Wythe House (c. 1754), a historic site in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia; both images analyzed with 3M Visual Attention Software (VAS). Source: Becky Chen.

These show a historic Georgian house (c. 1754) and modern glass building (c. 2016) analyzed with biometric software (3MVAS), and indicate how differently people will take them in, in the first 3–5 seconds (or preattentively) before conscious awareness kicks in. The heat maps (at bottom) and region of interest diagrams (in middle) predict people initially avoid looking at the glass structure almost entirely—it is implicitly ‘avoidant’—while our brain directs us to do the very opposite with the old brick one: there people focus straight on the front door! The study lets us confidently predict the building where people will not only most easily find their way in but which will most likely appear on a local postcard or tourist guide: the eighteenth century one! It’s magnetic. Because people readily focus on the Georgian structure, they are also more likely to make a memory of it (Ryan et al. 2020). And that’s significant; fixations, or focal points, bring the world to us visually and lay the foundation for creating a sense of place. And place-making matters, particularly today, when in the United States there is an epidemic of placelessness, as authors from Jane Jacobs to James Howard Kunstler have detailed at some length since the 1960s, in well-known books, including The Death and Life of American Cities (Jacobs 1961), and Home from Nowhere, Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st Century (Kunstler 1996).2 Successful designs work well “because they are consistent with human psychological needs that are probably universal and haven’t changed over time,” Kunstler writes in Home from Nowhere (1996: 18). With biometric tools and the paradigm shift in biology and psychology, we can see how he is right and we can start to discern the mechanisms that allow people to take in their surroundings and secure themselves in a place. Eye-tracking research repeatedly suggests that the attachments we make without conscious effort keep us connecting and feeling connected to the places around us (Noland et al. 2017; Hollander et al. 2019; Hollander et al. 2020). Like the eighteenth-century Wythe House in Colonial Williamsburg, people find the Old State House, c. 1713, in downtown Boston, magnetic. An eye-tracking study reveals that within five seconds, they will focus on the central portion of its facade and easily find its door (see Figure 8.5).

Figure 8.5 Boston’s Old State House, c. 1713, eye tracked with iMotions software proves magnetic; inherently ‘approachable,’ the historic Georgian building is featured in many tour guides and postcards of the city. Source: Ann Sussman.

The time to first fixation (TTFF) on the center of State House is under a second, 0.8 s, in study image above and in under five seconds (4.4 s) almost half of its 33 test subjects fixated on its entrance (Sussman and Ward 2020). No wonder the old brick building turns up on so many city postcards and guidebooks, no surprise it forms a proud part of Boston’s identity! It has to; for no matter the century, the brain unconsciously directs people to look at it. And eyetracking studies suggest how people effortlessly embrace places where they easily preattentively attach. The consistent ease with which the human brain fixates on traditional and vernacular architecture is remarkable; equally intriguing is the way the brain directs people to avoid looking at modern ones. In biometric comparisons, we have consistently found traditional facades grabbing attention while most modern ones do not (Hollander et al. 2019, 2020; Hollander and Sussman 2021). In the comparison presented in Figure 8.6, for instance, between a nineteenth-century carriage house in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a twenty-first-century library in Queens, New York, viewers are predicted to initially focus on the central door and round symmetrical windows of the old building (see the reddest heat maps), while they focus most on areas outside or at edges of the new one (note library’s reddest heat maps fall on adjacent bench, fire hydrant, and its book drop). When it comes to the new library, the brain informs the viewer nothing of import lies ahead.3

Figure 8.6 Biometric analysis of nineteenth-century carriage house contrasted with twenty- first-century library, using 3M Visual Attention Software (VAS); the heat map shows how the older facade inherently draws attention while the newer one does not. Source: Ann Sussman.

The exciting aspect of the twenty-first-century paradigm shift is not only the ability to make these comparisons and predict our responses, but also, given new understandings of how human perception happens, understand why they happen. A design impact becomes predictable because we can now appreciate how external built architecture reflects our internal brain architecture. Architecture really is about us by making explicit externally the patterns which unconsciously direct our experience internally, reflecting what evolution preset our brain to prioritize. Of course, so many of the older building facades in and around Greater Boston suggest a face, as photos in Figure 8.7 show; they have to! Traditional buildings celebrate the face-bias that promotes our species’ survival. And whether we like it or not, this remains what we still need to see to feel and be at our best in the public realm. We still are human, after all,

with “ancient brains in a high-tech world” (Gazzaley and Rosen 2016).

Figure 8.7 Evolution made us a face-centric species and the trait that secured our survival in the wild shows up in traditional building elevations, above in Greater Boston. Source: Ann Sussman.

And, why is seeing the face-like pattern so seminal? Obviously, faces are key for differentiating between friend and foe in the environment, which makes them important, but there is more: “Faceto-face interactions regulate state,” the psychologist Stephen Porges explains in his talks and books on neuroception, which describes how we are always evaluating threats beyond our conscious awareness (Porges 2017). Seeing faces, feeling connection with others as we do so, subliminally soothes our system, Porges elaborates, taking us out of fear, or fight or flight mode. Hardwired to see others’ faces to feel safe enables our social behavior, impacting our mental, physical, and social health. Designed for subliminal co-regulation with others in this way explains not only why we need to be around people but also why our artifacts including building facades need to suggest them, too. Interestingly, architecture historically appears to have intuited the importance of seeing faces centuries ago; after all the word for a building facade comes from the word for face, in Italian, facciata, and ultimately, facia, in classical Latin (Figure 8.8).

Figure 8.8 As a social species, we rely on others to regulate our emotional state, explains research psychologist and author, Stephen Porges. Source: Mengfei Wang and Ann Sussman.

What then happened with modern architecture, the sleek style emphasizing functionality that defined twentieth-century design? Why did the architecture developed after the Great War (1914–1918) become unface-like and blank? Why is there such a shift between the facades of eighteenth and nineteenth century and earlier architecture, shown in this book, and the modern ones, post-WWI and later, postWWII? Why do biometric studies reveal traditional buildings, pretwentieth century, as implicitly easy for viewers to take in, and approachable, while post-twentieth-century architectural buildings are the reverse: harder to focus on, and avoidant? In revealing the normal brain’s requisite face-bias, twenty-first-century psychology immediately suggests something extraordinary must have happened to create the paradigm for modern architecture, which stopped representing what humans most need to see for emotional regulation and survival. And, indeed, it did: the paradigm for modern architecture that followed the Great War (1914–1918) reflects not only new building

technologies its proponents were eager to adopt that promoted the expansive use of steel, glass, and concrete in new ways but also the distorted or damaged brain architecture of its key founders, who were WWI veterans, survivors of the first mass-industrialized military conflict the world had ever known (Fazio et al. 2008: 505; Welter 2015).4 And, given twenty- first-century understanding that ‘reality’ is a construct between eye and brain, we can observe how hidden interior brain disorders can be ‘seen’ explicitly in the way people live after a traumatic event, including how they build habitat or propose a new paradigm for doing so (Sussman and Chen 2017).

How Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Made Modern Architecture The fact that trauma changes human perception is an essential idea in twenty-first-century psychology; terrifying experiences change how survivors see, feel, and behave in their surroundings. “After trauma, the world is experienced with a different nervous system that has an altered perception of risk and safety,” explains Bessel van der Kolk, MD (2014) in The Body Keeps the Score; Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Unmitigated stress and terror alter internal brain structure; horrifying experiences overwhelm the human nervous system’s coping ability and actually rewire the brain, causing “people to remain stuck in interpreting the present in light of an unchanging past” (van der Kolk 2014: 7). In other words, after trauma, the survivor’s body and brain lose the ability to respond normally because traumatic experience subverts the pathways that enable normal subliminal responses in an effort to survive. So post-trauma the typical human face-bias, described at length in this book, can turn to face-aversion; the normal attraction to visual complexity, also described in Chapter 4, may diminish, with the traumatized brain actually losing capacity to take it in. This new understanding of human brain architecture and its malleability provides a new vantage point for assessing why ‘modern’ architecture looks so different from that of the past—it represents a direct external expression of the internal brain damage caused by the horror of the trench warfare that preceded it.

