Urban Experience and Design: Contemporary Perspectives on Improving the Public Realm 2020014976, 2020014977, 9780367435578, 9780367435554, 9780367435585

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The 21st-Century Paradigm Shift in Architecture and Planning
Section I Historical and Theoretical Foundations of Architecture and Planning
1 Sense of Place: Looking Backward to Go Forward?
2 Classic Planning: The Power of Beauty for Human Architecture and Planning
3 Bonding With Beauty: The Connection Between Facial Patterns, Design and Our Well-Being
4 Neuroscience Experiments to Verify the Geometry of Healing Environments: Proposing a Biophilic Healing Index of Design and Architecture
Section II Twenty-First-Century Tools: Biometrics and Measuring the Human Experience of Place
5 Identifying Biophilic Design Elements in Streetscapes: A Study of Visual Attention and Sense of Place
6 Exploring Eye-Tracking Technology: Assessing How the Design of Densified Built Environments Can Promote Inhabitants’ Well-Being
7 Attention and Focus in the Perception of Persian Architecture
Section III Explorations of the New Paradigm for Urban Experience and Design
8 Cognitive Mapping, Mobility Technologies and the Decoupling of Imageability and Accessibility
9 Emerging Transport Futures for Streets and How Eye Tracking Can Help Improve Safety and Design
10 Ecoempathic Design: Moving Beyond Biophilia With Brain Science
11 Exploring Urban Form Through OpenStreetMap Data: A Visual Introduction
12 A Device-Free Mapping Approach for Quantifying User Activities in Indoor Environments
13 Being Seen, Feeling Heard: Designing Intimate-Scaled Spaces on Urban College Campuses
Conclusion: Understanding Ourselves Better Reframes Architecture and Planning
Index

Citation preview

URBAN EXPERIENCE AND DESIGN Embracing a biological and evolutionary perspective to explain the human experience of place, Urban Experience and Design explores how cognitive science and biometric tools provide an evidence-based foundation for architecture and planning. Aiming to promote the creation of a healthier and happier public realm, this book describes how unconscious responses to stimuli, outside our conscious awareness, direct our experience of the built environment and govern human behavior in our surroundings. This collection contains 15 chapters, including contributions from researchers in the US, the UK, the Netherlands, France and Iran. Addressing topics such as the impact of eye-tracking analysis and seeing beauty and empathy within buildings, Urban Experience and Design encourages us to reframe our understanding of design, including the narrative of how modern architecture and planning came to be in the frst place. This volume invites students, academics and scholars to see how cognitive science and biometric fndings give us remarkable 21st-century metrics for evaluating and improving designs, even before they are built. Justin B. Hollander is a professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning and director of the C.A.G.S. in Urban Justice and Sustainability 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 seven other books on urban planning and design, including Cognitive Architecture: Designing for How We Respond to the Built Environment (with Ann Sussman) and Urban Social Listening: Potential and Pitfalls for Using Microblogging Data in Studying Cities, and was recently inducted as a fellow of the American Institute of Certifed Planners. He hosts the Apple podcast ‘Cognitive Urbanism.’ Ann Sussman is a registered architect, researcher and college instructor. Her book, Cognitive Architecture: Designing for How We Respond to the Built Environment (Routledge, 2015), coauthored with Justin B. Hollander, won the Place Research Award from the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) in 2016. She currently teaches a new course on perception and the human experience of place, ‘Architecture and Cognition,’ at the Boston Architectural College (BAC). In 2020, she founded and became president of the nonproft The Human Architecture + Planning Institute, Inc. (theHapi.org).

URBAN EXPERIENCE AND DESIGN Contemporary Perspectives on Improving the Public Realm

Edited by Justin B. Hollander and Ann Sussman

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 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 Justin B. Hollander and Ann Sussman to be identifed as the editors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted 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 identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sussman, Ann, editor. | Hollander, Justin B., editor. Title: Urban experience and design : contemporary perspectives on improving the public realm / edited by Ann Sussman and Justin B. Hollander. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifers: LCCN 2020014976 (print) | LCCN 2020014977 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367435578 (hbk) | ISBN 9780367435554 (pbk) | ISBN 9780367435585 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Architecture—Human factors. | Architecture and science. | Architecture and society. | Biometrics (Biology) | Cognitive Science. Classifcation: LCC NA2542.4 .U73 2012 (print) | LCC NA2542.4 (ebook) | DDC 720.1/03—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020014976 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020014977 ISBN: 978-0-367-43557-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-43555-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-43558-5 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

To E.O. Wilson, Alan N. Schore and Stephen W. Porges whose seminal work in biology and psychology make this book possible

CONTENTS

List of Figures List of Tables List of Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction: The 21st-Century Paradigm Shift in Architecture and Planning Justin B. Hollander and Ann Sussman

x xv xvi xxi

1

SECTION I

Historical and Theoretical Foundations of Architecture and Planning 1 Sense of Place: Looking Backward to Go Forward? Robert S. Tullis

9 11

2 Classic Planning: The Power of Beauty for Human Architecture and Planning Nir Buras

28

3 Bonding With Beauty: The Connection Between Facial Patterns, Design and Our Well-Being Donald H. Ruggles and John Boak

40

viii Contents

4 Neuroscience Experiments to Verify the Geometry of Healing Environments: Proposing a Biophilic Healing Index of Design and Architecture Nikos A. Salingaros

58

SECTION II

Twenty-First-Century Tools: Biometrics and Measuring the Human Experience of Place 5 Identifying Biophilic Design Elements in Streetscapes: A Study of Visual Attention and Sense of Place Peter Milliken, Justin B. Hollander, Ann Sussman and Minyu Situ 6 Exploring Eye-Tracking Technology: Assessing How the Design of Densifed Built Environments Can Promote Inhabitants’ Well-Being Frank Suurenbroek and Gideon Spanjar 7 Attention and Focus in the Perception of Persian Architecture Saeid Khaghani, Jamal Esmaeilzadeh Vafaei and Seyed Behnamedin Jameie

73 75

91

104

SECTION III

Explorations of the New Paradigm for Urban Experience and Design

121

8 Cognitive Mapping, Mobility Technologies and the Decoupling of Imageability and Accessibility Andrew Mondschein

123

9 Emerging Transport Futures for Streets and How Eye Tracking Can Help Improve Safety and Design Kevin J. Krizek, Bert Otten and Federico Rupi

140

10 Ecoempathic Design: Moving Beyond Biophilia With Brain Science Misha Semenov

146

Contents

ix

11 Exploring Urban Form Through OpenStreetMap Data: A Visual Introduction Geof Boeing

167

12 A Device-Free Mapping Approach for Quantifying User Activities in Indoor Environments Krister Jens

185

13 Being Seen, Feeling Heard: Designing Intimate-Scaled Spaces on Urban College Campuses Verna DeLauer

196

Conclusion: Understanding Ourselves Better Reframes Architecture and Planning Ann Sussman and Justin B. Hollander

210

Index

221

FIGURES

0.1

Perception of the wall greeting subway riders changes with art— a place previously ignored becomes a focal point; heat maps created with iMotions biometric software 0.2 A face-like facade grabs attention; one without cannot; heat maps above created with 3M VAS software 0.3 NYC public library, at right, and with its windows photoshopped away, showing how viewing patterns, or gaze path shifts dramatically; the study results were created with iMotions biometric software 2.1 The Campo in Siena is well known as an intersection of human nature and urbanism 2.2 The roofscapes of Paris embody the holism of traditional city building 2.3 The classical ‘alphabet’ of eight shapes 2.4 The classical orders compared and their parts 2.5a Score of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 2.5b Detail from proposed refacing of the British Embassy, Washington, DC 2.5c Design for a townhouse, Washington DC 2.6(a–f) Rustic interstitial classic plan country is arguably universal. But the landscape in each location has unique cultural and geographic character, ftting and enhancing the genius loci of each location 2.7 Birkenhead Park—2018 3.1 Rhonda, Spain 3.2 Green mold: A problem may hold a lesson 3.3 Bauhaus logo: The pattern lurks within

4 5

6 29 30 31 32 34 35 35

36 37 40 41 42

Figures

3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 3.10 3.11 3.12 3.13

3.14

3.15

3.16

3.17 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6

Bottom-up drawing: Children intuitively draw houses with a face pattern A Georgian house design by Ruggles Mabe Studio, exhibiting the nine-square pattern Babies prefer the top-heavy, facial-hinting patterns on the left The four divisions and the ‘nine-square’—a primal pattern The infant’s view A face to approach A face to avoid Parent-child bonding initiates a positive life-long response to facial patterns Humankind is born seeking pleasure and survival Bonding: The mesolimbic (reward) pathway regulates motivation and desire for rewarding stimuli, generating endorphins and, with positive stimuli, pleasure. Facial pattern recognition uses this feedback system in the process we call bonding A balancing act: Top-down/modern brain processing and bottom-up/ancient brain processing work together to form a homeostatic response Beauty: Top-down projects thought during perception. Bottom-up generates emotion immediately via the autonomic nervous system A persistent abstraction from our infancy: The nine-square pattern imprints the infant mind and returns again and again in our cultural artifacts The virtuous circle of beauty Certain built environments contribute to our health through their geometry, in this case even in a ruined state Natural environments are healing through the biophilic efect Door (left) and doorframe (right) connect to us via Gravity, Fractals, Detail and Organized complexity Building with obvious bilateral symmetries draws us toward its entrance, which is articulated through an arch Self-similarity defned by using arches on many diferent scales helps to attach us cognitively to our environment Locus map, showing Devens and the surrounding towns positioned in the commonwealth of Massachusetts Map of study locations Example VAS report images (top left corner is the photograph taken) Matrix of four example positions Heat map matrix Region report matrix

xi

44 45 46 47 47 48 48 49 50

51

52

53

54 55 59 64 66 67 69 76 79 81 82 84 85

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5.7 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8 6.9 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7 7.8 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 10.1

10.2 10.3 10.4

10.5

10.6

Figures

Sequence matrix Bijlmermeer in 1973 Model of the Sluisbuurt Eye tracker setup in a transition zone of the Bijlmermeer Selected viewpoints for the eye tracker lab setup Selection of photographs of diferent locations where design principles were present or absent Eye-tracking patterns of a participant at the exit of the subway and entrance to Bijlmermeer First eight seconds of one participant’s eye fxation with viewpoint close-up First eight seconds of one participant’s eye fxation with viewpoint close-up First eight seconds of one participant’s eye fxation with viewpoint distant Face in façade, Kerman national library Nasir al-Mulk Mosque, Shiraz Nasir al-Mulk Mosque, Shiraz Amir Chaqmaq Square, Yazd Shazdeh Garden, Mahan, Kerman Dowlat-Abad Garden, Yazd Jāmeh Mosque, Yazd Boroujerdi mansion South Los Angeles ‘home to survey site’ maps South Los Angeles ‘survey site to LA City Hall’ maps Ratio of landmark to choice point elements Elements used to describe home and work locations, % of respondents by cognitive travel group Halifax Central Library, an example of a building that is fairly hostile and unengaging to a passing pedestrian yet stands as a much-lauded ‘green’ LEED-certifed building Ophrys apifera, the orchid that fools male bees into mating with it Caravaggio, Incredulity of St Thomas This heat map shows where viewers’ eyes spent the most time focusing. Note the strong focus on ‘facial’ features. Images created with 3M VAS software This heat map shows where viewers’ eyes spent the most time focusing. Note the attraction to high areas of contrast and natural features like sky and trees, not the blank façade. Images created with 3M VAS software Note the diferences between neurotypical (L) and autistic individuals (R). Images created with iMotions biometric software

86 92 93 96 97 98 99 100 101 101 109 112 112 113 114 114 115 117 126 127 130 131

147 150 152

154

155 155

Figures

10.7 10.8 10.9 10.10 10.11 10.12 10.13

The magical La Pedrera Chimneys designed by Gaudí The dynamic roof cowls at BedZED The main gathering space on the top foor of Kroon Hall Kroon Hall solar panel with snow Play of light and shadow on the Urban Canopy Parklet Evening gathering at the Urban Canopy Parklet Eye-tracking study on the Urban Canopy Parklet. Image created with 3M VAS software 10.14 Eye-tracking study on the Urban Canopy Parklet details. Image created with 3M VAS software 11.1 One square mile of each city’s street network. The consistent spatial scale allows us to easily compare diferent kinds of circulation networks and urban forms in diferent kinds of places 11.2 One square mile of each city’s street network and building footprints. The consistent spatial scale allows us to easily compare the urban form in diferent kinds of places 11.3 One square mile fgure-ground diagrams of building footprints in the city centers of Venice, London, Paris and Brasília illustrate the modernist inversion of traditional urban spatial order and the loss of sense of enclosure in modernist cities 11.4 Polar histograms of the street orientations in New York City and its fve constituent boroughs 11.5 Polar histograms of the street orientations in 100 cities around the world 11.6 Boston’s street network and corresponding polar histogram of street orientations 12.1 The test space in the HL Lindner Hall, University of Cincinnati, USA—divided into zones for analytical convenience 12.2 An illustration of the spatial distribution of individual (A) and group (B) activities within the test space 12.3 A heat map of occupancy patterns (in %)—grouped by Zones 1–4 in time 13.1 Green gate leading to one of the gardens 13.2 Old Victorian-era oak bench restored by resident 13.3 The wind generators at The Park 13.4 A garden gate in The Park 13.5 The Living Machine (the plant-based wastewater processing system) 13.6 The original Game of Transformation 14.1 The unique capacities of the right hemisphere are the essence of the 21st-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

xiii

158 159 160 161 162 162 163 163

171

174

175 176 177 178 190 192 193 201 201 202 202 203 205

213

xiv

14.2

14.3

14.4

Figures

Gropius’s PTSD in his architecture: Traditional house (left) compared with Gropius’s house (middle) compared with historic WWI bunker in Walem, Belgium, on the Western Front (right) Gropius’s frst-foor study is laid out like a WWI trench—no one inside can be seen from outside; the window sill is four feet of the foor Gropius’s master bedroom (left) like a ‘trench dugout’ with sleeping quarters behind sturdy door frame; WWI trench dugout (right), doorway to area where men slept within trench wall

216

216

217

TABLES

2.1 Ten components of the biophilic healing index B 8.1 Mean element counts for sketch maps 8.2 Sketch map elements regression—OLS regression with robust errors 8.3 Potential efects of automation and information technologies on imageability

61 128 132 134

CONTRIBUTORS

John Boak  is an artist and designer. He paints in oil on linen. He also paints and

prints digital paintings. He designs books, websites, branding devices, verbal-visual infographics, writing and architectural components for a variety of clients. He is a graduate of Yale University. Geoff Boeing  is an assistant professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Spatial Analysis at the University of Southern California’s Sol Price School of Public Policy. He holds a PhD in city and regional planning from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to USC, he was an assistant professor at Northeastern University. His research revolves around city planning, urban form and data science. Nir Buras is a senior architect and planner focusing on strategic planning, archi-

tecture and transportation design, as well as on teaching and lecturing in architecture and planning. His professional experience includes work at Grand Central Terminal, New York; Dallas-Fort-Worth International Airport; the Washington DC Metro; and on the buildings of the US Capitol complex in Washington. Buras’s book, The Art of Classic Planning (Harvard University Press, 2019), maintains that the keys to durable and sustainable urbanism lie in the beautiful legacies of cities. Verna DeLauer is an associate professor of environmental studies at Franklin Pierce

University. Her research interweaves environmental decision-making and adult learning, with a focus on emerging adulthood. Her research is currently supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, through which she is able to involve undergraduates in applied social science.