Walter Gropius, the Horror of War, and How Modern Architecture Replicates Traumatic Experience A remarkable way to grasp how trauma stops time, and keeps a brain subliminally in fear, is to look at the iconic home built by a ‘founding father’ of Modern Architecture, none other than Walter Gropius, himself (1883–1969). Founder of the Bauhaus in 1919, which has been labeled “the embassy of modernist design” (Bergdoll 2019), Gropius would later move to the United States where he taught his modern approach to architecture at Harvard from 1937 to 1952. He became “one of the most influential architects in the 20th Century” according to the plaque in front of his house in Lincoln, Massachusetts, 20 miles west of Boston, now owned by Historic New England, a local non-profit organization (see Figure 8.9, center image above).

Figure 8.9 Walter Gropius’ home in Lincoln, Massachusetts, center image above; at left, the neighboring, traditional New England house directly across the street; Source: Ann Sussman; at right, concrete bunker along the Western Front in Walem, Belgium. Source: Wikimedia.

Less well known is the fact that Gropius served four horrifying years in the German Army on the Western Front during WWI (1914– 1918) before moving to the United States. Or that the impact of the war “never really left him,” as a new biography, Gropius, the Man Who Built the Bauhaus by Fiona MacCarthy (2019) asserts. On the Front, Gropius survived a grenade explosion that knocked him out, witnessed his captain shot to death the next day, and early in his military career formed part of a cohort of 250 men, half of whom died

within months (MacCarthy 2019). “The insomnia triggered by the grenade that exploded next to him in the Vosges mountains remained with him for years,” the biography notes, describing how “nightmares” disturbed Gropius’ sleep for decades afterward (MacCarthy 2019: 81). While sleeplessness after traumatic events is now a criterion for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-5 (2013) doctors use, sadly, and unfortunately, the disorder did not enter the medical lexicon until 1980, after Vietnam, and a decade after Gropius’ passing; it is now estimated that 20% or more of the Great War’s veterans suffered its consequences (Winter 2006). In Gropius’ case, the impact WWI had on him is on full display in the way he sited and built his American home, 3,000 miles away from where he saw military action, two decades after the war (c. 1938). New understanding about how trauma changes the brain, keeping it subliminally in fear, can help explain the house’s remote location at the edge of an orchard, for instance, and how it sits askew on a hilltop, resembling a military bunker, like the ones Gropius would have known in the mountains of the Western Front along the FrancoBelgian border (see Figure 8.9, photograph at right). “The scene you re-create in a structure may or may not be precisely what happened,” van der Kolk, MD, writes in The Body Keeps the Score, “but it represents the structure of your inner world: your internal map and the hidden rules that you have been living by” (2014: 6). Working with the aid of Hungarian-born architect and Bauhaus acolyte, Marcel Breuer, who was 20 years his junior, the precision with which Gropius’ ‘internal map’ recreated his WWI experience is uncanny. Built in 1938, his house has a flat roof, a hidden front door, and slit windows — the better to shoot from — not unlike the bunkers Gropius would have known in the war. It says, ‘keep out, stay away!’ mirroring the defensive stance of a brain still at the Front, and looking little like the traditional New England farmhouse across the street (Figure 8.9 pictured above, left), with its pleasing symmetries, pitched roof and easy-to-find front door facing the road. In its interior, Gropius’ home-office actually replicates a WWI trench; it is the same in section, featuring a walk-thru corridor,

window-sill so high off the floor no one outside could ever see him inside, and efficient, ready-for-munitions shelving like he would have known in the trenches (see Figure 8.10).

Figure 8.10 Walter Gropius’ study in Lincoln, Massachusetts, at left, replicates a WWI trench in section and layout. Source: Wikipedia Commons.

In his second-floor master bedroom, Gropius even recreated the layout of trench sleeping quarters, the ‘dugouts’ where men slept within a trench wall off a corridor, accessible only via a sturdy, wellframed doorway. Doubly protective, someone would have to open two bedroom doors in his New England house to find him in there (Figure 8.11).

Figure 8.11 Gropius’ master bedroom (left) set up like a ‘trench dugout’ with sleeping quarters behind sturdy door frame; WWI trench dugout (right), showing doorway to area where men slept within a trench wall. Source: Ann Sussman; Getty Images.

The house’s only open deck on the second floor showcases defensive design again, featuring a tall wall on the only side that faces a public road, effectively shielding anyone on the deck from ever being seen by someone outside (see Figure 8.12).

Figure 8.12 The second floor deck’s defensive design prevents anyone on it from being seen from outside. Source: Ann Sussman.

Rooms in the Gropius house feature minimal woodwork, detail and ornament, a hallmark of the Bauhaus approach, and not incidentally, trench construction and PTSD, too. Under stress your system simply cannot think about building in details. The approach produces efficient design, and a certain random, haphazard feel, mirroring the psychological fragmentation common to PTSD survivors. Gropius placed traditional New England clapboards vertically at his home entryway (photo below, left), which is not generally found in local residential design, but faithfully mimics the wood arrangements common in trench interiors (see photo below, right, of a reconstructed WWI trench at the American Heritage Museum, Hudson, Massachusetts) (Figure 8.13).

Figure 8.13 Rooms in the Gropius house feature minimal detail and ornament, at left; haphazard wood arrangements at entryway recall trench construction; reconstructed trench at right at the American Heritage Museum, Hudson, Massachusetts. Source: Ann Sussman.

Lacking shutters and window trim with mostly blank, white walls inside and out, Gropius’ house also fits the new understanding that PTSD compromises veterans’ sight; survivors frequently suffer from ‘blurry vision.’ Without the ability to take in visual detail and complexity, it makes sense Gropius would design his home without them (Trachtman 2010). This ‘founding father’ never knew that the neurotypical brain needs to see visual detail and complexity to anchor itself in space and feel at home in a place (as explained in Chapter 4), nor the biology behind why architecture historically featured so much of it! Nor would he have known about the neuroscience of fear:

how the emotion “is not necessarily conscious; a fearful response may be evoked even when one is not fully aware of being ‘afraid’,” and, like all emotional experience, it may proceed at an unconscious level, “without clear awareness” (Price 2005). In summary, we see here how twenty-first-century psychology, by explaining how traumatic experience rewires the brain and unconsciously impacts subsequent behavior, reframes our understanding of how Gropius came up with his ‘modern’ approach. With his brain still at the Front, two seemingly irreconcilable themes subliminally drove his design process: a need to feel safe and to recreate the trench war experience, in an attempt to heal from it. This is again typical behavior for survivors, psychologists explain. “Traumatic experience, encoded in the non-verbal right hemisphere, often unconsciously directs survivors to repeatedly replay an experience, as the brain struggles to recover from it” (Powers et al. 2010: 635–641). Gropius’ well-known house thus becomes iconic in modern psychology, too, representing a direct expression of the trauma of the WWI trench from which he never recovered. Because reality is a construct between eye and brain, the two cannot be disentangled; Gropius’ modern paradigm representing an explicit external manifestation of his traumatic experience and revealing the hidden imprint it left internally on his brain for all to see.

The Mental Disorders that Gave Us Modern Architecture And what about the other ‘founding fathers’ of Modern Architecture? Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969), also German, served in WWI but did not see action at the Front. Yet he was a member of the young generation of men devastated by it. Thirteen percent of German males born between 1880 and 1899 died within 50 months; millions were wounded (Whalen 2014). Witnessing the death of friends and peers also causes PTSD, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-5. Like Gropius, Mies also taught his modern approach to architecture in the United States, after WWI (from 1938–1958 at the Illinois Institute of Technology) and his emphasis on structural clarity, simplicity, and the expression of technology in architecture, which required reflexively casting aside precedent and things like time-tested building traditions, fits the behavior seen in this diagnosis; it suggests that he too was rushing to bury the past, carrying that under-acknowledged legacy of the Great War: PTSD. Indeed, as Chapter 3 and 4 reveal, because seeing facelike patterns and organized complexity are requisite for normal human emotional regulation, we can now better understand why architecture worldwide across time featured so much of it. And why coming up with a paradigm that does not suggest its promoters could not be ‘seeing’ the world nor regulating their emotional states normally (or neurotypically). And finally, while the ‘founding father’ Le Corbusier (1887–1965) never served in WWI, his “bad eyesight” exempted him from duty in the Swiss Army, he also likely had a mental disorder (Weber 2008). And like the German vets’ PTSD, this condition directly impacted his design process, making for outcomes that look and feel so differently from architecture of the past. In recent years, several authors and doctors have described Le Corbusier as autistic. Writers, including the critic and psychiatrist Anthony Daniels (2015), and the biographer Nicholas Fox Weber (2008), have come to the conclusion that the architect met the diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (Masi et al. 2017). They’ve chronicled his impaired social communications, repetitive behaviors, abnormal fixations (including a fascination with concrete), and apparent lack of interest in and

empathy for others, all hallmarks of the genetic disorder (like PTSD, ASD was not recognized as a separate disorder until DSM-III, first published in 1980). “For all his genius, Le Corbusier remained completely insensitive to certain aspects of human existence,” Weber writes in Le Corbusier: A Life (Weber 2008). “His fervent faith in his own way of seeing blinded him to the wish of people to retain what they most cherish (including traditional buildings) in their everyday lives.” Eye tracking people with autism can help us understand why Le Corbusier remained blind to others’ views—he could not process visual stimuli normally. And it can also help us ‘see’ how he arrived at his approach, and reveal how his autism shaped his architecture. People with ASD respond to visual stimuli in distinct ways. This shows up in eye-tracking studies (and is one reason why the technology is used in diagnosis, including with young children) (FalckYtter et al. 2013) (Figure 8.14).

Figure 8.14 Normal view, top left, and autistic view, at right, of a kitten in a biometric study with iMotions software, people on the spectrum avoid looking at eyes where neurotypical (or normal) viewers focus. Source: Ann Sussman.

For example, in Figure 8.14, at left we see how a ‘typical’ brain looks at a kitten; at right, one with autism. These images, tracking unconscious and conscious eye movements, aggregate viewing data and create black dots where viewers look most. They show how typical (or neurotypical) subjects focus directly on the eyes and central area of the face in a 15-second testing interval, while a brain on the spectrum, at right, takes the opposing approach, avoiding the eyes and central face almost entirely. These tendencies spill over to how different brains take in buildings.

Figure 8.15 Normal view, top left, and autistic view, at right, in a biometric study we conducted with iMotions software. Source: Ann Sussman.

Note how a viewer on the autism spectrum, at right, avoids looking at details on the carriage house, such as windows (which might suggest eyes), while typical brains instinctively go straight for them. (In the images above, the eye-tracking data creates ‘heat maps’ which glow reddest where viewers look most.)5 And while eye tracking reveals that people avoid looking at blank facades, as discussed in Chapter 7, viewers on the autism spectrum take the opposing approach and focus on blankness. We see this in the images of the library below (also viewed in Chapter 7), where typical subjects focus on building details, shown in heat map glowing reddest around the front door, at left, while the viewer on the

spectrum, at right, fixates on building areas that are the most detailfree (Figure 8.16).

Figure 8.16 Normal view, top left, and autistic view, at right, in a biometric study with iMotions software. Source: Sussman (2020) www.youtube.com/watch?v=T13cAmFcHHc

In summary, Le Corbusier’s autism diagnosis can help us understand why his modern architecture turned out the way it did, often featuring nearly blank facades; it was easier for him to take in. Note the minimal detail in the art museum he designed in Tokyo (1957) in Figure 8.17. Le Corbusier’s modern architecture, like Gropius’, can be seen as an external expression of his internal brain disorder and how he did not see or process visual stimuli normally, nor could he have understood what people need to see to most smoothly regulate and feel at home in a place. Nor would he have known what biometrics today reveal, as noted in Chapter 7, that subliminal attachments create the foundation for the architectural experience and are essentially preset by evolution.

Figure 8.17 National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, Japan. Le Corbusier c. 1957 can be seen as an expression of his autism. Source: Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:National_museum_of_western_art05s3200.jpg#file.

Why Retrospective Diagnoses of the ‘Founding Fathers’ of Modern Architecture Matter Why should it matter that key people who came up with modern architecture in the twentieth century had mental disorders? For one, the information reframes our understanding of how modern architecture came to be. We can now better understand, at least in part, why modern buildings look so different than older or traditional ones: relationally compromised people with atypical “fixations” and emotional regulation came up with the approach, following an incredibly disruptive time in world history, the post-WWI years, where people were recovering from fantastic losses (an estimated 40 million casualties) (Mougel 2011). They needed to rebuild, were rushing to bury the past, and looked to embrace new technologies that enabled expansive use of steel, glass, and concrete to do so (Fazio et al. 2008). And, at the same time, quite significantly, the diagnoses help us understand why the human experience of modern architecture differs so radically from traditional. ‘Founding fathers’ who regulate atypically, taking in and responding to visual stimuli differently, cannot understand or intuit what people need to see to be soothed, feel safe, and at their best. They did not know (as tech-guru Don Norman explains, see Chapter 7) how the design experience begins subliminally and viscerally, outside of conscious control, nor how their mental conditions made them ‘see’ the world atypically. Ironically, the ‘founding fathers’ work to secure themselves in a place, creating buildings that from the exterior are difficult for the normal population to look at and subliminally attach to, made for built environments around which healthy people implicitly feel less safe or secure. As noted, neurotypical individuals need to subliminally see face-like facades with detail to most smoothly regulate and feel safe within themselves and their surroundings. Thus, the anomie and disconnection so common to much modern urbanism, built in the ‘modern’ style, turn out to be not at all random, but predictable: it is a direct external expression of the internal dissociation and disembodiment common to people with brain disorders such as

PTSD. “Dissociation is the essence of trauma,” van der Kolk writes in The Body Keeps the Score (2014: 20). In PTSD, “[t]he overwhelming experience is split off and fragmented,” which on the one hand enables an individual’s survival, but on the other hand carries a social cost, fracturing the survivor’s ability to connect with themselves and others and to feel “fully alive in the present” (van der Kolk 2014: 66– 67). Dissociation, defined as feeling disconnected from “thoughts, feelings, memories, actions” and even yourself, is a hallmark of PTSD (Allene et al. 2020), thus became a hallmark of the human experience of modern built environments. A root cause of the placelessness of so much twentieth-century development, exacerbated by eagerness to accommodate autos, of course, modern architecture made feeling disconnected or detached from your surroundings the norm. While traditional streets, whether in Paris, Boston, Philadelphia, or Main Street, Disneyland, as shown in earlier chapters here, welcome a visitor, promote community and provide a place for all, by offering subliminal connection and coherent experience, modern developments cannot. As an external expression of internal dissociation, the ‘founding fathers’ ‘modern’ paradigm made their fractured, distorted internal states the norm and disconnection the hallmark of our modern environments. “Hurt people hurt other people,” psychologist van der Kolk summarizes, explaining how traumatized people frequently hurt and traumatize those around them (van der Kolk 2014). In a sense, that five-word sentence concisely sums up what happened in the twentieth-century history of architecture, as well as the way forward to fix it.