Contributors

xvii

Seyed Behnamedin Jameie is Professor of Anatomical Sciences and Neuroscience

at Iran University of Medical Sciences (IUMS) and Director of Neuroscience Research Center (NRC) and the Student Research and Technology Coordination Center at the university. He has been a visiting researcher in RIKEN BSI, Lab of K Tanaka and K Rockland, Saitema, Tokyo, Japan, in 2001. He has published extensively about neuroscience and directed PhD students since 2008. Krister Jens  holds an MSc in engineering (sustainable cities) from Aalborg Uni-

versity in Copenhagen, Denmark. Since 2016, he has worked for the Livable Cities Lab of the Ramboll Group, an interdisciplinary think tank with urban development projects in India and Germany. In 2018, he decided to pursue an industrial PhD in conjunction with Henning Larsen Architects and the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). His project, ‘Mapping Micro-Contexts: Informing Architectural Urban Design and Development,’ applies mixed methods including image-based sensors to quantify the implications of architectural design on dynamic user needs in modern workplaces and learning environments. With this project, he will become a member of BLOXHUB’s Science Forum—a Copenhagen-based network that cultivates collaborative research and practice in urban development. Saeid Khaghani  fnished his PhD at the University of Manchester (2009) in art history, specializing at historiography of Persian art and architecture. Trained as a practicing architect, his research interests are architectural history and social history of Iranian architecture. Saeid is currently lecturing in architectural theory and history at Tehran University. He has written a book on the historiography of Iranian architecture, published by I.B. Tauris, has a book in press on architecture and everyday life in Iran (entitled: Space and Subjectivity) and has written two books in Persian on calligraphy and inscriptions in Iranian architecture and the sociology of built spaces in Iran. Kevin J. Krizek is Professor of Environmental Design at the University of Colorado Boulder whose work analyzes the design of cities and transport alternatives. For his research, he has been awarded a post as a visiting professor of ‘Cycling in Changing Urban Regions’ (Radboud University, the Netherlands) and two Fulbright appointments (University of Bologna, Italy; EAFIT University, Medellin). He is the coauthor/editor of four books, including Metropolitan Transport and Land Use (2018, 2nd ed.). He was scientifc director for the Velo-city 2017 research symposium—held as part of the world’s largest conference on bicycling. Peter Milliken  is an assistant planner at the City of Kirkland in Washington State. He holds a master’s in urban and environmental policy and planning from Tufts University in Somerville, Massachusetts, where his research was in pedestrian-oriented street design and its infuences on visual attention. In particular, he studied these design features utilized in the redevelopment of Fort Devens, Massachusetts.

xviii

Contributors

Andrew Mondschein,  PhD AICP, is an assistant professor in the Department of

Urban and Environmental Planning at the University of Virginia School of Architecture. He studies transportation systems and travel behavior, seeking to foster equitable, sustainable accessibility in cities and regions. He addresses a rapidly changing terrain of transportation and information technologies, drawing on behavioral theory to understand human responses to transportation systems, information and the built environment. His research emphasizes the role of information and cognitive processes in fostering individual accessibility and community control as technology transforms mobility. Donald H. Ruggles, AIA, NCARB, ICAA, ANFA, is a practicing architect and the

CEO of Ruggles Mabe Studio, an award-winning boutique residential architecture and interior design frm based in Colorado. Since 2018, Don has been traveling the  US and Europe to discuss his frst book, Beauty, Neuroscience, and Architecture: Timeless Patterns and Their Impact on Our Well-Being, which suggests beauty can and does make a diference in our lives, including improving many aspects of our health. Federico Rupi,  PhD in transport, is Associate Professor of Transport Engineering

at the University of Bologna (Italy) where he is the coordinator of Transportation Networks Laboratory. He is vice president and member of the steering committee of NITEL Consortium, consisting of 18 Italian universities and working in the transport and logistics feld. He is also the coordinator of two Erasmus exchange programs with Universitat Politècnica De València (E) and Universiteit Twente (NL). His research interests focus mainly on sustainable mobility and in particular on cycling network analysis and modeling, bicycle route choice model, cyclist gaze behavior and innovative public transportation systems (PRT). Nikos A. Salingaros,  PhD, is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He helped to introduce two key concepts into urban morphology: fractals and networks, thus providing a set of scientifc tools for design. One of the pioneer researchers on biophilia as an essential health component of the human environment, he contributed to the New Athens Charter of 2003. He has described cities as systems of informational architecture and defned the key notion of ‘fractal loading.’ He was the winner of the 2019 Stockholm Cultural Award for Architecture, and he shared the 2018 Traditional Building Magazine Clem Labine Award with Michael Mehafy. Misha Semenov  is an architectural designer and researcher whose work explores how the built environment can be redesigned to foster greater emotional and physical connections to nature. Semenov is the co-founder of The Ecoempathy Project, an online platform for exploring architecture/nature connections, and a designer and sustainability coordinator at Centerbrook Architects in Centerbrook, CT. Semenov has lectured widely on his studies, appearing on the US Green

Contributors

xix

Building Council’s Built for Health podcast and as a co-presenter at the Greenbuild conference. A graduate of the Yale Schools of Architecture and the Environment, Semenov is presently an associate fellow of Trumbull College at Yale. Minyu Situ  is a research associate working at the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University. She holds a bachelor’s degree in environmental management at Indiana University Bloomington and a master’s degree in environmental policy and planning at Tufts University. Her design of a ‘water drinking system’ contained in automobiles to recycle water resources was granted a 19th National Exhibition of Inventions & Unity Model Patent in China. Gideon Spanjar  holds a PhD in landscape architecture from the University of Essex. He is currently Senior Researcher at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (AUAS). He is also the project leader of Sensing Streetscapes (www.sensing streetscapes.com) and of the European Union–funded Cool Towns project, which aims to make cities climate-proof. He is an associate fellow at the Centre for Econics and Ecosystem Management and a member of the editorial board of Rooilijn, a peer-reviewed Dutch journal on science and policy in the feld of spatial planning. His research focuses on users’ experience at eye level and the redesign of the built environment. Frank Suurenbroek,  PhD, is Professor of Spatial Urban Transformation at the Faculty of Technology at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (AUAS). Frank is a board member of both the Interdisciplinary Research Program Urban Technology and the Urban Governance and Social Innovation program. His chair conducts multiple applied research projects on urban redesign and planning of existing neighborhoods, with a focus on the application of new technologies to design livable and resilient neighborhoods, streetscapes and public places. He coorganizes the Media Architecture Biennale in Amsterdam in 2020 (www.mab20. org), which is related to his Responsive Public Spaces Project (www.responsive urbanspaces.amsterdam) and Sensing Streetscapes Project (www.sensingstreetscapes. com). Robert S. Tullis,  a 40-year Boston architect, migrated to real estate development

in 2008. His well-known placemaking projects include University Park at MIT, The Grove at Farmer’s Market, Americana at Brand, BelMar and Waterline Square. As Senior VP and Director of Design, he oversees the GID Development Group’s mixed-use projects. He is co-chair of the Boston Society of Architects’ Placemaking Network, taught placemaking at the Boston Architectural College and lectures on the importance of an architect’s awareness of the spaces between buildings and the characteristics that transform them from space to place. Robert holds an AB from Colgate University and MArch from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is a member of the BSA, AIA, ULI and CNU and is a LEED AP.

xx

Contributors

Jamal Esmaeilzadeh Vafaei  recently earned his MA in architecture. First studying medical lab sciences and then philosophy for four years, he fnally continued his studies in architecture. Because of his interest in philosophy of mind and design, his fnal thesis was design through perception principles. He teaches basic courses in architecture and translates key texts into Farsi.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is with profound gratitude that we acknowledge the numerous people who have contributed to make this book possible. First, we must extend our appreciation to those who were instrumental in the organization and execution of the 1st International Conference on Urban Experience and Design in April 2019, from which many of the chapters herein derive. Thanks go to the generous contributors who helped make the conference possible: iMotions (Robert Christopherson, Kieu Wong, Peter Hartzbech, Ambrose Soehn), 3M (Kelly Canavan), Landscape Journal (Claire Eder), US Green Building Council, Massachusetts Chapter (Meredith Elbaum), Genetics of Design (Janice Ward) and the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University (Mary Davis). Thanks to those who helped run the conference and those who spoke or moderated sessions but did not participate directly in this book: Julian Agyeman, Anthony Flint, Peter Lowitt, Piers MacNaughton, Yin Jie, Kristian Kloeckl, Kai Zhou, Heidi Pribell, and Happy Farrow, and those who helped organize and run the conference: Minyu Situ, Eve Zasoba, Linh Tran, Robyn Lee, Rachel Herman, Michael Flanary and Maria Nicolau. We extend thanks to our conference speakers and non-speakers who provided chapters for this text. We thank Katie Chen and Erin Lang for their help and psychological expertise analyzing the Gropius house referenced in the book’s conclusion. For providing useful insights on PTSD and mental health, we thank 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. And in the introduction, special thanks to Dan Bartman, Somerville planner, for his superlative photographs used in our early eye-tracking studies.

xxii

Acknowledgments

After the conference, we have greatly benefted from a close relationship with Routledge and appreciate their enthusiasm for this book—thank you Krystal LaDuc and Christine Bondira. Thank you to Tufts graduate student Jessica Wilson for her herculean eforts to herd the contributors and an untold number of forms, fgures and attachments, her expert copyediting and her overall editorial support. Lastly, we want to acknowledge the contributors to this volume who turned a thrilling and momentous conference into this book. This transformation from the spoken word into the written word will allow these messages and insights to spread globally and herald a new era in architecture and planning, one that puts biological and psychological understanding of urban experience and design at the center of professional practice and research.

INTRODUCTION The 21st-Century Paradigm Shift in Architecture and Planning Justin B. Hollander and Ann Sussman

We live in a new age, where new tools from preference testing to measuring immediate unconscious physical responses improve our understanding of how architecture and planning impact physical, mental and social health—and either detract or contribute to the public realm. Eye-tracking analysis, for instance, a biometric tool that lets us easily follow unconscious and conscious eye movements, increasingly shapes our world. It’s widely used in advertising, web page, product and package design. At American University in Washington, DC, an eye-tracking lab was recently installed in the business school. What do we learn if we apply this tool to urban design and the built environment? Will it change our understanding of how buildings impact people? Can it improve the design of human settlements? In this book, prepared with 20 collaborators, we present the case that 21stcentury scientifc understandings in biology and psychology transform our understandings of how the built environment impacts people and determines our behavior, and we provide a new foundation for planning and architecture that will promote better design, health and community welfare. Urban Experience and Design: Contemporary Perspectives on Improving the Public Realm, has a nickname: Ux+Design. Ux is most widely known as an abbreviation for user experience, the vast and relatively new discipline that draws on psychology and neuroscience to improve a wide range of software, hardware and computer-driven virtual activities. We call this book and the emerging new feld of urban experience and design Ux+Design because doing so emphasizes the signifcance of user experience for assessing our built environments, a domain largely ignored in design and planning in the 20th century. We frst came up with the term ‘Ux’ to promote a conference we hosted at Tufts University in April 2019. By disseminating an international call for abstracts,

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Justin B. Hollander and Ann Sussman

we solicited proposals from researchers, practitioners and students who were working at the intersection of architecture, planning, design and psychology. The response was great! We accepted a subset of the proposals and invited speakers from across the globe to Massachusetts to share their research at what we called the First International Conference on Urban Experience and Design (Ux+Design/2019). In addition to the dozen or so speakers, we were also joined by nearly 100 professionals and students. Our keynote speaker, architect Donald H. Ruggles, spoke about fndings from his recent book, Beauty, Neuroscience, and Architecture: Timeless Patterns and Their Impact on Our Well-Being (2018) (and brought a documentary flm crew with him to record the proceedings!) The energy and excitement in that room on that rainy Friday in April was palpable. The speakers wanted more, the audience wanted more; there was a thirst for spreading the word about this new and novel take on urban experience and design. Thus was born the idea for this book. While not all presenters’ work is included here, most are, along with articles from several additional researchers invited into this collaboration. Organized as an extension of the conference talks and conversations, the book’s intent is to spread its key signifcant ideas and insights. With that historical context, it is useful to ofer a quick overview of the content of the 14 chapters that follow. In the proceeding text, we and our contributors begin to answer the following questions posed: What do we learn if we apply emerging biometric tools to urban design and planning? Will it change our understanding of how buildings impact people? Can it improve the design of human habitats? Arranged in three sections with a concluding chapter, the book begins with an overview of ‘Historical and Theoretical Foundations,’ with contributions by architects Robert Tullis, Nir Buras, Donald Ruggles, artist John Boak and academic Nikos Salingaros. The second section, ‘Twenty-First-Century Tools: Biometrics and Measuring the Human Experience of Place,’ explores the power and promise of eye-tracking technologies with entries from American, Dutch, Chinese and Iranian researchers Peter Milliken, Minyu Situ, Frank Suurenbroek, Gideon Spanjar, Saeid Khaghani, Jamal Esmaeilzadeh Vafaei, and Seyed Behnamedin Jameie. The third section, ‘Explorations of the New Paradigm for Urban Experience and Design,’ reviews additional technologies and insights from neuroscience available for analysis of the built environment today, with articles from design thinkers Andrew Mondschein, Kevin J. Krizek, Bert Otten, Federico Rupi, Misha Semenov, Geof Boeing, Krister Jens and Verna DeLauer. As editors and educators, we return with a conclusion at the end of the book to draw lessons and implications for practice, showing among other things

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how understanding the diference between normal and abnormal (traumatic) brain function reframes the history of modern architecture—which has important signifcance. While our aim is for you to read through the following chapters with care and to enjoy the richness of perspectives, we summarize below—spoiler alert—key concepts you will encounter that support the book’s fnal recommendations. These include that 21st-century architects and planners use evidencebased metrics and work to:

Embrace Insights From Neuroscience Advances in neuroscience and psychology have changed our fundamental understanding of the relationship between the city and its inhabitants. Now we know that unconscious responses to external stimuli, outside of conscious awareness, direct our behavior. This means we can better understand and actually see our primate nature at work as we assess our surroundings—and it follows we can design and build more appropriate places for people, further understanding, for instance, why old city centers—whether in Paris or Boston or Barcelona—hold enduring appeal, more successfully accommodating human nature than do most modern counterparts. Viewed as a sophisticated data processing system, scientists today explain that the brain receives 11 million bits of information from the body per second. The conscious brain is only able to handle about 50 bits of this load per second (Mlodinow, 2003). Thus, most of our brain’s work happens without any of our conscious awareness or control. Signifcantly, for architecture and planning, this research also reveals our brain’s amazing visual bias: 10 million of the 11 million bits per second come from our eye (Koch et  al., 2006). This fact underscores why looks really matter for people—these are what the human perceptual system is set up to respond to.