The Twenty-First-Century Paradigm Shift: Reframing Architectural and Planning History for Our Well-Being Reframing the history of modern architecture in the twentieth century, the twenty-first-century paradigm shift also gives us a remarkable opportunity to create a new, better, and healthier foundation for design. This is one where intrinsic, subliminal, human experience is understood and healthy human perception and how humans actually function is respected, acknowledging what we need to see subliminally to feel safe. It lets the neuroscience behind human perception establish metrics for architecture and planning. In twenty-first-century architecture and planning, practitioners will design more appropriately, improving community health and wellbeing because: They understand that ‘unconscious’ or subliminal responses to stimuli, outside our conscious awareness, direct our behavior in the built environment. They employ biometric tools, such as eye tracking, to predict experience, and evaluate how ‘approachable’ or ‘avoidant’ a new structure or streetscape may be before it is built. They acknowledge the role the founding fathers’ brain disorders and atypical regulation had in creating the paradigm for twentiethcentury ‘modern’ architecture and how this implicitly hurts the public realm. And finally, they respect the fact that evolution has largely preset our pre-attentive behaviors, including how we’re hardwired to look for and at faces continually, everywhere, all the time—even in architecture. Humans, implicitly seeking out soothing and safety, deserve it in their environments. Taking an inside-out approach to the problem of solving the riddle of how to best design for people, this book argues that it is best to first look at how people are built—not only mechanically but also mentally, and then design or plan for these requirements and tendencies. In teasing apart the evolutionary scrim

people look through, the intent is to encourage creative approaches to the task. With that end in mind, each of the previous chapters can be considered a rule-of-thumb for understanding human behavior in the built environment. The points are reiterated below, in the order they appeared in the book: Edges Matter: This principle, discussed in Chapter 2, describes how we are a ‘wall-hugging’ species. The more designers are aware of thigmotaxis as a billion-year-old biological trait, the better they will understand how people chose restaurant tables to why well-defined corridor streets encourage our walking and the imperative of creating them in suburban and urban places; Patterns Matter: This principle, outlined in Chapter 3, reminds us that the human mind prioritizes vision to gather information most salient for survival. We evolved in a world of visual complexity and relish visual stimulation, not sameness nor blankness. We are also biologically designed to process, emotionally engage with, and remember facial patterns over other forms. The template for the face is in us before birth; Shapes Carry Weight: This principle, discussed in Chapter 4, recognizes that humans are programmed to prefer certain forms over others; our cognition is embodied; and we carry innate biological biases for bilateral symmetric shapes, and for curving versus straight, jagged, or repetitive parallel lines; Storytelling is Key: This principle, reviewed in Chapter 5, most identifies us as human; our narrative capacity, a consequence of our species’ unique neural circuitry, helps us engage with others, with places, with a shared past and enables the creation of identity. Most popular designed places engage this aspect of human uniqueness in some manner; and Nature is our Context: This principle, discussed in Chapter 6, emphasizes the importance of biophilic elements in our designs, both inside and out. An artifact of evolution, we always require connection to the fabric that made us. Taken together, Cognitive Architecture’s principles provide a framework for thinking about human behavior with the hopes of

building a foundation for the creation of better designs and more compelling places. “The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have,” Steve Jobs, Apple CEO once said, describing the essential idea at the base of his computer company’s stratospheric success (Thomas 2011: 71). In this book, we have outlined the salient, mostly hidden, aspects of human experience, the ones we believe are significant for planning and architecture, with the same intention— to promote better design. What the research discussed here says, incontrovertibly we think, is that human beings evolved to look at nature and make deep connections with other human beings. And no matter how ‘modern’ and technologically advanced our world feels, we have not changed as fast. To quote the UK psychologist Nigel Nicholson (1998), “You can take the person out of the Stone Age… but you can’t take the Stone Age out of the person.” Man-made environments that reflect this truth in various ways (and there are many ways to go about it, as the book’s case studies illustrate) will be healthier and more sustainable. They will be places that enhance our lives, will more likely be cared about, and, in the end, more likely last.

Implications for Practice Many considerations govern the details of designing and planning in the built environment. We are not suggesting an abandonment of all other design imperatives, but instead a need to integrate those requirements with what research shows us about who we are and how we came to be. Today’s practitioner who is shaping buildings, streets, and neighborhoods can no longer rely on influences that are simply functional or utilitarian. An opportunity is available to “design for people” in a way that noted Danish architect Jan Gehl promotes. By grounding our designs in our evolution, and the fact human perception is relational, a construct between eye and brain, we are more likely to make enduring, sustainable places that people enjoy.

Implications for Policy

One of the most powerful influences on the built environment is the (primarily) local regulatory system that controls the use of land, building form and bulk, and parking (Platt 1996). The principles outlined in this book offer critical lessons for adjusting policy at the local, state, and federal levels. Most decisions about how the built environment is designed and shaped are made at the local level and that is where the ideas of this book can make an impact. Zoning, subdivision control, and design review processes provide local elected or appointed officials the chance to guide and shape how development happens, subject to state and federal guidelines. In much of the United States, that local authority is strong and cities have great latitude to control form, function, bulk, and use. Local officials may wish to consider these principles and look for ways to update their rules and regulations. State and federal agencies typically fund much of the transportation infrastructure in the United States and, globally, these transportation officials ought to understand that their policy decisions will shape how well places work for people. For urban planners, community-wide visioning exercises may profit by beginning with a look at the principles elaborated here. That way clients are more likely to believe design professionals truly have their interests at heart. Before the first public meeting, before goals are identified for community growth or change, it may prove useful for planners to look to these principles as a foundation for understanding how people experience places and then explore goals, values, and plan development for the future.

Implications for Theory Theory helps us to understand the relationship between concepts, why things happen, how and by whom. Here, this book’s principles may have the potential for the greatest impact. This book reframes the history of modern architecture and planning, exploring how you cannot successfully create places for people without acknowledging the hidden ways human perception works. When designers and planners consider the question of what makes a place great or how

to rate a public design, we believe they now have a better starting point. This ethic allows for the ultimate judge of success to be grounded in answering questions, such as: how well does this place meet the needs of an evolved, bipedal mammal? How will it be received by people never met? Remember: to get the right answers, we need to begin by asking the right questions.

Notes 1 To create this heat map, ten subjects looked at the book cover in a 15-second testing interval with eye-gaze data analyzed with iMotions software. 2 Other titles exploring the decline of the public realm in America and what to do about it include The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream (Calthorpe 1993), From Bauhaus to Our House (Wolfe 1981), The Old Way of Seeing (Hale 1994) and more recently, Welcome to Your World, How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives (Goldhagen 2017) and other Kunstler titles: The Geography of Nowhere, The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-made Landscape (1993) Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back (1998), and Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (2010). 3 Text is employed at the top floor, projecting the word ‘SEARCH’ across the building’s upper façade, specifically to engage passersby; however, the 3M VAS study suggests viewers will likely not see the word; the fact that the brain processes text 60,000 times more slowly than images or visual form may play a role in this outcome (https://www.tsciences.com/news/humans-process-visual-data-better). 4 Walter Gropius (1883–1969), Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969), and Le Corbusier (1887–1965) are “the triumvirate of modern “masters,” Fazio et al. explain in A World History of Architecture, 2nd edition, 2008, McGraw Hill, p. 505, or key ‘founding fathers’ of modern architecture. Gropius and Mies were both German WWI veterans; the Swiss-born Le Corbusier lived through the devastation, but did not serve, his vision too poor to be drafted in the Swiss Army (Weber 2008: 113). 5 Figures 8.14–8.16 reference a study using iMotions biometric software where 30 neurotypical subjects viewed the images in 15-second testing intervals; one viewer on the spectrum looked at the same image (Hollander et al. 2020).