Build for ‘Attachment’: Using Eye Tracking to Create Buildings People Easily Take In These same scientifc advances have drastically decreased the costs and technical acumen needed for urban designers and planners to understand unconscious responses to our surroundings. Through the use of biometric tools, including eye tracking and facial expression analysis, which records our shifting emotional states, we can predict human behavior, including why we choose to approach or avoid diferent buildings or prefer walking along one side of the street to another. Eye tracking, which follows the conscious and unconscious movements our eyes make, tracks how our brain can make us approach one area and, just as quickly, make us move away from another. The following images, from our research, show the exit area outside the Davis Square subway station in

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Perception of the wall greeting subway riders changes with art—a place previously ignored becomes a focal point; heat maps created with iMotions biometric software

FIGURE 0.1

Source: Dan Bartman, Janice M. Ward, Ann Sussman

Somerville, Massachusetts, as it exists today and how it might look with added art. Eye tracking—aggregating visual data to create heat maps—glows brightest where people look most. Here, we see the heat maps show people barely look at the wall exiting the T, but with the added art they would behave much differently, likely to approach or even linger in front of it and, signifcantly, even perhaps create a positive memory of the moment.

Acknowledge Our Human ‘Face-Bias’: Why Putting a ‘Face’ in a Façade Matters Evolutionary biology explains that our evolutionary trajectory largely presets our response to external stimuli, including how we are hardwired to continually look for and at faces, even in building façades. As a mammal, we are hardwired to be seen and co-regulate with others looking to their faces and eyes to feel safe and at our best (Porges, 2017). Places that promote the building of streetscapes with the familiar face-like bilaterally symmetrical arrangement of windows thus attract interest and attention from people, while those with blank walls cannot. We and other contributors in this book have found this repeatedly in biometric studies, including research we conducted in New York, Boston, and Devens, Massachusetts (Hollander et al., 2019).

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FIGURE 0.2 A face-like facade grabs attention; one without cannot; heat maps above created with 3M VAS software

Source: Ann Sussman and Justin Hollander

The heat maps in Figure 0.2 track how the brain focuses on the windows in the old carriage house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at top left, and essentially ignores the building below, a new public library in Queens, New York, built without ‘punched’ windows, which from our brain’s perspective means it is barely worth a glance. (Note heat maps glow brightest at library benches and its book-drop out front, while ignoring the door and much of the building.) Implicitly avoidant, we come to understand that the library cannot create a positive sense of place like the carriage house nor become as memorable because the human brain is simply not set up to unconsciously take it in and pre-attentive or non-conscious behaviors provide the foundation for architectural experience.

Employ Biometric Terms to Describe User Experience A new vocabulary is needed for urban designers and planners. Biometric terms such as fxation, saccade and pre-attentive processing—what our brain gets us to look at without our conscious awareness in the frst three to fve seconds— will be the foundation for collecting data on urban conditions that respond to innate human needs. The images in Figure 0.3—also from our research with the City of New York—show another New York library’s fxations, the large dots where the eye stops to rest to take in visual stimuli; saccades refer to the

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FIGURE 0.3 NYC public library, at right, and with its windows photoshopped away, showing how viewing patterns, or gaze path shifts dramatically; the study results were created with iMotions biometric software

Source: Ann Sussman and Justin Hollander

lines between them. In general, the eye moves 45 times in 15 seconds, which is the testing interval illustrated in the fgure. Again, we see how without ever telling test subjects where to look, they ignored blank walls.

Accept That as a Social Species, We Look for Relationships All the Time Traditional or vernacular architecture has generally been very efective at meeting people where they are, in an evolutionary sense. Bilateral symmetry, face-like façades and straightforward hierarchy has been baked into traditional designs and helps explain why the older parts of a city are often the most popular, the most welcoming and the most photographed—and the ones that provide a city with a unique identity. The work described throughout this book helps us understand the physical designs that connect with us best do so because they ft what our brain evolved to see. Remember, no matter how modern we may feel, we remain Pleistocene, a primate, a social species hardwired for relationship, always looking to connect— even if what is in front of us is inanimate. No surprise then that since we are built for attachment, we feel at our best when the buildings in front of us provide just that attachment. Successful urban planning and architecture of the future, embracing this science, will build with this in mind.

And Finally, a Last Recommendation: Stay Curious! Enjoy what follows! We hope the material in this Ux+Design book sparks your thinking and further explorations to develop new ideas and metrics that will defne a healthy public realm in the 21st century and make it happen. We look forward to receiving your comments and creative feedback.

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References Hollander, J. B., Purdy, A., Wiley, A., Foster, V., Jacob, R. J., Taylor, H. A., & Brunyé, T. T. (2019). Seeing the city: Using eye-tracking technology to explore cognitive responses to the built environment. Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability, 12(2), 156–171. Koch, K., McLean, J., Segev, R., Freed, M. A., Berry II, M. J., Balasubramanian, V., & Sterling, P. (2006). How much the eye tells the brain. Current Biology, 16(14), 1428–1434. Mlodinow, L. (2013). Subliminal: How your unconscious mind rules your behavior. New York: Vintage. Porges, S. W. (2017). The pocket guide to the polyvagal theory: The transformative power of feeling safe. New York: Norton. Ruggles, D. (2018). Beauty, neuroscience, and architecture: Timeless patterns and their impact on our well-being. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.

SECTION I

Historical and Theoretical Foundations of Architecture and Planning

1 SENSE OF PLACE Looking Backward to Go Forward? Robert S. Tullis

Introduction As neuroscience, biometrics and the theory of embodied cognition work their way to the foreground of measuring the human experience of form and space, architects, planners and landscape designers who become aware of the new science all ask, ‘What are its lessons for the design of architecture and urban spaces?’ As we anxiously await prescriptive design advice to come from research that other contributors in this book are pursuing, those in the know have a newfound respect for the remarkable insights of some who came before us about what makes exemplary parts of the built environment resonate with humans, what allows them to transform from space into place. This chapter will simply put the new research into the context of the work of earlier observers, theorists and advocates who, through a combination of feld observation, evidence-based design, serious thought and gut instinct preached human-centered design methods that now turn out to be backed by the science. So, through the lens of the human experience of place, let’s indulge in a vastly condensed history of this thought.

Memory, Emotion, Meaning: Sense of Place in History For ages, architects have been debating the importance of memory, emotion and meaning in architectural and urban design, what I contend we now refer to as ‘sense of place.’ The earliest thoughts on place come from Plato and Aristotle. Plato argued that to exist, something has to be diferentiated from nothingness, the void known as kenon. He used the term choros for a limited space that’s a sort of container with content, distinct from nothingness. His term topos referred to an achieved place, the product of a process of becoming. For Aristotle, choros

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was thought of as a region, while topos described a smaller defned place within it. Aristotle thought that for something to exist, it had to be someplace. Therefore, place provides the basis for existence (Cresswell, 2015, pp. 26 and 27). Vitruvius, in De Architectura (probably 30 BC–15 BC), relates his concept of memoria to rhetoric’s ‘memory palace’ technique, in which a public speaker remembers a speech by taking an imaginary walk through a building in which the ideas are placed like statues in architectural niches. Vitruvius similarly describes the purpose of statues ornamenting real architectural spaces as teachable moments for future generations (Walden, 2012). For Vitruvius and the ancients, architecture could both store and evoke memories and be used to convey societal or cultural values. Both aspects are based on an important biological fact that was known to the ancients and has been recently confrmed by visual-cognitive studies: We are visually oriented social animals who are extremely good at remembering places we know. After all written architectural works except those by Vitruvius were lost to the dark ages, Renaissance architects looked back to the ancient world for inspiration. In the ‘Age of Humanism,’ the role of memory and meaning in architecture focused on conveying social values. Leon Battista Alberti’s de Pictura (1435) and his de Architectura (1452), for example, combined practical and philosophical advice to emphasize the aesthetics of humanism. For Alberti, beauty and virtue are achieved via ‘lineamenta,’ design that allows proportions to be perceived, and ‘materia,’ images and forms derived from nature. They combine to appeal to man through ‘concinnitas,’ skillful and pleasing composition of architectural components, which he defnes as ‘the spouse and soul of reason’ (Walden, 2012). Alberti says that the architect acts toward a moral end to design beautiful buildings, and they in turn contribute to the order of cities. The city’s order makes visible its civics and justice and piety. Vastly oversimplifying, architecture conveys cultural content. A material thing like a building, or more importantly for us a group of buildings defning an urban space, can make immaterial qualities visible. Pienza’s Piazza Pio II, by Alberti’s student Bernardo Rossellino, is an oft-cited example of a humanist urban space. The late 17th and 18th centuries ushered in the ‘Age of Enlightenment’ emphasizing reason rather than tradition, and a new scientifc defnition of knowledge permeated art, architecture and culture. Rather than abstract musings about the philosophical framework of the universe, Enlightenment scholars believed that man was ruled by ‘natural law.’ Intellectual memory and human emotion were still deemed to play a role in the production of architectural meaning, but there was a growing emphasis on empiricism and the role of the physical senses. Examples include Laugier’s ‘primitive hut’ theory about the anthropological relationship between man and his environment (that the essentials of classical architecture were derived from man’s need for shelter and enclosure), and the evolution from Brunelleschi’s Renaissance rediscovery of the rules of perspective to Piranesi’s explorations of fctitious environments that inspired awe, depictions of a human experience of place known as the sublime.

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In the 19th century, study in the now mature academies brought on an interest in nonclassical styles that were thought to be appropriate for use in buildings of certain types and to evoke certain cultural associations. This engendered the style wars interlude of ‘Romanticism.’ Nineteenth-century thought about memory, emotion and meaning in architecture may be represented by John Ruskin’s 1849 book The Seven Lamps of Architecture. The lamps of the title are Ruskin’s design principles, the sixth of which was called the ‘Lamp of Memory.’ In this chapter Ruskin wrote about the role memory and meaning play in architecture: The greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, not in its gold. Its glory is in its age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness . . . of mysterious sympathy .  .  . which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity. It is in their lasting witness .  .  . in their quiet contrast with the transitional character of all things . . . that we are to look for the real light, and color, and preciousness of architecture. (p. 172) This fowery prose essentially means that architecture, because it is more permanent than many of man’s endeavors, should embody the culture from which it has developed, and that it gains the power to communicate that culture through its use over time by man. Ruskin’s use of ‘sense of voicefulness .  .  . of mysterious sympathy’ appears to be a 19th-century attempt to talk about sense of place. At the end of the 19th century, the ‘Age of Industry’ produced a schism in which an emphasis on engineering and the architecture of the machine was used for utilitarian buildings or parts of buildings, and the more memory, emotion or meaning-evoking academic styles were deemed appropriate for cultural buildings or the ‘cultural parts’ of buildings. A good example of this schism is the 19th-century train station, with its historicist waiting room or hotel housing people at the front and facing the square, and its cast iron train shed housing machines at the rear. All of this evolution of thought about sense of place was radically changed in Europe after the end of World War I, and in America by the end of World War II, by people who found themselves inspired by the ‘wrong’ end of the train station, if you will. Le Corbusier ofers an interesting example. Corbusier brings in the element of time diferently than Ruskin does. No longer is memory or emotion related to our personal or cultural experience and absorption of symbols over time. Instead, what’s important is the movement of the human body through space over time: architectural procession. In a paper titled Le Corbusier’s Kaleidoscope: Looking at the Architect’s Sense of Place (2013), Adam Kleinman writes,

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In his youth, Le Corbusier slowly walked through the Acropolis to watch how his changing views of the Parthenon began to create not a stone temple but a mental composite, which activated his imagination as much as it did his eyes. Key among these vistas was how the building was revealed or concealed with each step so that a kind of time travel could be felt. By taking in the view from various coordinates .  .  . and superimposing such difering perceptions of the same object, he was able to project himself back to various points in time and sensation. In an essay on Corbusier’s work, Colin Rowe proposed that such a layering of space, time, and memory could be called ‘phenomenological transparency.’ This scenographic presentation of forms brings time and memory into play as narrative, through foreshadowing, juxtaposition and the like. The notion of narrative is important, as we’ll soon see. In urban design, Corbusier’s 1943 Athens Charter proposed that utopian, functionalist and non-referential cities were appropriate for the postwar world. Sigfried Giedion, in his infuential 1941 book Space Time and Architecture, argued that the Industrial Revolution had caused a separation to occur between feeling and thinking. Giedion praised Corbusier’s ‘thinking’ separation of people and cars in diferent tracks on the ground plane, separation of homes from the ground in slab-like high rises, and separation of life functions into diferent parts of the city. It has recently been posited (Weber, 2008; Sussman & Chen, 2017; and in the Conclusion chapter of this book) that Le Corbusier was autistic or had autism spectrum disorder and design strategies like separating people from the street refect that. Because Corbusier’s and Giedion’s functionalist utopia had failed to materialize by the 1960s despite the great changes that modernism, transportation engineering and functionalist zoning had made on city design and city spaces, some architects in the 1960s and 70s started to re-examine and re-embrace earlier thought. Aldo Van Eyck, for instance, emphasizing human interaction in what seems to be a Giedion reassessment, wrote, ‘Whatever space and time mean, place and occasion mean more. For space in the image of man is place, and time in the image of man is occasion’ (Carmona, Heath, Taner, & Tiesdell, 2003, p.  98).