Appendix More on the Morphology and Function of the Human Brain

The human brain makes people outliers in the animal kingdom. It is also a mystery to us, like an iceberg, mostly hidden, as Freud said. There are several models for thinking about the brain. Divided into two hemispheres, as noted in Chapter 8, a typical diagram, which masks the complexity, looks like Figure A.1.

Figure A.1 Each hemisphere of the brain is often described as having four lobes with fairly specific functions: the frontal lobe is responsible for conscious thought and mood; the parietal lobe plays a role integrating sensory information from the various senses and manipulating objects; the occipital lobe is concerned with visual processing; and the temporal lobe is involved in retaining visual memories, understanding language processing, and the processing of complex visual stimuli such as faces. The cerebellum, responsible for coordinating movement, lies below. Source: Mayo Clinic [2020], image, Trey Kirk and Mengfei Wang.

This shows the cerebral cortex, the outer-most folded layer of the brain, which enables complex thinking, with various ‘lobes’ that take their names from the parts of the skull covering them. A well-known feature of the brain is its size, particularly its relative size. The human brain is larger than any other mammalian brain when body mass is taken into account. (We have a smaller brain than elephants or whales, for instance, but they are larger mammals). The encephalization quotient (EQ), which takes the relative size into account, is shown in Figure A.2. The gorilla, a fellow primate and mammal, which can be as large as a person or larger, has a brain one-third the size of our own (Fonseca-Azevedo and HerculanoHouzel 2012) (see Table A.1).

Figure A.2 Diagram of the encephalization quotient (EQ) in various animals. The human brain is an outlier at three times the size of its nearest relation on the evolutionary tree (the chimpanzee) when factoring in body size. Source: Trey Kirk.

Table A.1 Brain size and energy consumption table Animal

Encephalization Quotient1

Brain Energy Consumption2

Human

7.4–7.8

20–25%

Chimpanzee

2.2–2.5

8–10%

Gorilla

1.5–1.8

Whale

1.8

African elephant

1.3

Dog

1.2

Animal

Encephalization Quotient1

Brain Energy Consumption2

Squirrel

1.1

3–5%

Horse

0.9

Mouse

0.5

Rabbit

0.4

Rat

0.4

This table shows the relationship between brain sizes adjusted for body mass and energy consumption. The encephalization quotient (EQ) is the ratio of an organism’s brain size to its body mass. A higher EQ generally indicates greater intelligence. Brain energy consumption is the amount of the body’s total resting energy that the brain uses to function. A higher percentage means that more energy is devoted to brain functioning. 1 Roth, G., and Dicke, U. 2005. Evolution of the brain and intelligence. TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences, 9(5), 250–257. 2 Snodgrass, J. J., Leonard, W. R., and Robertson, M. L. 2009. The energetics of encephalization in early hominids. In The Evolution of Hominin Diets, pp. 15–29. Springer Netherlands). Source: Devin Merullo.

But new research shows size is not everything—it is the specialized circuitry that gives us our humanness, as Michael S. Gazzaniga and co-authors describe in Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind, 3rd ed. (2009): Complex capacities like language and social behavior are not constructs that arise out of our brain simply because it is bigger than a chimpanzee’s brain. Instead, these capacities reflect specialized devices that natural selection has built into our brains. (p. 664)

Combined with its special circuitry, another uniqueness of the primate brain is that it contains more neurons, or nerve cells, than a similarly sized rodent brain—as much as seven times more according to one analysis (Fonseca-Azevedo and Herculano-Houzel 2012). And a further distinction of the human brain is that it contains appreciably

more neurons than that of any other primate or creature on earth. The adult male human brain has an estimated 86 billion nerve cells (Azevedo et al. 2009). These, in turn, are capable of making trillions of synapses, chemical, or electrical connections to other cells. And, connections are everything, as they say. However, we pay a price for all this activity. The human brain, about 2% of body mass, uses more energy than any other organ, accounting for 20–25% of the body’s energy intake (see Table A.1). The brain needs the energy to both fire and maintain its horde of nerve cells. Our intelligence comes at a cost–no wonder we avoid stairs!

The Significance of Cooking Table A.1 shows how we are like other animals—and not. The enormous brain size, three times the size of our nearest relative on the evolutionary tree, in some senses may contribute to making us feel more different from other creatures than our bodies are. Intriguingly, the energy appetite of the brain has promoted evolutionary theories about how the human brain came to be and whether it could get larger in the future. “It may have been a change from a raw diet to a cooked diet that afforded its remarkable number of neurons,” said Karina Fonseca-Azevedo and Suzanna HerculanoHouzel in a 2012 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Since cooking enormously increases the energy yield of foods and the speed with which we can consume them, this theory holds that using fire to make food was the crucial step in promoting “the near doubling of numbers of brain neurons” our ancestors experienced. It also can help explain why other creatures have not overtaken us in brain power: they have not learned to master fire and cook.1 The epic transformation is estimated to have occurred between Homo erectus (c. 1.8 million years ago) and Homo sapiens (c. 200,000 years ago).2 The elephant, for example, has the largest size brain for a land mammal, weighing in it 4 kg or more (8 lbs), and has to spend most of its time, some 16–18 hours each day, feeding to maintain its brain and body health (Sea World 2014). Humans standing upright have freed up their appendages to put together ingredients, heat them, and effectively pre-digest them, outsourcing

part of the digestive process outside the body. This is one reason, scientists believe, humans do not have the enormous digestive systems other large animals such as elephants and cows do and do not spend hours ruminating, in the digestive sense, either. Another way to describe the brain is to look at it in section. And a typical section looks like Figure A.3.

Figure A.3 Diagram of the human brain in section shows the forebrain, midbrain, and hindbrain. Source: Trey Kirk and Mengfei Wang.

Figure A.3 shows the forebrain, midbrain, and hindbrain. These basic elements we share with other animals, although their forebrains

are smaller. Starting from the top, the forebrain is responsible for thinking and processing sensory input and makes up the left and right cerebral hemispheres. It is covered by the highly ridged pinkish-gray cerebral cortex. Nested below the high-thinking region is the limbic system, sometimes called the emotional brain, which has four main parts: the hypothalamus, the amygdala, the thalamus, and the hippocampus. Together these work as a very fast, unconscious evaluation system with one key goal: keeping us safe. Is that a lion in the parking lot? The thalamus, sometimes called an information transfer hub, immediately transfers visual data to the amygdala, known for its role in processing fear, taking us into a fight-or-flight mode before we may even know what is in front of us. Evolving in the savanna millennia ago, this certainly makes sense. And, addressing the fact we are still designed for that ancient place is the theme of this book. Arranged for efficiently responding to ever-changing flow of stimuli, the lobes of the brain’s cortex include the frontal lobes, which are involved in planning future action; the parietal lobes further back on the head, involved with body awareness and manipulating objects; the occipital lobe, concerned with processing visual information; and the temporal lobes at the side, also involved with memory recall and interpreting visual information including facial recognition. The point is each region of the brain has pathways to expertly handle specific tasks. This organization, evidently, carrying an evolutionary advantage. The midbrain, the smallest region deep within the brain, between the forebrain and the spinal cord, works as a ‘relay station’ for the central nervous system, controlling things like eye movement, sleep cycles, and temperature. The hindbrain, which extends up from the spinal cord, is responsible for activities considered lower-order and more automatic, including breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, and maintaining balance and equilibrium. Other models of the brain underscore the evolutionary timeline we share with our predecessors on our evolutionary tree. For example, the Triune Brain model, developed by Dr Paul MacLean in the 1960s, organizes the brain as a compilation of three brains, the oldest at

bottom, the reptilian brain, or brain stem, followed by the paleomammalian brain, or limbic brain, and topped off by the human brain, or neo-cortex (see Figures A.4 and A.5).