The Role of the Body/Brain This reassessment led to a focus on kinesthetics and place dialogue, the role of the human body and our fve senses in relationship to a place-oriented architecture. In their book Body, Memory, and Architecture (1977), Kent Bloomer and Charles Moore refer to ‘a feeling of being bounded, possessed, and centered’ within sympathetic buildings, and say that it ‘must apply to the city as well if the city is to belong to its constituency’ (pp. 54 & 55). They refer to

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the building as a partner in dialogue, and as a precursor to embodied cognition theory they write, We might simply ask what the building tells us about the place of our bodies within and around it. This may have as much to do with static ft (where do we sit, lean, nestle?), as with dynamic ft (where and how do we move?). (pp. 70–71) They refer to the book The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966), in which psychologist J.J. Gibson focused on how our senses process environmental information. Gibson maintains that senses are not just receptors, but that they project out to gather experience; they are aggressive, information-seeking mechanisms (Bloomer & Moore, p.  33). This is critically important to their role in a person-place dialogue. Gibson accepts Aristotle’s fve-sense sight and hearing categories, combines smell and taste together and splits the sense of touch into two, an orienting system and a haptic system (haptic meaning touch, expanded to include the entire body rather than just our hands). In Gibson’s orienting system, we gather information to make distinctions about up vs. down, front vs. back, order vs. randomness. These relate to gravity and the ground plane, to our body posture, to our position relative to three-dimensional objects. The 1970s and 1980s saw an explosion in research and scholarship on these issues. This work was being done by people in fve disciplines: landscape, sociology, anthropology, environmental psychology and something known as cultural geography. They wrote about a topic they variously called place dialogue, place attachment, place identity and even tropophilia (the afective bond between people and a particular place). In 1981, environmental psychologist Fritz Steele wrote a book titled The Sense of Place, and that term seems to have been frmly in the lexicon by 1994 when well-known landscape scholar J.B. Jackson wrote Sense of Place, Sense of Time. In their section on the perceptual dimension of urban design, the authors of Public Places, Urban Spaces write, The period since the 1970’s has seen increasing interest in examination of people’s ties to, and conceptions of places. This has often drawn on ‘phenomenology’ which .  .  . aims to describe and understand phenomena as experience, wherein human consciousness takes in ‘information’ and makes it into ‘the world.’ Thus, while the meanings of places are rooted in their physical setting and activities, they are not a property of them, but [rather] of human ‘intentions and experiences.’ Hence, what ‘the environment’ represents is a function of our own subjective construction of it. (Carmona et al., 2003, p. 96)

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The authors cite geographer Edward Relph’s Place and Placelessness (1976) as one of the earliest phenomenologists to focus on the experiential sense of place. Relph argued that ‘however “amorphous” and “intangible,” whenever we feel or know space, it is typically associated with a concept of “place”’ (Relph, p.  8). For Relph they say, Kevin Lynch’s defnition of individuality of  place merely acknowledges that each place has a unique address, without explaining how it gains identity. Relph argues that physical setting, activity, and meaning constitute the three basic elements of the identity of places. Sense of place doesn’t reside in those three elements, but in the human interaction with those elements. (Carmona et al., 2003, p. 98) I contend that Relph’s elements—form, use, and emotion—are placemaking’s three-legged stool. But how do they combine; what is the human interaction? The human mind clearly plays the major role. Maybe people bring something to the space, and if the space ofers them something in return there is an emotional transaction that occurs to invest the space with signifcance, and this transaction is tied to our formation of image and meaning. This conclusion is in line with the writings of other phenomenologists and contemporaries of Relph’s. Yi-Fu Tuan says that place comes into existence when humans give meaning to a specifc part of larger undiferentiated space (Tuan, 1977). And J.B. Jackson writes, ‘A sense of place is something that we ourselves create in the course of time. It is the result of habit or custom . . . A sense of place is reinforced by what might be called a sense of recurring events’ (Jackson, 1994). And the architect Donlyn Lyndon emphasized it when he wrote, It is not the designer who creates the sense of place. It is the user or observer. The designer merely sets out opportunities for others to use; to make distinctions, to perceive connections, and to take advantage (or not) of the structure of thought that is there. (Lyndon, 1984) Leave it to the architect in this group to hint at something helpful for placemakers when he writes that the designer ‘sets out opportunities.’ So, during the1970s and 1980s these fve disciplines and a few architects are trying to describe something that they know exists, but they can’t quite nail it down. They can demonstrate it through empiricism but are unable to document how it works. Like Chris Alexander’s ‘quality without a name,’ it is a bit elusive. Then we get the frst inklings of the game changer: neuroscience.

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Embodied Cognition Tony Hiss, in his book The Experience of Place (Hiss, 1991), developed a theory of what he called simultaneous perception, which is ‘a part of the structure of our attention, a mechanism that drinks in whatever it can from our surroundings’ (p. xii). He marvels at ‘how much of their ordinary environments people respond to’ and that ‘people have within them various brain-body mechanisms that react to diferent aspects of their surroundings’ in simultaneously conscious and unconscious ways (p. 9). Hiss attributes this to Homo sapiens’ evolution on the East African plains, when our remote ancestors came down from the .  .  . treetops and moved out onto the warmth and openness of the savannah. There on the grasslands over the course of many thousands of generations they acquired larger brains and learned to stand and walk upright, to fashion tools and containers, and to live and work together cooperatively. (p. xvi) He writes, ‘away from the abundance of scents along the ground, [they] found that they could see for long distances. Many of the perceptions of ordinary consciousness evolved in this visually dominant world’ (p.  35). Hiss develops thoughts about what makes people ‘react, consciously and unconsciously, to the places where we live and work, in ways we scarcely notice or that are only now becoming known to us,’ and why it’s important ‘to learn that our ordinary surroundings, built and natural alike, have an immediate and continuing efect on the way we feel and act, and on our health and intelligence.’ He concludes, Through one system of perception we see ourselves as observers of an environment composed of separate objects, but at the same time, through another system equally active, we look for ways in which we are connected to or are a part of our surroundings. (p. 22) Hiss is struggling a bit to pull all this evidence together in 1990. But his instincts are correct. Because at the dawn of the new millennium, the ‘Age of Biology,’ all the musings from the ancients through the Renaissance, Enlightenment, modernism and its 1970s’ reassessment seem scientifcally confrmed by the growing amount of brain research now available. In a paper called ‘Neuroscience, Memory and Social Manipulation,’ Harvard Professor Daniel L. Schacter writes, We now know enough about how memories are stored and retrieved to demolish another long-standing myth: that memories are passive or literal

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recordings of reality . . . we do not store judgement-free snapshots of our past experiences but rather hold on to the meaning, sense, and emotions these experiences provided us. (cited by Lawrence, 2008) In what is a paradigm shift for architects and city designers, what has now emerged is the concept of embodied cognition. In her book Welcome to Your World, How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives (2017), Sarah Williams Goldhagen writes that embodied cognition (sometimes also called situated cognition or grounded cognition) holds that much of what and how people think is a function of our living in the kinds of bodies we do [and in the environments we do]. It reveals most; much more than we previously knew; of human thought is neither logical nor linear, but associative and nonconscious .  .  . What the new paradigm of embodied or situated cognition reveals is that the built environment and its design matters far, far more than anybody, even architects, ever thought that it did. (pp. xii & xiv) She defnes cognitions as ‘the many processes by which people understand, interpret, and organize sensory, social, and internally generated data for their own use’ (p. 46), or incidences of the human thought process for short. By embodied (or situated or grounded), the science means that we are situated in (1) our body, (2) the natural world and (3) the social world. Cognitions are the product of a threeway collaboration of mind, body, and environment (p. 47). Goldhagen writes, Cognitions do not emerge in tension with the corporeal self, as was thought for centuries, nor from a disembodied mind. Instead .  .  . the brain and the body together facilitate the operations of the human mind, which depends on their architecture for its very existence and for its modes of functioning. (pp. 47 & 48) Our cognitions, it seems, exist along a range from preverbal to verbal to nonverbal and range from conscious to nonconscious, and 90% of our brain processes are beyond our conscious awareness. As Freud supposedly said, ‘The mind is like an iceberg, it foats with only one-seventh of its bulk above water.’ The mind is functioning on input we gain from our bodies through multiple senses in relation to our environments and acts on it without conscious thought. And that’s another interesting point; our cognitions aren’t only multi-sensory, they are multi-modal. This means that sensory perception is always preparation for action. Our motor neurons and our capacity for narrative are always involved.

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So, when we look at a door, we also think about how it opens and how we might move through it. Sight also activates haptic parts of the brain, so we don’t need to actually touch things to have them activate tactile-sense brain cells. All we need to do is look at surfaces, textures and colors and we imagine what it would be like to touch them. We also incorporate schemas and metaphors into our cognitions. Schemas are patterns of associations. Like when we open the refrigerator door and fnd no milk for our morning cofee, we instantly imagine a trip to the grocery store and picture the milk aisle and reaching into the cold case there, because our mind-body knows that’s how we get more milk. Metaphorical schemas are those that transport one kind of content or meaning to another. Examples are Saarinen’s use of swoopy, bird-like shapes to evoke fight in designing JFK’s TWA terminal or PTW Architects’ and Arup Engineers’ use of the image of water bubbles to clad the Olympic pool in Beijing. These metaphors and images are also how buildings get nicknames, like Beijing’s Olympic stadium being called ‘the bird’s nest.’ Schemas and metaphors aid us in what’s called gist extraction, our ability to rapidly ‘download’ only the features of new information that are of use to us in the task at hand. And scientists can now explain the relationship of memories to place. Memories are consolidated or prepared for long-term storage in the brain’s hippocampus, which has ‘place cells’ that fre in reaction to particular environments. In forming memories, the brain uses the very same place cells, encoding an experience along with metadata about where it happened. Amazingly, uncoding also works in reverse, so that seeing the place reminds you of the experience. Remember, humans are very good at remembering places we know. Place cells work with related ‘grid cells,’ discovered by Edvard and May Britt Moser in 2005 (Moser & Moser, 2014). These allow us to continually update our sense of position relative to objects around us and to an imagined coordinate  system. This is sometimes referred to as ‘dead reckoning.’ But apparently, the grid cells reference a triangular/hexagonal latticework of points, not a Cartesian grid, probably due to the forward orientation of our eyes and feet and the degree of swivel in our necks. The mind’s constant reference to experience perceived through our body also explains how we know forward from backward, up from down, level and plumb from skewed, and how we account for gravity in all perceptions and cognitions. Goldhagen, Hiss and others cite ‘fun facts to know and tell,’ interesting experiments and studies that reveal things like: People think more creatively and respond better to abstract concepts when seated in rooms with high ceilings or bluepainted ceilings. People in red rooms or exposed to red light sufer diminished problem-solving skills and reduced capacity to engage in social conversation. Humans respond to sharp, irregular, angled forms with discomfort and even mufed fear. And my favorite, the ‘beautiful room experiment,’ in which people found angst and distress in the photos of faces when they viewed them in a

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room that resembled a janitor’s closet and found happiness and joy in the same faces when viewing them in a room resembling a private library. It’s even been shown that people perceive greater friendliness when they meet strangers while holding a cup of warm liquid than while holding a glass of cold liquid! Goldhagen refers to the tendency of contemporary ‘starchitects’ to design for an iconic photo view that will play well in media rather than focusing on a sense of place or human habitation. She laments, ‘designers simply lack suffcient knowledge about human environmental experience,’ and blames ‘the anachronisms of architectural education’ (p. 35). The aesthetics of a new project, how it is composed, how the people who use it will experience it, is too often dismissed as unknowable or irrelevant. The question of how its design afects human beings is rarely asked .  .  . Good design; thoughtfully composed ordering systems and patterns, sensuously active materials and textures, deliberately constructed sequences of spaces; create coherent places that have a powerfully positive efect on people. Urban spaces, landscapes, and buildings . . . profoundly infuence our well-being. They actually help constitute our very sense of ourselves, our sense of identity. (p. xxiii) I am proposing that the operation of embodied cognition is, when it produces emotional nourishment, what we mean by sense of place. It’s not just a marketing slogan for the latest live-work-play mixed-use project, but rather it is a biological/ mental/emotional fact of our evolved life in a human body on the earth. In the ‘Age of Neuroscience,’ sense of place is our conscious and unconscious emotional reaction to our body-mind’s kinesthetic and cognitive experience in, and in relationship to, our immediate surroundings. For a focus on placemaking, it is our lived experience in defned urban spaces. Useful specifcs for placemakers come from Ann Sussman and Justin Hollander’s book Cognitive Architecture (2015). That edges matter, that patterns matter, that shapes carry weight and that narrative matters. They reference brain research and cognitive studies proving that ‘People have multiple unconscious tendencies and behaviors that govern their responses to built environments’ (Sussman & Hollander, p. 3). Designers who take this ‘hard-wiring’ into account can predict our reactions, as a species, to certain types and features of city space.

Those That Have Come Before Us But this information isn’t actually new. Observant designers have seen these traits in action and have advocated for designing in coordination with them for ages. Nineteenth-century Vienna architect Camillo Sitte is the godfather of research on place form. In his landmark 1889 book Der Städtebau (or City

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Planning According to Artistic Principles), Sitte focused on the design of popular and beloved piazzas and squares, trying to understand what physical features made them so. He presented his fndings using the graphic technique of fgureground analysis. Looking at these, we note how the piazzas and the streets leading to them appear to be outdoor rooms carved from the surrounding building mass, and that they have defned shapes. This is what architects refer to as fgural space (as opposed to free space) volumes of space (rather than volumes in space). Sitte distilled six principals for planning good city squares: (1) Integration of the sculptural mass of buildings with the open space. (2) Proper siting of monuments in the space that leaves its center open. (3) Defned enclosure and controlled access points that frame views in and conceal views out. (4) Pleasing proportions of the open space. (5) Avoidance of overly simple and boring plan shapes. And (6) harmonious grouping and composed relationships of linked spaces. Particularly important is the principal of enclosure and thresholds, and Sitte calls it ‘this most important and really essential prerequisite of any artistic efect’ (p.  170). He makes his most famous forensic observation, known as the ‘turbine plaza,’ when he writes ‘that by leading the streets of in the fashion of turbine blades, the most favorable conditions result, namely that from any point within the plaza no more than a single view out of it is possible at a time’ (p.  172). Although Sitte’s research is over 125 years old and some spaces he analyzed are a thousand years old, the principals he identifed still apply to human experience of our public realm today. There are rules, and good spaces follow them. Recent technique adds quantifable and measured data to surveys like Sitte’s. From these eforts we learn that the sense of enclosure so important to Sitte is strongly felt at height to width container ratios of 1:2 and 1:3 and dissipates at ratios of 1:5 and 1:6. Taller/tighter is better. As is proportion. Edward T. White, in his book Path Portal Place (1999), has posited that humans perceive all public spaces to have one of those three roles based on our reading of their proportions. And we then have expectations of how to act in them, either to move along, pass through or stay in. From the standpoint of human behavior, it’s useful to think of the spaces we design in these categories and understand that they perform distinct symbiotic functions related to their use by pedestrians. White also said that the design of a place can prohibit, impede, discourage, allow, promote or create activities. Imagine these levels of activity-support as a range on a VU meter. He wrote, ‘Activity is created by a place when human nature meets environmental opportunity to bring about human behavior’ (p.  35, emphasis added). Those not comfortable with the notion that design can ‘create’ human behavior can substitute the words ‘encourage’ or ‘incubate.’ Regardless, when we design public open space, we should be trying for the positive side of White’s range. So, who has studied the human nature that meets (and should infuence) good place design to bring about (encourage, incubate) human behavior?

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Among these researchers, Jan Gehl stands out for his insights on human characteristics. This Copenhagen architect and planning consultant has made a lifelong study of how people innately relate to public space (see his books Life Between Buildings, 2008, and Public Spaces, Public Life, 2004, and Cities for People, 2010). Gehl notes that human activity can be subdivided into necessary, optional and social categories. He says that necessary activities like commuting to work or shopping for basics happen regardless of the quality of the environment, but that optional activities like dining out are greatly infuenced by a quality environment, and social activities like meeting friends for drinks and dinner are dependent on multiple people agreeing that an environment is of high quality (Gehl, 2010, p.  21). Gehl therefore maintains that the types of activities, the frequency or number of them and their duration in time can all be infuenced by good design. He says that life between buildings, successful and vibrant urban public space, is a product of the number of activities times the duration of those activities. The notion of stasis is important here. It’s not how many people move through a public space, but the amount of time that they spend in a space, that gives it vitality. Gehl, like William Holly Whyte before him, urges us to design for people who stay awhile (Gehl, 2008, 2010; Whyte, 1980, p. 73). The better their environment, the more activities will take place, for longer periods of time, and with more people involved. Jan Gehl relates the way humans see and hear to the size of spaces in which we feel comfortable. It’s no surprise that spaces feel most comfortable when we can see details and people across the way (brain research shows that we unconsciously and constantly scan for faces). Spaces the size of stadiums (100 meters, sometimes called the ‘social feld of vison’) are the outer limit of human recognition, and those the size of theaters (25 to 35 meters, the ‘emotional feld of vision’) allow us to efectively relate to other humans as distinct people. We can also compare the ‘good piazzas’ that researchers have identifed and fnd that they share similar size and proportions. Gehl (2010) notes that typical European rectangular squares average 230 feet × 330 feet, Camillo Sitte states in Der Städtebau that the largest plazas in ancient cities average 190 feet × 470 feet, the average of all plazas documented in Robert Gatje’s Great Public Squares (2010) is 265 feet × 410 feet, and those falling between the mean and average in Josh Simoneau’s Civic Intimacy (2010) are 320 feet × 450 feet. This is a relatively tight range of sizes and proportions. Clearly something is going on here. Gehl relates comfortable personal and social space dimensions to our human behavior in public space. He posits a 12-foot public zone of comfort, and sure enough, when we encounter street performers, we fnd there is a 12-foot radius that defnes the front row of spectators. If our space anticipates performers, we shouldn’t make one that’s too small (or too large), any more than we’d design a baseball feld with incorrect dimensions, yet architects do it all the time. Gehl also relates the speeds at which we walk to the distances we are willing to walk. The well-known quarter-mile/5 minute and half-mile/10-minute walk

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circles are tools that come from this research. And the ideal storefront bay (15–20 feet) correlates with our walk and blink rates to present new information to us before the retail industry’s ‘8 second rule’ kicks in (Gibbs, 2012, p. 83). Jef Speck’s work on walkability (see Walkable City, 2012, and Walkable City Rules, 2018) maintains that for urban spaces to encourage pedestrian use, they must be perceived as useful (compact and well connected with mixed uses), safe (having both real safety and perceived defensible space features), comfortable (with good edges and spatial defnition) and interesting (with signs of humanity and continuity) (Speck, 2012). His research ofers many guidelines for designing human-oriented streetscapes (Speck, 2018), as does Oscar Newman’s (1972) Defensible Space theory. Kevin Lynch, in his infuential book The Image of the City (1960), focused on human perception, how people perceive and remember space and urban patterns. Lynch documented how, to understand and navigate through a city, people frst and foremost create a cognitive map, a ‘generalized mental picture of the external physical world,’ based on their experience (p.  6). He discovered the maps are the result of a two-way process between individual and environment; the environment suggests distinctions and relations among the various physical parts of the city and the observer selects and organizes them in a personally meaningful way. Lynch discovered that people use fve distinct components of a city when forming images of it in their mind: paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks. If these are the components that literally make city spaces memorable, then it makes sense that we should use them to help create memorable social places. Some researchers have focused on human behavior in public open space, setting up cameras to record it, counting people and diagramming their movements and their activity. William Holly Whyte’s work in the mid-1970s is the most well-known (see The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, 1980, and Rediscovering the Center City, 1988). Whyte observed people’s tendency to stop and chat in the midst of the most active pedestrian trafc paths and their tendency to sit where they can face others walking by. The see-and-be-seen aspects of this social interaction are consistent with the human proclivity to scan for faces. Whyte observed what he called a process of triangulation, in which some external stimulus provides a linkage between people and prompts strangers to talk to each other as if they know each other (Whyte, 1980, pp.  94–98). And he famously concluded, ‘What attracts people most, it would appear, is other people’ (Whyte, 1980, p.  19). Gehl says the same thing, quoting Icelandic proverbs, ‘Man is man’s greatest joy’ and ‘People go where people are’ (Gehl, 2010). Whyte found that when people stand on a plaza, they tend to station themselves near fxed objects such as a bollard, fagpole or statue. And that they sit in well-defned edge locations such as steps, walls and ledges. What he found people rarely do is choose the undefned middle of a large space (Whyte, 1980, pp.  21–22). These are examples of what Gehl termed the edge efect (Gehl, 2010, p. 88) and of what thinkers from Sitte to Chris Alexander (The Timeless Way of Building, 1979, and A Pattern Language, 1977) have observed. Alexander

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wrote, ‘If the edge fails, then the space never becomes lively’ (Alexander, Ishikawa, & Silverstein, 1977, p.  60). From biological research we now know this to be an evolved edge-hugging trait called thigmotaxis (Sussman & Hollander, 2015). It strongly correlates with geographer Jay Appleton’s prospect and refuge theory; that humans prefer physical environments that meet a basic human psychological need for both opportunities, where one can survey the surroundings, and safety, where one’s back is secure (see The Experience of Landscape, 1975). Appleton says that recognizing this evolved and innate human desire gives us the means to understand successful and enduring place aesthetics and the ability to predict them. And, I would argue, the ability to design them. Kent Bloomer (who with Charles Moore wrote Body, Memory, and Architecture in 1977) advocates the use of ornament that employs the four operations of symmetry to produce mid-density fractal patterns on visually important architectural surfaces and features. He says, ‘architects who favor blankness and abstraction deprive us of an important component of how humans perceive not only fgurative objects, but space itself ’ (Fundamental Process podcast, Feb. 28, 2017). This relates to J.J. Gibson’s and Nikos Salingaros’s contention that evolved traits make us information-processing machines. We’re compelled to constantly scan our environment and engage with it as an informational feld. Since spatial information plays a fundamental role in human functionality, we require it in order to sustain us. Feedback we get fulflls a need for emotional nourishment, or in the case of featureless places, it does not. Architect and urban designer Yodan Rofè has conducted experiments in which people map their feelings within urban environments. The feeling maps show a high degree of agreement on which spaces feel good and which feel bad. Agreements span age, resident/nonresident, lay-person/design professional and socioeconomic characteristics (Rofè, 2016). In Places of the Heart (2015), neuroscientist Collin Ellard monitors people walking undiferentiated and bland streetfronts versus complex and active streetfronts. They answer questions that assess their engagement and wear bracelets that measure skin conductance to measure alertness. He also observes their body posture. In front of blank façades, his subjects are quiet, stooped and passive. At more fractal and visually complex sites, they are animated and chatty. Skin conductance measures of arousal are higher. Ellard concludes that humans are ‘biologically disposed to favor locations defned by complexity, interest, and the passing of messages of one kind or another’ (p. 113).

Design Methodologies for City Form There’s much more, of course. Including the use of place-based design methodologies. Practices such as employing typology in understanding the roles that diferent forms play in the city (roles assigned to them by human perception and their familiarity as recognized historical artifacts), as explored in Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter’s Collage City (1978) and Aldo Rossi’s The Architecture of the City (1966).

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Or using the concept of armature as laid out in William MacDonald’s The Architecture of the Roman Empire, Vol. 2, An Urban Appraisal (1986) to determine the ‘possessive location’ of forms in an architecture of connection and passage; an arrangement that draws on existential philosopher Martin Heidegger’s sense of the function of a boundary as ‘not that at which something stops but . . . that from which something begins its presencing’ (MacDonald, 1986, p. 251). Or leveraging the visual infuence of movement through that armature by applying Gordon Cullen’s concept of serial vision to produce efects such as closed vistas, defection, narrowing and projection/recession as diagrammed in his book Townscape (1961). Or the diferences between individualized frames of reference associated with free space versus communal frames of reference associated with fgural space and their relationship to man’s place in it as discussed in Stephen K. Peterson’s Space and Anti-Space article for Volume 1 of the Harvard Architectural Review (1980).

Conclusion As neuroscience is revealing some age-old truths about our perception of place and our process of emotionally bonding with it, the modernist notion of a zeitgeist (spirit of the times) yields to the ancient notion of genius loci (spirit of the place). The human-focused design insights of earlier generations continue to be valid. Now that brain research and embodied cognition are here, we as designers have no excuse to ignore these insights, nor to dismiss the work of those that came before us as personal theories or mere pet peeves. Our urban public spaces are, in fact, a theater for human events and where people come together on a social and civic basis, importantly diferent from our relationships within private buildings. This public realm should be composed as thoughtfully as the buildings that form it and should not be simply the residual area left over when the design of the buildings is done. We should employ strategies that follow a human-centered recipe that attempts to transform space into place. This recipe is not magical or mysterious. It’s actually well researched and time tested, and now it’s being validated by brain research. While we await a neuroscience-based revision of Der Städtebau or A Pattern Language, perhaps we should all become more aware of this scholarship, for decades ignored or marginalized in design schools. As James Kunstler observed in his book The Geography of Nowhere (1993), ‘The culture of good place-making is a body of knowledge and acquired skills . . . if it is not transmitted from one generation to the next, it is lost.’

References Alexander, C. (1979). The timeless way of building. New York: Oxford University Press. Alexander, C., Ishikawa, S., & Silverstein, M. (1977). A pattern language. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Appleton, J. (1975). The experience of landscape. London: John Wiley & Sons. Bloomer, K., & Moore, C. (1977). Body, memory, and architecture. New Haven: Yale University Press. Carmona, M., Heath, T., Taner, O., & Tiesdell, S. (2003). Public places, urban spaces. Oxford: Architectural Press. Cresswell, T. (2015). Place, an introduction (2nd ed.). Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Cullen, G. (1961). Townscape. New York: Reinhold Publishing Corp. Ellard, C. (2015). Places of the heart. New York: Bellevue Literary Press. Gatje, R. (2010). Great public squares. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Gehl, J. (2004). Public spaces, public life. Copenhagen: The Danish Architectural Press. Gehl, J. (2008, published in Danish 1971). Life between buildings. Copenhagen: The Danish Architectural Press. Gehl, J. (2010). Cities for people. Washington, DC: Island Press. Gibbs, R. J. (2012). Principles of urban retail planning and development. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Gibson, J. J. (1966). The senses considered as perceptual systems. Boston: Houghton Mifin. Giedion, S. (1941). Space time and architecture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goldhagen, S. W. (2017). Welcome to your world, how the built environment shapes our lives. New York: Harper Collins. Hiss, T. (1991). The experience of place. New York: Vintage Books. Jackson, J. B. (1994). Sense of place, sense of time. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kleinman, A. (2013). Le Corbusier’s Kaleidoscope: Looking at the architect’s sense of place. Modern Painters Magazine. New York: Blouin Media. Kunstler, J. (1993). The geography of nowhere. New York: Simon & Schuster. Lawrence, K. (2008, September 21). Suite101.com. Lynch, K. (1960). The image of the city. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lyndon, D. (1984). Caring about places. Places Journal, 2(1). MacDonald, W. (1986). The architecture of the Roman empire, Vol. 2, an urban appraisal. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Moser, E., & Moser, M.-B. (2014). Mapping your every move. Cerebrum: Dana Foundation. Retrieved from www.dana.org/article/mapping-your-every-move/ Newman, O. (1972). Defensible space. New York: MacMillan. Peterson, S. K. (1980). Space and anti-space (Vol. 1). Cambridge, MA: Harvard Architectural Review. Relph, E. (1976). Place and placelessness. London: Pion Ltd. Rofè, Y. (2016). The meaning and usefulness of the ‘feeling map’ as a tool in planning and urban design. In Pursuit of a living architecture: Continuing Christopher Alexander’s quest for a humane and sustainable building culture (Chapter 15, pp. 295–312). Common Ground Publishing. Rossi, A. (1966, in English 1984). The architecture of the city. Cambridge, MA: Oppositions Books. Rowe, C., & Koetter, F. (1978). Collage city. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Ruskin, J. (1849). The seven lamps of architecture. London: Smith Elder & Co. Simoneau, J. (2010). Civic intimacy. Raleigh, NC: Lulu Enterprises Inc. Sitte, C. (1889, translated 1965). Der Städtebau (or City planning according to artistic principles) (G. R. Collins & C. C. Collins, Trans.). Random House. Speck, J. (2012). Walkable city. New York: North Point Press.

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Speck, J. (2018). Walkable city rules. Washington, DC: Island Press. Steele, F. (1981). The sense of place. Boston: CBI Publishing Company. Sussman, A., & Chen, K. (2017). The mental disorders that gave us modern architecture. Common Edge. Retrieved from https://commonedge.org/the-mental-disorders-thatgave-us-modern-architecture/ Sussman, A., & Hollander, J. (2015). Cognitive architecture. New York and London: Routledge. Tuan, Yi-Fu. (1977). Space and place: The perspective of experience. Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press. Walden, D. (2012). Frozen music. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Magazine. Weber, N. F. (2008). Le Corbusier, a life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. White, E. T. (1999). Path portal place, appreciating public space in urban environments. Tallahassee, FL: Architectural Media Ltd. Whyte, W. H. (1980). The social life of small urban space. New York: Project for Public Spaces. Whyte, W. H. (1988). Rediscovering the center city. New York: Doubleday.