Figure A.4 A diagram of the ‘Triune’ Brain Model, developed by physician Dr Paul MacLean, underscores the evolutionary past we share with other creatures on earth and models the brain as a series of sequential additions. Source: Trey Kirk.

Figure A.5 The ‘Triune’ Brain Model as a schematic portrait of Albert Einstein: within us are elements of animals that came before as rendered by artist Trey Kirk. In this model, the reptilian brain controls primitive behaviors such as survival and aggression, the paleomammalian complex, including the limbic system, is responsible for social behavior and simple emotions, and the neomammalian brain, with the cortical regions described above, enables complex thought. Although an oversimplification, this model can be used as a loose analogy to recognize what various parts of the brain do. While we do not literally have reptile and early mammal brains connected to a modern human

brain, these three different regions of our brains play roles in regulating a range of our behaviors, from the instinctive to more measured. Not acknowledging how all design always involves interaction with these ancient brain structures is a prime reason for the dysfunction in much of what we make today (as tech-guru Don Norman explains), including the arrangements of most modern built environments. These fail by not recognizing who we are and how we got here, dissociating from human experience, including our subliminal need for attachment to objects in our physical surroundings as well as connection with others to feel safe and at our best. Reminding ourselves that we are of Nature brings up another key point: not only does our brain architecture mimic that of other creatures that we may not have a particular affinity to, such as the snake and monkey shown in Figure A.5, but we also share behaviors with these creatures. Since evolution is conservative, traits that work reappear. We might say that our reptilian brain (snake-like) is at work when a sudden pang of hunger strikes us around 6 o’clock in the evening and all we can think of is food and how to get it fast. But our paleomammalian brain (monkey-like) kicks in when we stop to consider our spouse, children, or other associates and what their preferences for dinner might be. It is our neomammalian brain (the human) that enables to weigh all possible options and make the executive decision on what the best choice may be. Clearly the brain is complex. And, in terms of our sensory inputs, the brain does not prioritize them equally, as discussed in Chapter 3. The human brain prioritizes vision, and is always alive to the possibility of new arrangements in our field of view; all this, of course, is a product of our singular evolution.

Notes 1 The high-energy requirement of our brains may indicate we have reached a physical limit: the end of feasible brain expansion in the future. (This precludes the idea that we will soon have brains with computer chips in them.) We can’t get smarter because human brains would consume too much energy, said Simon Laughlin, professor of neurobiology, at Cambridge University, who told The Sunday Times: “We have demonstrated that brains must consume energy to function and that these requirements are sufficiently demanding to limit our performance and determine design” (July 31, 2011). We are, in other words, maxed out (Leake 2011: 1, 5). 2 There is debate in the literature about when our human ancestors first got control of fire, ranging from 1.8 million to 400,000 years ago.

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Further Reading

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Index

Note: Bold page numbers refer to tables; italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. acacia trees 119, 138 advertising 66 aesthetics 110, 111, 114, 119, 139 African savanna 119, 137–138 Aldersey-Williams, H. 104 Alexander, C. 13–14, 17, 22, 30, 47 Allene, C. 190 amphibians 18 amygdala 115, 199 Antioch Culture 108 Aonikenk tribes of Patagonia 107 Apple 65, 66 Appleton, J. 32 Arcimboldo, G. 54–58, 55, 56 Aristotle 123 Arnheim, R. 111 art 64–66, 107, 109 Arcimboldo 54–58, 55, 56 Dancing Maenad (Roman) 113 fractals 118–119 hospitals 114 portraits 49, 50 Ashton Raggatt McDougall (ARM Architecture) 66 attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) 141 Australia: building ‘face’ in Newcastle 73

Portrait Building in Melbourne 66–67, 69 autism spectrum disorder (ASD) 186, 187, 188 Bacon, E. 91 Bacon, F. 169 bacteria 18 Banich, M.T. 53, 61 Barak, W. 66, 69 Bar, M. 115–116 Barnes, B. 134 Barthes, R. 122–123 beauty 111 Bejan, A., constructal law 88–89 Bergdoll, B. 180 Bertamini, M. 110, 114 bilateral symmetry 83, 97–104, 115, 125, 128 beauty, order and organization 111 in the beginning . . .Š 105–111 biology and 104 Cappadocia 97–99, 98 faces 107–110, 109 ‘good genes’ hypothesis 108 hierarchy 112 human body 100, 103 redundancy 111 smiling 110 vertical 110, 110 billboards 66 biometrics 149 for assessing walkability 164–165 face patches 59, 164 internal brain design 164 Metrobot 168 post-occupancy evaluations 168 tools see (eye-tracking) biophilia and biophilic design 136–143, 142 Bloom, N.D. 36, 38, 41

body decoration 107 Boston: Apple stores 65, 66 back-yard arbor (Acton) 137 City Hall 29, 30, 139, 139 City Hall Plaza 29, 30, 76, 80 Copley Square 156–157, 157 Edward W. Brooke Courthouse 23, 23–24 Faneuil Hall 28, 29 Hanover Street 24–29, 27, 30, 82, 82 Kelley’s Corner (Acton) 130–133, 131, 132 Mass Art Design and Media Center 174 Old State House 175 Scollay Square 26–28, 28, 29 Trinity Church 99, 100 Webster S. Blanchard house (Acton) 100, 102 de Botton, A. 9, 31 Bower, I. 141 brain 14, 87–88, 137, 198–202 amygdala 115, 199 bilateral symmetry 106–107 emotions and memory, faces engage 61–63 forebrain 198–200 fractals 118 hindbrain 198, 201 hippocampus 17, 199 hypothalamus 199 midbrain 198, 200 narrative 123 natural landscapes or interiors 53 neurons 87, 197–198 pareidolia: faces out of random data 59–61, 68, 82 right-side up, faces and bodies 52, 54–59 size and energy consumption 197 template for the face 52–54 thalamus 199 we see what our brain wants us to see 49–51 Bratman, G.N. 141

Capaldi, C.A. 141 Cappadocia 97–99, 98 Cardenas, R.A. 107–109 cars 12 car-dependent design 37, 38–39, 46, 130, 131 ‘faces’ and design of 61–63 fusiform face area (FFA) 61 pedestrians, needs of 34–36 CarSifu 63 cauliflower, romanes cocalabrese 118, 118 Cezanne, P. 64 The Card Players 64 Chalup, S.K. 70–71 Chartres Cathedral 144, 145 Chatterjee, A. 52 Chen, K. 179 child health and development 141 China 99, 140 Clifford, C.W.G. 61 cognition: embodied cognition 120 and emotions 147–148 Coley, R.L. 142 complexity and order 116–118 fractals 118–119 computer scientists 70 corridor streets 13, 22, 26, 31–32, 38, 46, 191 double-loaded 32, 42, 47 Cortina, M. 171 crafts 107 curves 111–116 Dahl, C.D. 58 Daniels, A. 186 Darwin, C. 1, 3, 4, 17, 21, 107 diet 30, 198 Disneyland (California) 5, 12, 42–46, 44, 45 Disney, W. 42, 45