2 CLASSIC PLANNING The Power of Beauty for Human Architecture and Planning Nir Buras

What Is Classic Planning? Classic planning is the knowledge and practice behind successful city planning. It comprises the overall best forms and methods that support our human mental and physical well-being in the built environment. The Art of Classic Planning: Building Beautiful and Enduring Communities (Harvard University Press, 2019) demonstrates that holistic principles, embedded in the classical method, have been used for 5,000 years in a spectrum of scales, ranging from urban fabric to intimate interiors. Like the alphabetical system that was codifed some 2,500 years ago, the aesthetic tools of the classical method were similarly codifed at that time, and continually applied and improved upon since then. This occurred most notably during the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and most lately in the 1850s by Haussmann in Paris and Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. in the US, as well as in the early 1900s by Burnham in the US and Forestier in Europe and the Americas. The classical method is in fact based on understanding that nature, people, cities and buildings are holistic entities. They thrive or fail based on holistic principles. Classic planning is founded on the notion that the substance of cities is complex, and if they are to work, their plans must be simple. Radically, but not surprisingly, it concludes that the purpose of urbanism is to build a legacy of beautiful places. Biometric research into our brain architecture validates its design templates, which were devised and improved over millennia (Kawabata & Zeki, 2004; Ishizu & Zeki, 2011; Zeki, 2003, 2016).That is because classic plan places are for people. Their human scale, charm, walkability and variety result from knowing that in the last 50,000 years humans haven’t changed much.

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FIGURE 2.1 The Campo in Siena is well known as an intersection of human nature and urbanism

Source: Nir Buras

Based on ‘what works,’ classic plans are for the most part composed in traditional styles. Such plans follow the KISS principle (‘Keep it simple, sweetheart’). They provide durability, thereby promoting urban memory. Focusing on practicality, user experience and successful precedents, this type of planning minimizes, if not eliminates, many if not most fatal faws from the process. The classical method is founded on a knowledge base, a ‘cloud of ideas,’ which features urban paradigms, building architypes and street, plaza, park and infrastructure components. It directs how to appropriately wield imitation, invention and judgment for the successful application of precedents. This method helps capture and amplify the good qualities of a context and its sense of place, the so-called genius loci. Since projected outcomes are quantifable before the frst spade enters the ground, they foster designer and builder accountability. The tools of classic planning are powerful yet accessible. Classic planning applies not development-limiting coding and zoning, but easy to comprehend and, for the most part, an intuitive knowledge base for choosing, sizing and placing urban elements, in creating beautiful and holistic fabric. At its core, the classical method enables the generation of built fabric for the experiences of beauty, comfort and security. The hugely important and overlooked point that people feel safer and more relaxed in classic plan urbanism

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FIGURE 2.2

The roofscapes of Paris embody the holism of traditional city building

Source: Nir Buras

must be returned to the forefront of our thinking. People feel ‘at home’ in classic plan neighborhoods, even if they know nothing about traditional architecture. But paradoxically that experience is far more than skin deep. Just as human beauty gauges a person’s health, a building’s beauty indicates environmental well-being in a profound aesthetic experience that touches people on many levels (Salingaros, 2019; Dewey, 1934; Sternberg, 2009; Sussman and Hollander, 2015). This planning knowledge base is not an analytical system but a holistic one. Unlike contemporary architecture and urbanism, which seek to ‘reinvent the wheel’ and insist on applying unproven, ‘innovative’ concepts for their seeming strangeness and novelty, the classical method employs proven planning and architectural precedents, inventively modifying them to new experiences and circumstances. The foundational tool for its understanding is architectural literacy.

Architectural Literacy Classical and traditional design inherently appeals to people in ways that are confrmed by biometric testing. That which makes the classical method implicitly understandable is best communicated through what we call architectural literacy.

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We take reading and writing for granted, forgetting what a crippling disability it is to be illiterate. Architectural literacy is the main tool for understanding and discussing the built environment. It is a common language that levels the playing feld for community dialogue. It enables an even untrained individual to engage in a productive, non-jargon exchange of architecture and planning ideas. Illuminating ‘mysterious’ expertise, architectural literacy empowers its users to break out of visual poverty, participatory nimbyism, deadlock and sidelining in the quest to realizing important civic goals. Much as reading literacy does not require the complete knowledge of the literature of a language, architectural literacy does not require an encyclopedic knowledge of architecture, history or styles. As in literature, a professional producing a masterpiece might study the feld’s basic forms for a lifetime. But becoming literate can be undertaken by an elementary school child. In fact, reading ‘the language of architecture’ is far easier than reading musical notation. The payof is immediate: We can enjoy the newly assimilated literacy the frst time we walk down the streets of our city. The essentially simple concepts of architectural literacy include: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Everything has three parts (a bottom, a middle and a top; a front, a middle and a back). Everything comes in three sizes (small, medium, large). It is based on eight recurring basic shapes—the moldings—which are its ‘letters.’ Like letters in words, the sequence of shapes is immutable if we want the words to have meaning.

FIGURE 2.3

The classical ‘alphabet’ of eight shapes

Source: Nir Buras

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5.

6.

7.

8.

Columns, cornices, pediment and other elements—the ‘words’—consist of the moldings arranged in specifc short sequences. From these, the orders, the styles, the ‘grammars’ of architectural literacy are composed. The classical orders are distinguished primarily by the capitals of their columns. The orders are roughly analogous to scales in music such as Indian ragas, Chinese and Japanese scales, modes of Indonesian gamelan music, Arabic, Persian and Turkish Makam system melodies, etc. Changing a molding in a sequence is like changing a letter in a word, changing its meaning or rendering it incoherent. Moving an element in an order is like changing a word in a grammar. It makes the shape incomprehensible. Architectural literacy involves knowing at least three of the perhaps seven types of proportions one encounters in built work: • • •

Equality—bilateral symmetry; The proportion of diferentiation which distinguishes little from big and which is often the Golden Ratio, roughly 1:1.618; The proportion of punctuation, which in nature appears as the tip of a leaf, the tip of a nose or the tip of a lion’s tail. Also derived from the Golden Ratio, it is about 1/5th to 1/7th of the length of an element.

The classical orders compared and their parts (left to right): Tuscan, the simplest, most utilitarian order; Doric is strong, bold, masculine, basic; Ionic is pretty, beautiful, feminine;1 Corinthian is fancy; Composite combines Corinthian and Ionic to be ‘the fanciest.’

FIGURE 2.4

Source: Nir Buras

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It was the ancient Greeks who said that ‘art imitates nature,’ and the proper way to interpret that is not to design leaf-shaped buildings or glacierinspired high rises. Art imitates nature in that the experience of art imitates the experience of nature. The small-, medium- and large-scale proportionalities of a classical order are analogous in their biometric effect to the selfsimilarity of limbs, branches and twigs at the different scales of a tree. Both proportional systems are so-called statistical fractals. Indeed, the human brain perceiving a classical building does not know it is not a tree (Schaffer, 1999). Intentionally devised to evoke an experience of beauty more than any other design style, method or approach in existence, the orders of the classical method contain the specifc fractal geometries that in humans evoke such an experience. All other aesthetic systems (read ‘styles’), attractive as they might be and as appropriate as they might be under diferent circumstances of culture, history and place, do not trigger the same response in the  brain. The classical orders become key to both understanding and building beauty. Similar to how in music an infnite number of pieces can be composed by using only 12 sounds, this method in fact provides an infnite range of expression. Architects use this know-how to fne-tune urban experience for its circumstance, which is what ‘form follows function’ really means. Focused on designing places and buildings for people to feel uplifted and safe in, the classical method entices the eye with the proper fractal dimensionalities. Appearing in the weathering patterns on walls or the location and proportions of windows and doors, they inform the mind of the durability and utility of a structure or place. Satisfed by what it perceives and considers, the brain releases dopamine. This causes the body to reduce stress, sometimes by as much as 60% (Taylor, 2006). From ‘simple’ to ‘fancy,’ traditional buildings and styles worldwide fundamentally emanate from classic principles, appropriately expressing their signifcance through their beauty and size. Since ‘bigger’ and ‘more beautiful’ imply ‘more important,’ commercial and residential buildings should rarely if ever be higher or more attractive than civic, educational, institutional, religious or community buildings. Indeed, architecture has been said to be ‘concretized music,’ a term mistranslated from German and back again into it as ‘frozen music.’ Last but not least, architectural literacy recognizes design by deletion. John Russell Pope’s National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (1936) is a great example. ‘Design by deletion’ also explains how come the low-relief of some 1920s and 1930s stripped classical styles appears so highly sophisticated.

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FIGURE 2.5A

Score of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9

Source: free-scores.com

Classic Planning

FIGURE 2.5B

Detail from proposed refacing of the British Embassy, Washington, DC

Source: Nir Buras

FIGURE 2.5C

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Design for a townhouse, Washington DC

Source: Nir Buras

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Balancing Town and Country The long journey from frst cities to ancient Greece, Rome and the Middle Ages, to Paris, Washington and Shanghai, helps us understand what is wrong with our cities today and how they might end up. Rome, Angkor Wat and Detroit illuminate the cycle of cities, their pasts, their presents and their expected futures. Abandoned today but for a number of still operating temples, in 1200 CE, Angkor Wat was a thriving community of one million people. Rome, though vastly reduced after 500 CE, did not disappear (Buras, 2019). Comprised of landscapes both natural and human-improved, arable and naturally rustic, country typically occurs in the space between towns, cities and villages, but also between neighborhoods, quarters and districts. Reticulated over distances ranging from an hour to a few day’s walk, it is the space between areas of urbanized land. Countryside is most often classifed according to its remoteness. Its economic base tends to be place-bound, often focused on agriculture, forestry or fshing, sometimes in tandem with tourism, and often reliant on low-skill labor (Monk, 2007; Jensen, McLaughlin, & Slack, 2003).

(a–f) Rustic interstitial classic plan country is arguably universal. But the landscape in each location has unique cultural and geographic character, ftting and enhancing the genius loci of each location: (a) Cheshire, England; (b) Rajasthan, India; (c) Mallorca, Spain; (d) Dorset countryside, UK; (e) Tuscan landscape around San Gimignano; (f) countryside outside Nîmes, France.

FIGURE 2.6

Source: Nir Buras

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Town and country balance can be systematically accomplished by inserting or deleting urban fabric and country in the existing matrix, defning the edge of the built fabric and organically reverting areas to country as needed. Seeking the long-term equilibrium of environmental sustainability, social equity and economic efciency in cities is analogous to living systems seeking homeostasis (Ryan, 2012; Shane, 2005; Clark, 2003; Buras, 2019).

Asking for Beauty Defned by the International Ergonomics Association (2000) as being concerned with how mental processes such as perception, memory, reasoning and motor responses afect interactions among humans and other actors of a system, the feld of cognitive ergonomics studies, evaluates and designs how tasks, jobs, products, environments and systems intersect with humans and their cognitive abilities. While the feld focuses on such topics as decision-making, skilled performance, human-computer interaction, human reliability, training, work stress and mental workload, cognitive ergonomics investigates cognition in work and operational settings, to which we can now add research in the cognitive ergonomics of the experience of town and country.

FIGURE 2.7

Birkenhead Park—2018

Source: Nir Buras

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Conclusion The elephant in the design room today remains that although traditional design and classic planning are proven to provide the best spectrum of architectural, urban and countryside experience, most designers are incapable of prescribing them (Curl, 2018; Sussman & Chen, 2019). Incomprehensibly to a thinking person, modernist ideology, academic fashion, architectural illiteracy and historical ignorance cause most professionals and academics to deny themselves and others access to the best—and likely the only—‘urban medicine’ we have. What sort of progress is it that insists on reinventing the wheel? What valid reason have we for consciously refusing to prescribe ‘what works’ as healing measures for poorly conceived human-made environments? Much like architectural literacy is the only genuinely holistic method for understanding and designing good built environments, classic planning appears to be the unique way to comprehensively approach the homeostatic balance of town and country, regionalism, megacities and conurbations. Indeed, the method—tested, cross-disciplinary, experiential and measurable—appears to uniquely qualify and quantify how and why traditional fabric has worked so well for 5,000 years—and why everything else has done so poorly. The classical method provides a unique platform for the discussion, design and evaluation of the built environment. At its core is the measurable experience of beauty. The method fosters both durability and long-term adaptive reuse, and its understanding of the homeostatic balance of town and country provides a known, successful approach to addressing the human–nature dichotomy in the human-made environment. Perhaps the way forward for the future is a new respect for the relevance and reliability of the design and construction practices of the past. To design for human health and well-being in our built environment, we recognize that we are not ‘modern’ at all. In fact, we are ancient, built and programmed organisms of high-level consciousness. There is no good urbanism without good architecture, and traditional and classical buildings make the best streets and places. We have to use modern science to reveal that power of the past. In the end, it is cheaper to plan for the long term than to pursue planned obsolescence and innovation for its own sake. If we don’t know where we’ve been, we won’t know where we are going. Not knowing history, we will ‘make history’ simply by repeating our mistakes again and again. The historic methods described here are how we built cities before planning ruined them. It is the humane alternative to the dystopias often projected by today’s planners. It balances town and country to refect the magic of place and helps create a legacy of beautiful places. Driven by community aspiration, and sustained by durable construction, classic planning uses the shapes and proportions that best suit human biometrics, perception and thriving.

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Note 1. Do not misinterpret this as associating ‘bold and strong’ with masculine and ‘pretty and beautiful’ with feminine. These are the associations of the orders with human characteristics, not the associations of human characteristics with gender and sex.

References Buras, N. H. (2019). The Art of Classic Planning: Building Beautiful and Enduring Communities. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Clark, B. (2003). Ebenezer Howard and the marriage of town and country: An introduction to Howard’s Garden cities of To-morrow (Selections). Archives of Organizational and Environmental Literature, 16(1), 87–97. Curl, J. S. (2018). Making dystopia: The strange rise and survival of architectural barbarism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. New York: Minton, Balch and Co. International Ergonomics Association. (2000). What is ergonomics. Retrieved July 28, 2016 from www.iea.cc/whats/ [WebCite Cache ID 6jL0wKZ8c]. Ishizu, T., & Zeki, S. (2011). Toward a brain-based theory of beauty. PLoS One, 6(7), e21852. Jensen, L., McLaughlin, D. K., & Slack, T. (2003). Rural poverty: The persisting challenge. In Challenges for Rural America in the Twenty-frst Century (pp. 118–31). University Park, PA: Penn State Press. Kawabata, H., & Zeki, S. (2004). Neural correlates of beauty. Journal of Neurophysiology, 91(4), 1699–1705. Monk, D. H. (2007). Recruiting and retaining high-quality teachers in rural areas. The Future of Children, 155–174. Ryan, B. D. (2012). Design after decline: How America rebuilds shrinking cities. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Salingaros, N. A. (2019). Beauty and the nature of matter: The legacy of Christopher Alexander. New English Review. Retrieved from www.newenglishreview.org/Nikos_ Salingaros/Beauty_and_the_Nature_of_Matter%3A_The_Legacy_of_Christopher_ Alexander/ Schafer, L. J. (1999). Callistics: The fractal nature of beauty. Dissertation, The City University of New York, New York. Shane, D. G. (2005). Recombinant urbanism. In Conceptual modeling in architecture, urban design, and city theory. Washington, DC: Academy Press. Sternberg, E. M. (2009). Healing spaces. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sussman, A., & Chen, K. (2019). The mental disorders that gave us modern architecture. Common Edge [online]. Retrieved November 11, 2019 from https://commonedge. org/the-mental-disorders-that-gave-us-modern-architecture/ Sussman, A., & Hollander, J. B. (2015). Cognitive architecture: Designing for how we respond to the built environment. London and New York: Routledge. Taylor, R. P. (2006, June). Reduction of physiological stress using fractal art and architecture. Leonardo, 39(3), 245–251. Zeki, S. (2003). The disunity of consciousness. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(5), 214–218. Zeki, S. (2016, September 8). The macro- and micro-worlds in physics and perception. Prof Zeki’s Musings. Retrieved from profzeki.blogspot.com

3 BONDING WITH BEAUTY The Connection Between Facial Patterns, Design and Our Well-Being Donald H. Ruggles and John Boak

FIGURE 3.1

Rhonda, Spain

Source: istockphoto.com

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What If? There is a famous story about a Scottish medical scientist who in 1928 returned from a month-long holiday to his lab to fnd that his petri dishes were infected with a green mold despite being carefully stored. Upon looking more closely under the microscope, he realized the green mold had completely killed the bacterial cultures he had been studiously preparing. How could that happen? The green mold wasn’t anything new or unknown to lab technicians, as it had nullifed many experiments over the years. What was especially diferent this time was the degree to which the mold had neutralized the bacteria. He wondered how this might afect treatment procedures if doctors had such a tool at their disposal. Fast forward ten years and after much work by a vast team of scientists, penicillin was introduced to the world as the frst anti-bacterial treatment. By recognizing that something once seen as a negative had possible broader positive implications, Dr. Alexander Fleming changed the course of human history. He and two colleagues were awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in 1945 (Wikipedia).

FIGURE 3.2

Green mold: A problem may hold a lesson

Source: istockphoto.com

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This story inspired me to look beyond conventional wisdom and expectations to ask, ‘What if?’

When Beauty Fell Out of Favor When Walter Gropius, along with several other individuals, initiated the Bauhaus school in Weimar, Germany, in 1919, he did so with the clear intent of fomenting a revolution in thought and craft of art and architecture. European society at that time was under extreme pressure to rebuild after WWI. New, more efcient methods of construction and design that eliminated time-consuming details were created to aid in the recovery (Wikipedia). Deemed superfuous and unnecessary, many elements of beauty were stripped from the built environment. This simplifed architecture was also infuenced by veterans afected by PTSD, who, frequently sufering from blurry vision as a result of trauma’s impact on their brain, struggle to process visual stimuli (Trachtman, 2010). Thus, the anti-beauty culture of architecture was born. Beauty was being redefned as functional, spare and structural. Aspects that appealed to the human soul were deemed irrelevant and not to be held in high esteem.

FIGURE 3.3

Bauhaus logo: The pattern lurks within

Source: Wikipedia commons

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Architecture had long utilized nature and the human form to create shapes, details and proportions. But Bauhaus teachings declared those ideals to be no longer valid, thus neutralizing thousands of years of thought and wisdom born of continual experimentation. Early in my education, we were instructed to avoid patterns that had humanistic overtones, for fear of not being honest—not truly born of function but rather contrived a priori ideas that improperly infuenced the proper course of the design. True design, we were instructed, came only from functional analysis. To quote Gropius, ‘A modern building should derive its architectural signifcance solely from the vigor and consequence of its own organic proportions. It must be true to itself, logically transparent and virginal of lies or trivialities’ (Gropius, Shand, Pick, & MIT Press, 1965, p. 82). Peter Behrens, who taught Gropius and set him on his path, was even more strident, ‘Design is not about decorating functional forms—it is about creating forms that accord with the character of the object and that show new technologies to advantage’ (Behrens, circa 1910).

From the Mouths of Babes One event had important implications in my evolution as an architect, and it bears some semblance to the penicillin story. I was presenting some drawings, which included rendered elevations, to a client. It was a typical design meeting, where items were discussed and the client commented about the design. The word ‘beautiful’ was even used to describe certain aspects of the idea. The clients were warming up to the design. Their 5-year-old daughter was watching, and I remember thinking how captivated she seemed to be, especially by the elevation that was propped up against the wall on a display board. Finally, she walked over, looked more closely and exclaimed, ‘It’s a face.’ I was concerned, of course, because the modernist lessons of avoiding anthropomorphic forms at all costs still resonated with me. Yet she had caught her parents’ attention, and they discussed the pattern in the elevation that resembled a face. I didn’t see it at frst, but as the discussion carried on, it became evident to me. In the following days, I couldn’t keep the comment ‘It’s a face’ from repeating in my mind. This was important in that the clients loved the elevation, and I was reluctant to change the pattern. Yet, what was I to do about not being honest and true to the design process when I intuitively had landed on a facial pattern to compose the elevation? I, too, was blessed with young children in my home at this period of my life. Our refrigerator door had a great collection of children’s art. In the center of the collection was a home that one of my children had drawn. If you ask a child to draw a house, it generally has a recognizable pattern: two

44 Donald H. Ruggles and John Boak

FIGURE 3.4

Bottom-up drawing: Children intuitively draw houses with a face

pattern Source: The Noun Project

windows up high and two windows low with a door in the center—fve elements arranged symmetrically left to right. This is exactly what was on my refrigerator. This, in fact, was the pattern imbedded in the elevation, the one declared ‘a face’ by my client’s child. This familiar pattern has been called ‘the primal pattern,’ demonstrated by children, and adults, from around the world creating similar drawings with the same recognizable facial pattern (Sussman, 2019b). I had clients request a Georgian-style design. In doing research on the style, there was a startling realization. If you look closely at a typical Georgian house in its most simple form, the same pattern applies: A facial pattern was imbedded in one of the greatest design schemes ever developed. It could hardly be any more evident. I also knew the Georgian style was rooted in Palladianism, which is rooted in the three-by-three pattern. This is a geometric pattern that displays a center with boundaries. The divisions are referred to as left, center, right and top, center, bottom. Thus, each division can be named, i.e., left-top or bottomcenter. Could there somehow be a link between beauty, facial patterning and the three by three? The penicillin story foated out of my subconscious, jolting me to ask: Could what we had been taught in our modernist education be incorrect? Should we

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FIGURE 3.5 A Georgian house design by Ruggles Mabe Studio, exhibiting the ninesquare pattern

Source: Donald H. Ruggles and John Boak

be looking in the opposite direction and embracing humanistic forms in architecture? There seemed to be some important forces at work here. Could it be that beauty recognition, history and intuition all emanated from this pattern? This initiated my slow and steady investigation of looking into facial patterns, three-by-three patterns and their application to beauty.

Some of My Discoveries •

•

Research has shown there is a facial pattern infants prefer (Figure 3.6). This pattern bears a remarkable resemblance to a three-by-three pattern. My hypothesis here is that the three-by-three pattern was intuitively developed over thousands of years as a result of the facial pattern-recognition skill that all humans are born with. This geometric pattern is a representation of a parent’s face, and the face represents the empathic bonding that happens between parent and child providing pleasure and love and safety. At birth, 65% of the neuronal structure of our brain is dedicated to facial recognition. Over half of our structural mental capacity is given to facial pattern recognition (Granrud, 1993). Why, in our evolution, would nature devote so much capacity to this skill?

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FIGURE 3.6

Babies prefer the top-heavy, facial-hinting patterns on the left

Source: Donald H. Ruggles and John Boak

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‘Faces are among the most informative stimuli we ever perceive: Even a splitsecond glimpse of a person’s face tells us their identity, sex, mood, age, race and direction of attention’ (Tsao & Livingstone, 2008). This visual information allows us to conclude certain things about a person’s identity without actually knowing anything about them. Psychology Professor David Perrett writes, ‘Our constant, intense, and rewarding exposure to faces means that faces acquire a prominence and a signifcance for us that no other object can match’ (Perrett, 2012, p. 52). •

The brain mechanisms underlying face recognition emerge early in infancy (Kandel, 2012, p. 288). Babies prefer to look at faces from the frst moments of birth. It is, as Darwin theorized, part of the survival instinct that humans are born with. Darwin pointed out that if infants are to survive, they need adults to respond to and care for them (Wikipedia).

FIGURE 3.7

The four divisions and the ‘nine-square’—a primal pattern

Source: unsplash.com and pexels.com

FIGURE 3.8

The infant’s view

Source: Donald H. Ruggles and John Boak

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In a groundbreaking study, John Morton and Mark H. Johnson of the Medical Research Council, Cognitive Development Unit in London, England, theorized, ‘infants possess some information about the structural characteristics of faces from birth’ (Morton & Johnson, 1991, p. 164). This theory follows from research of Robert Fantz, who argued, It is .  .  . reasonable to suppose that the early interest of infants in form and pattern in general, as well as in particular kinds of pattern, play an important role in the development of behavior by focusing attention on stimuli that will later have adaptive signifcance. (Fantz, 1961, pp. 66–72) Following additional research, Morton and Johnson wrote, ‘At normal viewing distance a 1-month-old infant can at best discern only the grossest features of the face: the outer contour defned by the hairline and vague darker areas in the regions of the eyes and mouth’ (Morton & Johnson, 1991, p. 164).

FIGURE 3.9

A face to approach

Source: Shutterstock

FIGURE 3.10

A face to avoid

Source: Shutterstock

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‘From birth, babies can feel pleasure, distress and even fear. By the time they’ve reached two years of age they have developed some pretty complex emotions,’ according to author Lauren Barack (Barack, 2016). One of those complex emotions is empathy, associated with the bonding that takes place between parent and child beginning from the frst moments of birth. Love, nurturing, survival, protection and sustenance are all part of the bonding. The child quickly knows that their survival needs can be met, and there is a feeling of empathy. An infant can discern those feelings from someone’s face. Nature has given the newborn the ability to discern facial features at the distance from the child’s face to the mother’s face during nursing, which signifes survival and pleasure. The facial pattern represents the emotions of love, nurturing and survival. Those emotions initiate the emotion of empathy and feelings of pleasure. It has been written that ‘the meaningful experience newborn infants have with human faces drives the perceptual preference for stimuli that share similar qualities. Similar patterns to the face share and engender similar emotional responses’ (Turati, Simion, Milani, & Umilta, 2002).

FIGURE 3.11

Parent-child bonding initiates a positive life-long response to facial

patterns Source: Donald H. Ruggles and John Boak

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FIGURE 3.12

Humankind is born seeking pleasure and survival

Source: Donald H. Ruggles and John Boak

The facial pattern recognition beginning from birth elicits a response of love, nurturing, survival, protection and empathy, and the general sense of bonding. This bonding generates neuronal pathways in our brain that last a lifetime, ready to be activated upon viewing a facial pattern. Children are born with a drive to explore. A quality of exploring is curiosity, which in turn is the initial component in the three-step theory of beauty. The next two steps are anticipation and pleasure. This theory is structured on the idea that humans have an innate hunger for information .  .  . It is a craving that begins with a simple preference for certain types of stimuli, then proceeds to more sophisticated levels of perception and cognition that draw on associations the brain makes with previous experiences. (Biederman & Vessel, 2006) •

Of course, there are degrees to this perception, and the push-pull of pattern recognition is at play here. Opposing systems push against each other to reach a balance point, which is adjustable (Haidt, 2006). We are constantly assessing if a pattern is about approach or avoidance and to what degree. Therefore, if we encounter a facial pattern that has threatening qualities, the avoidance reaction may come into play.

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Bonding: The mesolimbic (reward) pathway regulates motivation and desire for rewarding stimuli, generating endorphins and, with positive stimuli, pleasure. Facial pattern recognition uses this feedback system in the process we call bonding.

FIGURE 3.13

Source: Donald H. Ruggles and John Boak

Neonatal bonding recall is a positive experience triggered by facial pattern recognition. Theoretically, despite the stronger neurological reaction being the avoidance instinct, the recurrence of love and nurturing is the longer-lasting, more-afrmative quality that humans seek. Pleasure wins out, in the long run, over avoidance (Onderko, 2012). •

Hermann von Helmholtz, a noted 19th-century physician, postulated that the push-pull of pattern recognition is governed by ‘bottom-up’ information and ‘top-down information’ (Kandel, 2016, pp. 21–23).

Top-down processing refers to cognitive infuences and higher-order mental functions such as expectations, attention, imagery and learned visual associations. Essentially, the brain accesses acquired information to discern what emotion is being felt. This type of processing resolves ambiguities in patterns in the feld of vision. If the brain vaguely recognizes a pattern, then this cognitive process will help complete the pattern. Bottom-up processing is based on circuitry that is inherent in our brain. It is essentially innate, intuitive knowledge that initiates the emotion. The processing is governed by universal rules that are built into the brain at birth by evolution, and it enables us to extract key elements of images and patterns in the physical world, including intersections, contours and the crossing of lines. So,

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FIGURE 3.14 A balancing act: Top-down/modern brain processing and bottom-up/ ancient brain processing work together to form a homeostatic response

Source: Donald H. Ruggles and John Boak

the push-pull isn’t just between approach or avoidance; it is also about intuition and cognition. This is an important point because a newborn child possesses minimal accumulated information; therefore the intuitive, born-with emotions govern their actions. Bottom-up processing wins out and the innate drive for pleasure and food becomes the determining factors that foster bonding. •

The three-by-three pattern has a worldwide history that spans thousands of years. How could that be? This hypothesis allows an explanation: Parental bonding is part of all human existence, and the pattern is constant throughout time and space, and has been for all time.

Professor Harry Francis Mallgrave stated, ‘Beauty is a neurological activity, an urge for and feeling of pleasure emanating from the brain’s lowest or most primal reaches and associated with awe or wonder.’ He also said, ‘In this regard, we judge certain forms to be beautiful because they in fact mirror the basic conditions of organic life’ (Mallgrave, 2013, p. 51). The famous Scottish philosopher David Hume said, ‘Beauty is no quality in things themselves. It exists merely in the mind, which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a diferent beauty.’ From this originates the common refrain, ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’ which is a top-down statement (Mallgrave, 2011, p. 42).