dissociation 190 Dixon, J.M. 91 edges matter see thigmotaxis (‘wall-hugging trait’) Edison, T. 28 Eiffel, G. 119 electrodermal activity (EDA) 149 embodied cognition 120 emoticons 63 emotional brain 199 emotions 140, 202 anxiety 20, 21, 22 bilateral symmetry 107, 109 Chartres Cathedral 144 cognitive thoughts 147–148 curves 111, 114 emotional field of vision 80, 83, 91–92 faces engage memory and 61–63 fractals 118, 119 threshold for reading 79–80 employees 145n2 Emrath, P. 2 energy-conserving habit 16, 23, 24, 86 energy consumption and brain size 198 England 140 Hampton CourtMaze 19 Lacock Village in Wiltshire 68–69, 72 escalators 16 evidence-based design 141 eye-tracking 161–162, 162 evolution 1, 53, 60–61 bilateral symmetry 105–106, 107, 109 brain 198–202 curves 114–115 faces 48, 50 fractals 118, 119 narrative 124

nature is our context 137–139, 191, 192, 193 thigmotaxis (‘wall-hugging trait’) 17–18, 18, 31–32 vision 85–86, 88, 89, 90 Ewing, R. 46 Eye-tracked Stapleton Library 151 eye-tracking 149 in architecture 150, 157 evidence-based design 161–162, 162 gaze paths 159–160, 160 heat maps 152, 152, 154, 155, 170, 171 3M VAS or Visual Attention Software 165 organized complexity 118, 162–163, 163 in research 149, 174–175 ‘Thatcherized face’ 164, 164 visual sequence diagrams 159, 160 fabric design 107 ‘face-i-tects’ 52 face patches 59, 164 faces: bilateral symmetry 107–110, 109 patterns: faces and spaces see (separate entry) facial recognition 200 Fahlman, S. 63 Falck-Ytter, T. 186 Fazio, M.W. 179, 189 films 68, 70 Finnerty, J.R. 106 Firth, C. 50 Fonseca-Azevedo, K. 196–198 food 22, 30, 198, 202 forced-perspective 45 Ford, H. 99 Ford, J. 33, 34 fractals 118–119 France: Chartres Cathedral 144 Chateau de Chambord (Loire Valley) 99, 102 Paris see (separate entry)

Villa Stein (Garches) 85 Francois I 99 Freud, S. 17, 195 functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) 52–53, 114 fusiform face area (FFA) 52–53, 61 galvanic skin responders (GSR) 149 gardens 128, 136, 140 Taj Mahal 76, 78, 112 Villa Lante in Bagnaia 126, 127, 128–130 Gazzaley, A. 177 Gazzaniga, M.S. 196 Gehl, J. 14, 24, 75–76, 81, 193 Gehry, F. 74 gentrification 47n3 Germany: Allianz Arena (Munich) 77 building ‘face’ in Ruit 73 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 117 ‘golden rectangle’ 84, 84, 85, 88 Goldfield, D.R. 42 Goldhagen, S.W. 120 Gordon, K. 111 Greece 100 Parthenon 84, 85, 99 green building 46, 139 Gregory XIII, Pope 128 Guggenheim Museum (Bilbao) 74, 74 Hacking, I. 172 Hazzard, F. 38 health 14, 53, 82, 136–138, 140–142, 167, 170, 178, 191, 198 heat maps 152, 152, 156 eye-tracking 152, 152, 154, 155, 170, 171 of High Bridge 159 Heerwagen, J.H. 138, 141 Herzog and de Meuron 77 hierarchy 112, 134

Hildebrand, G. 116 hippocampus 17, 199 Hippocrates 14 von Hoffman, A. 130 Hollander, J.B. 132, 149–150, 152, 157, 165–166, 175–176 Holt, S. 33 Hong Kong 42 hospitals 114, 141 human body 54, 100–103 brain see (separate entry) faces see (separate entry) human-centered design (HCD) 147, 156 hunter gatherers 136 hypothalamus 199 identity see narrative iMotions biometric software 151, 152, 154, 155, 156, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 171, 175 India: Taj Mahal 76, 78, 112 indigenous peoples 24, 66–67 information theory 148, 149 information transfer hub see thalamus inversion effect 52, 54–59 Ireland: Grand Canal Theatre (Dublin) 80 Istanbul: Grand Bazaar or Kapalicarsi 31, 32 Italy: medieval street in Siena 24, 26 Piazza del Campo in Siena 9, 10, 76, 79 St Peter’s Square 76, 78 Villa Capra, ‘La Rotonda’ in Vicenza 104, 105 Villa Lante in Bagnaia 126, 127, 128–130 Jacobs, J. 2–3, 10–12, 11, 17, 22, 24, 45, 80, 139, 142, 173 Japan: National Museum of Western Art (Tokyo) 187–188, 188 Jobs, S. 192 Kahneman, D. 30 Kallai, J. 20–22

Kandel, E.R. 17, 49–50, 51, 53, 59, 68, 87 Kanwisher, N. 52–53 Karagianni, M. 104 Kastl, A.J. 111 Kellert, S.R. 6, 48, 137–140, 142 van der Kolk, B. 179, 181, 190 Koons, J. 74, 74 Kruh, D. 30 Kuhn, T.S. 172 Kunstler, J.H. 173, 174 Lazzaro-Bruno, C. 128 Le Corbusier 13–14, 30–31, 47n1, 84, 85, 185–188 Leinberger, C.B. 38 Leone, S. 66 Lieberman, D. 14, 16 Liotti, G. 171 Lopez, M. 142 Lynch, K. 160 Maas, J. 142 MacCarthy, F. 180, 181 MacLean, P. 201 Makin, A.D.J. 110 malls, shopping 12, 31, 37, 41 marketing 64–66 Marling, K.A. 42 Mars 59, 60 McKone, E. 52–53 medieval period 119, 140 Cappadocia 97–99, 98 Piazza del Campo in Siena 9, 10, 76, 79 Siena street 24, 26 memory 21, 99, 152, 173, 200 faces engage emotions and 61–63 Mexico 99 Middle East 32

modern architecture: ‘Founding Fathers’ 189–190 mental disorders 185–189 Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) see (separate entry) post-WWI years 189 traumatic experience 180–185 modernism 26, 30, 41, 180 Modigliani, A.: Nu Couché 64 monastery gardens 140 monkeys 58, 109 Mougel, N. 189 movies 5, 66, 88, 117 Mueller, L. 133, 134 music 116–117, 169 narrative 122–126, 133–134, 192 decoupling 123 Kelley’s Corner (Acton, Massachusetts) 130–133, 131, 132 Villa Lante (Bagnaia, Italy) 125–126, 127, 128–130, 129 Wright’s house plans 124–125, 125, 126 natural selection 1, 4, 7n1, 17, 61, 196 nature is our context 136–143, 192 Neubauer, S. 173 Newman, P. 142 Newton, N.T. 125, 128 New York: High Bridge 158, 159 555 Hudson Street 9–10, 11 Lower Manhattan 90 Queens Library 153, 155, 156, 160, 161 Rockefeller Center 34 Stapleton Library 150–151, 151 Weeksville Heritage Center 153, 153, 154, 155 Nicholson, N. 115, 192 Nigeria 107 Nightingale, F. 140 Nisbet, E.K. 141 Noland, R.B. 175 Norman, D.A. 117, 147–148, 163, 168, 189, 202

Notre Dame 84 Obama, B. 116 office interior design 141, 143 order and complexity 116–117 fractals 118–119 organized complexity 117–118, 128 eye-tracking 162–163, 163 Oval Office 115–116, 116 Paleolithic time 14, 47n2 Palladio, A. 104, 105 Palmer, C.J. 61 Palmer, E. 33 paper size 86–87 pareidolia 59–61, 68, 70, 82 Paris 26, 42 Eiffel Tower 119 Notre Dame 84 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) 169 Places des Vosges 76, 78 Rue de Rivoli arcade 24, 25 sidewalks 13–14 Parthenon 84, 85, 99 Patagonia 107 patterns 191–192 art and marketing 64–66 brain’s rules 49–63, 202 buildings, faces are in 66–67 buildings, facial expressions in 67–75 case study 89–95 emotional field of vision 80, 81–82, 83 emotions and memory, faces engage 61–63 faces and spaces 46, 109–110, 125, 192 ‘golden rectangle’ 84, 84, 85, 88 ‘golden spiral’ 84, 85

inversion effect 52, 54–59 natural landscapes or interiors 53 objects which are face-like 61–63 one hundred meters 76, 77, 78, 79, 79 pareidolia: faces out of random data 59–61, 68, 82 right-side up, faces and bodies 52, 54–59 ‘seeing’ abstract faces in buildings 45 senses are not equal 48–49 seven meters and under 81–82 template for the body 54 template for the face 52–53 thirty-five meters 79–81 thresholds, visual 75–83 urban design and planning 75 we see what our brain wants us to see 49–50 Pei, I.M. 91, 94 Penn, W. 89 Peters, T. 142 physics, Bejan’s constructal law 88–89 Pinker, S. 2 placelessness 124, 130, 138, 173, 190 Platt, R.H. 193 Pollock, J. 119 Pompeii 26 Porges, S.W. 177, 178 portraits 49, 50, 58 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): modern architecture 179–180 Walter Gropius’ home 180, 180–185, 182, 183, 184 pottery 107 Powers, M.B. 184 processing, levels of: behavioral 148–149 reflective 149 visceral 148 productivity, worker 141, 145n2 Prosser, W. 106 psychology 1, 7, 82, 107, 110, 111, 171–172, 174, 179, 184–185 curves 111, 114

Purves, A. 128, 130 Ramachandran, V.S. 110–111 regions of interest (ROIs) diagrams 166, 167 reptiles 18, 148 rhesus macaques 58 Richardson, H.H. 100 robots 70, 71 van der Rohe, L.M. 185 romanesco calabrese cauliflower 118, 118 Rosen, L.D. 177 Rouse, J.W. 36–38, 41 Ryan, J.D. 173 Sagan, C. 59–60 St Peter’s Square 76, 78 Salingaros, N.A. 84, 117–119, 162 savanna 119, 136–137, 138 Saver, J.L. 122–123 Schiele, E. 51 Schnorr, S.J. 18 senses are not equal 48–49 shapes 75, 97, 120, 192 bilateral symmetry see (separate entry) complexity and order 116–119 curves 111–116 fractals 118–119 scanning images 87–88 shopping malls 12, 31, 37, 41 short-cuts 16 Shull, N. 57 smiling 110 Soderlund, J. 142 Spain: Guggenheim Museum (Bilbao) 74, 74 sperm 18 Spielberg, S. 66 sponges, sea 105, 106

stairs 16 Stapleton, T. 33–34 storytelling 122–126, 133–134, 192 decoupling 123 Kelley’s Corner (Acton, Massachusetts) 130–133, 131, 132 Villa Lante (Bagnaia, Italy) 125 126, 127, 128–130, 129 Wright’s house plans 124–125, 125, 126 street level windows 12, 13, 30, 46, 94 Bejan’s constructal law 88–89 streets, corridor 13, 22, 26, 31–32, 38, 46, 191 double-loaded 32, 42, 47 stress 141 Sussman, A. 130, 132, 150, 152, 156–157, 163, 176, 179 sustainability 139–140, 192 symmetry see bilateral symmetry Taj Mahal 76, 78, 112 Taoism 140 Taylor, J.B. 148 Taylor, R.P. 119 television 5, 66, 68, 86–87 textbooks 86 thalamus 199 Thatcher, M. 57, 58–59 theatre design 79 thigmotaxis (‘wall-hugging trait’) 9–33, 101 anchors ‘prospect and refuge’ 32 anxiety 20, 21, 22 case studies 32–46 cities 24–32 familiarity 20 functions of 22 hidden trait 17 indoors 31–32 old in evolutionary terms 17–19 people’s natural walk 13–14, 16, 22, 24, 90 research in animals and people 19–24

use of term 18–19 Thomas, A.K. 192 Thompson, P. 58, 164 3M Visual Attention Software (3M VAS): gaze path or visual sequence 165–168, 166, 167 pre-attentive processing 165, 173, 174, 176 regions of interest (ROIs) diagrams 166, 167 tile ornamentation 107 time to first fixation (TTFF) 159, 176 Trachtman, J.N. 183 traffic 12 car-dependent design 37, 38, 46, 130, 131 pedestrians, needs of 34–36 transportation officials 193 trauma: dissociation 190 see also post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) trees 119, 141, 142 acacia 119, 138 Chartres Cathedral 144 Redwoods 144 Turkey: Cappadocia 97–99, 98 21st-Century Paradigm Shift: The Age of Biology 170 in architecture and planning 172–179 policy implications 193 practice implications 193 in psychology 171–172 reframing architectural and planning history for our well-being 190–192 theory implications 194 Ulrich, R. 114, 140, 141 United States 32–33, 124 attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) 141 Bavarian Inn (Shepherdstown, West Virginia) 71 Boston see (separate entry) Columbia (Maryland) 36–42, 37, 39, 40, 41, 43 Disneyland (California) 12, 42–46, 44, 45

Dunker Church (Sharpsburg, Maryland) 70 epidemic of placelessness 173 Great Workroom (SC Johnson, Wisconsin) 143 Green Building Council (USGBC) 46, 139 555 Hudson Street 9–10, 11 Lampoon Castle (Cambridge, Massachusetts) 66–67, 67, 68 Lower Manhattan 90 Martha-Mary Chapel (Sudbury, Massachusetts) 99, 101 Navajo 107 Oval Office 115, 116 Palmer House (Michigan) 119 Palmer Square (Princeton, New Jersey) 33–36, 34, 35, 47n3 Redwood trees 144 Rockefeller Center (New York) 34, 36 Society Hill (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) 89–94, 92, 93, 94, 95 suburban subdivision (Ayer, Massachusetts) 164, 165 transportation officials 193 Washington’s home in Mount Vernon (Virginia) 124 Vartanian, O. 114 Vilotti, J. 33 da Vinci, L. 64, 103, 103 Salvator Mundi 64, 64 vision 48–49, 85–86, 89, 191, 202 bilateral symmetry 107 human field 86–87, 88 main visual thresholds 75–83 vertical bilateral symmetry 110, 110 visual stress 114 Vitruvius 5, 100, 104 Wald, A.M. 66 walking 14, 38, 94, 132 bilateral symmetry 107 natural head tilt when 13–15, 16, 22, 24, 90 ‘wall-hugging trait’ see thigmotaxis (‘wall-hugging trait’)

Ward, J.M. 176 Washington, G. 124 Weber, N.F. 185, 186 Webster S. Blanchard house (Acton, Massachusetts) 100, 102 Wells, K. 140 Welter, V.M. 179 Weyl, H. 111 Whalen, R.W. 185 Wheelright, E.M. 66 Wilkins, A.J. 114 Wilson, E.O. 6, 136–138, 140–141, 143, 146 windows at street level 12, 13, 30, 46, 47, 94 Bejan’s constructal law 88–89 Winter, J.M. 181 Wiseman, C. 94 worker productivity 141, 145n2 Wright, F.L. 119, 124–126, 125, 126, 143 Yin, J. 141 Yoruba tribe 107 Young, K. 122–123 YouTube 5, 66