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FIGURE 3.15 Beauty: Top-down projects thought during perception. Bottom-up generates emotion immediately via the autonomic nervous system.

Source: Donald H. Ruggles and John Boak

Let us use the penicillin story as a model and reverse the thinking here. Beauty is an emotion common to us all that creates a feeling that results in an interpretation. Beauty is a bottom-up emotion and not a top-down processing of accumulated information. Hume seems to recognize this as well in another quote: ‘Beauty, whether moral or natural, is felt more properly than perceived’ (Wikipedia). The emotion of beauty exists in us all, and our feelings toward beauty are tempered by societal expectations and customs in top-down processing. •

Bilateral symmetry is an important component in facial pattern recognition as related to beauty. The anthropologist Karl Grammar, working with biologist Randy Thornhill, measured facial symmetry by measuring distances from facial landmarks and found that symmetry correlated with judgments of attractiveness. This has been confrmed with many subsequent studies and experiments (Kandel, 2012, p. 379). Facial symmetry equates with beauty.

One theory holds that symmetry conveys the image of health and that good genes are present. This is representative of being an attractive mate with whom to conceive children. Symmetry is a ftness indicator that refects a healthy nervous system and a healthy immune system. This holds true for infants and adults as well as people from diferent cultures. Beauty seems to have constants that cut across ages and racial boundaries, as the principles of attraction in faces have a biological and evolutionary foundation (Chatterjee, 2015). Symmetry conveys a sense of health, well-being and solidity. In the analysis of iconic art and architectural works worldwide, symmetry plays a major part

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in the anointment of a work as a timeless and iconic beauty. I believe the less symmetrical, the less likely for the composition to be judged beautiful. In 2000, Christopher Tyler presented the paper, ‘The Human Expression of Symmetry’ at the International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences in Seoul, Korea. There he stated, ‘Symmetry is an important visual property for humans because it can be useful in discriminating living organisms from inanimate objects.’ He also suggested that humans see symmetry as an important principle in objects we design, from buildings to Persian rugs (Tyler, 2000). According to John Eberhard in Brain Landscape (Eberhard, 2009), humans can detect symmetry within about 0.05 of a second. This stimulus duration is too brief for eye movements to be completed. This implies that human symmetry processing is a global, hardwired activity of the brain. Since antiquity, architectural proportioning systems have been important, and many studies have been conducted looking for the geometric properties of facial structure in an attempt to defne beauty. This is especially true with use of the Golden Ratio of 1.618, a measurement between features, such as the distance between your eyes, which relate to the same ratio as the distance vertically from

A persistent abstraction from our infancy: The nine-square pattern imprints the infant mind and returns again and again in our cultural artifacts

FIGURE 3.16

Source: Donald H. Ruggles and John Boak

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eye to nose. These proportions are abundant in nature and were formally named the Golden Ratio by Greek sculptor and mathematician Phidias. What is important to realize here is that most of these studies were made prior to the understanding that neuroscience has provided us with hormonal reaction to patterns. The Golden Ratio and the Golden Section are recurring themes in beauty, especially in fractals and repetitively coded geometry. We intrinsically react to these proportions because our evolution tells us that the patterns will support our survival and/or pleasure. Our acknowledgment of the code and pattern is ingrained in our DNA. The singular message is that the three-by-three pattern results in triggering the sequence of curiosity, reward and pleasure that activates the hormonal system, which results in the feeling of pleasure and the acknowledgment of beauty. While proportions are important, without the presence of one of the fundamental patterns, curiosity is not initiated and the sequence is interrupted. Should the lack of the fundamental pattern be replaced by an unfamiliar pattern that generates high stress in the observer, then the reaction is likely to be a sympathetic, adrenalized reaction that activates the fght-or-fight reaction for survival and avoidance.

FIGURE 3.17

The virtuous circle of beauty

Source: Donald H. Ruggles and John Boak

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In psychology, there is a phenomenon referred to as pareidolia, in which a vague, random stimulus is perceived as signifcant. According to Hume, ‘There is a universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted and of which they are intimately conscious’ (Kandel, 2016, p. 107). Transferring the emotions of beauty into a building elevation upon viewing the three-by-three pattern is an empathic reaction that results in pleasure. Through the millennia of evolution, parental love and bonding have imprinted our neuronal structure to look for, uncover and acknowledge the three-by-three pattern. When self-referring geometric systems known as fractals are present, then the response is an even stronger emotional and empathic response, one that generates a self-referring sense of curiosity and pleasure that feels insatiable. This is the feeling one has in the presence of the Mona Lisa, sitting in Radclife Square in Oxford, viewing the Monet lily paintings or standing outside Fallingwater. This is what our iconic works of art and architecture are made of. Our brains have powerful machinery for processing scenes, objects and particularly faces. The associative recall of the bonding emotion and the transference of the feeling to a work of architecture or art via the three-by-three pattern makes this an inherently pleasurable experience. My research shows it is pleasurable because it stimulates our brains to initiate the hedonic outfow pathways of our neuronal structure, releasing the hormone endorphin. These pathways are the result of empathic love that occurs during neonatal bonding. This feeling of pleasure results in the top-down proclamation, ‘It’s beautiful.’ It is a bottom-up emotion ignited by the single ancient pattern that humans have known for all time: a geometric representation of our facial pattern, the three by three. In summary, beauty is a physical reaction to a pattern that conveys the emotion of pleasure. Pleasure that is generated by this simple geometric scheme is one of the fundamental keys in the theory of beauty. This is why I choose to illuminate these concepts and propose a path forward to help architects and designers create ways to cut stress and improve people’s health while also building a more beautiful world.

References Barack, L. (2016). How babies learn about feelings. Parenting. Retrieved from www. laurenbarack.com/clips-by-topic.html Behrens, P. (circa 1910). Retrieved from www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-1010/ architecture-20c/a/peter-behrens-turbine-factory Biederman, I., & Vessel, E. (2006). Perceptual pleasure and the brain. American Scientist. Retrieved from www.americanscientist.org/article/perceptual-pleasure-and-the-brain Chatterjee, A. (2015). The aesthetic brain: How we evolved to desire beauty and enjoy art. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Eberhard, J. P. (2009). Brain landscape the coexistence of neuroscience and architecture. New York: Oxford University Press. Fantz, R. (1961). The origin of form perception. Scientifc American, Issue 204. Granrud, C. (1993). Visual perception and cognition in infancy. Hillsdale, MI: L. Erlbaum Associates. Gropius, W., Shand, P. M., Pick, F., & MIT Press. (1965). The new architecture and the Bauhaus. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Haidt, J. (2006). The happiness hypothesis: Finding modern truth in ancient wisdom (1st ed.). New York: Basic Books. Kandel, E. R. (2012). The age of insight: The quest to understand the unconscious in art, mind, and brain, from Vienna 1900 to the present. New York: Random House. Kandel, E. R. (2016). Reductionism in art and brain science: Bridging the two cultures. New York: Columbia University Press. Mallgrave, H. F. (2011). The architect’s brain: Neuroscience, creativity, and architecture (1st ed.). Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Mallgrave, H. F. (2013). Architecture and embodiment: The implications of the new sciences and humanities for design (1st ed.). Abingdon: Routledge. Morton, J., & Johnson, M. H. (1991). CONSPEC and CONLERN: A two-process theory of infant face recognition. Psychological Review, 98(2), 164–181. Retrieved from https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d27e/9007d789bb503a9460dde4275adb4498a26d.pdf Onderko, P. (2012). The new science of mother-baby bonding. Parenting. Retrieved from www.parenting.com/article/the-new-science-of-mother-baby-bonding Perrett, D. (2012). In your face: The new science of human attraction. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Sussman, A. (2019a). Modern architecture: A direct expression of trauma of WWI trench. Retrieved from https://imgur.com/521AcVm Sussman, A. (2019b). The ‘primal pattern’ for architecture is in us. Retrieved from https:// geneticsofdesign.com/2019/01/11/the-primal-pattern-for-architecture-is-in-us/ Trachtman, J. N. (2010). Post-traumatic stress disorder and vision. Optometry, 81(5), 240–252. Retrieved from www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20435270 Tsao, D. Y., & Livingstone, M. S. (2008). Mechanisms of face perception. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 31(1), 411–437. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.neuro.30.051606. 094238 Turati, C., Simion, F., Milani, I., & Umilta, C. (2002). Newborns’ preference for faces: What is crucial. Retrieved from www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12428700 Tyler, C. (2000). The human expression of symmetry. Retrieved from www.researchgate.net/ publication/241431492_The_Human_Expression_of_Symmetry_Art_and_Neuroscience Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penicillin, https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Bauhaus, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin

4 NEUROSCIENCE EXPERIMENTS TO VERIFY THE GEOMETRY OF HEALING ENVIRONMENTS Proposing a Biophilic Healing Index of Design and Architecture Nikos A. Salingaros Introduction The human body is hardwired to prefer being surrounded often by living things, as well as with artifcial things that unconsciously remind us of organisms. Biophilia—the love of living structure—is a natural consequence of our evolution (Kellert, 2018; Kellert, Heerwagen, & Mador, 2008). This strong association is visceral, not intellectual, and it consequently afects our physiology and health. By implementing mechanisms responsible for this innate connection, design that is biophilic is felt as more natural and comfortable than are alternative geometries incompatible with biophilia (Ryan & Browning, 2018; Ryan, Browning, Clancy, Andrews, & Kallianpurkar, 2014; Salingaros, 2015, 2019). Tools for achieving biophilic design (described in detail later) create a positive emotional/physiological state that helps to boost the body’s own defense mechanisms (Joye, 2007a). Long-term advantages are cumulative. Stress-reducing surroundings (which biophilic design helps to create) are therefore healing. For millennia, people used their instincts to adapt the geometry of the built environment so that it was healing to everyone who experienced it. A healing environment does not wear us out psychologically. It’s the opposite of one where the geometry alarms us; where we have to deal with constant ambiguity, fear and stress triggered from surrounding components. Using this understanding, we can predict healing efects of specifc environments before they are built—yet this secret is unknown to most contemporary architects. A ‘biophilic healing index’ (defned later) estimates how far an environment reduces stress. It thus helps to implement a robust scientifc approach to assessing architectural projects in an objective manner that contrasts with decades-old judgments based on dubious aesthetics (Boys Smith, 2018).

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Certain built environments contribute to our health through their geometry, in this case even in a ruined state.

FIGURE 4.1

Source: Nikos Salingaros

A massive experimental program needs to discover and support the health efects of environmental geometry. The reason is that design decisions taken today will determine our future health and well-being. How the built environment’s geometry afects the human body is a major, though woefully neglected, public health issue (Ruggles, 2017). During the past century, harmful environmental efects due to geometrical stimuli that produce anxiety were routinely ignored. Incredibly, this global efect hasn’t caught the interest of the medical community (other than in healthcare environments; and even there, not in any systematic manner). Design tools for achieving healing environments are already known to researchers outside dominant architectural culture but are not yet part of the public consciousness. Hopefully, new results can help trigger a historical paradigm shift in how humankind shapes the earth.

Achieving Healing Environments Through Geometry Over several decades, Christopher Alexander and his collaborators developed a geometrical approach to the analysis and composition of architectural forms (Alexander, 2001; Alexander et al., 1977; Mehafy et al., 2019; Salingaros, 2006). The basis for adaptive design is to fnd and document rules that create a feeling of well-being. Traditional design typologies use ‘design patterns’ that have been built and tested during centuries. Biophilia, consilience and neuroscience

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support results of what geometrical and visual features constitute healing environments (Coburn et al., 2019; Ryan & Browning, 2018; Mehafy & Salingaros, 2018; Robinson & Pallasmaa, 2015; Ruggles, 2017; Ryan et al., 2014; Salingaros, 2015, 2017). These parallel topics converge to understand how people experience built complexity in the environment, and specifcally, how it afects us in either a positive or negative manner. In separate research, eye-tracking experiments verify that living beings crave concentrations of Organized complexity and avoid both empty plainness (blankness) and randomness (Hollander et  al., 2019; Sussman & Hollander, 2015; Sussman & Ward, 2017). We are hardwired for pre-attentive visual attachment to anchor ourselves securely and safely in our environment, without conscious control. Stress results when we cannot achieve this attachment—and most modern built environments deny us this connection because they are too blank (Sussman & Ward, 2017). Health efects arise from interacting with perceived complexity, and they are boosted by very specifc types of complexity that we have evolved to seek for our survival (Salingaros, 2018). We can interpret the healing quality of our environment in terms of the mental processing of information (Ruggles, 2017). An informational basis for making design decisions combines design patterns (Alexander et  al., 1977; Mehafy et  al., 2019) with complexity measures and biophilia. Knowing why we respond in specifc ways to forms is quite new and is unknown to mainstream architectural practice. The geometry of older, preindustrial buildings and urban fabric is largely salubrious, since it intuitively and unconsciously applies biophilic design rules that respond to human psychology.

Raising the ‘Biophilic Healing Index’ Is Good for Our Health We are able to predict the healing properties of specifc environments before they are built, by using a simple numerical measure that architects (and anybody else) can easily compute. Ten easy-to-estimate factors responsible for biophilia quantify the biophilic content of any physical setting. They measure how far an environment reduces stress through diferent informational channels. Experimental evidence validates the benefts from each of these factors (Salingaros, 2019). A useful checklist is taken from a booklet used in courses for architecture students (Salingaros, 2015). We add these ten biophilic healing factors, according to the degree they are present in a building or urban space, together into a single number (there could be some overlap). A simple numerical estimate developed earlier to measure Organized complexity as the analogy of ‘Life’ in a building (Salingaros, 2006) is adopted here. Estimate an integer value 0, 1, or 2 for the intensity and presence

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TABLE 4.1 Ten components of the biophilic healing index B

1. Sunlight: preferably from several directions. 2. Color: variety and combinations of hues. 3. Gravity: balance and equilibrium about the vertical axis. 4. Fractals: things occurring on several nested scales. 5. Curves: on small, medium and large scales. 6. Detail: meant to attract the eye. 7. Water: to be both heard and seen. 8. Life: living plants, animals and other people. 9. Representations of nature: naturalistic ornament, realistic paintings, reliefs and fgurative sculptures—including face-like structures. 10. Organized complexity: intricate yet coherent designs—extends to symmetries of abstract face-like structures. Source: Nikos Salingaros

of each of the ten biophilic healing qualities described above, then add up those numbers. Estimates: {none = 0, some = 1, a large amount = 2}. Defnition: ‘Biophilic Healing Index’ = Light + Color + Gravity + Fractals + Curves + Detail + Water + Life + Representations of nature + Organized complexity. Range: 0 ≤ B ≤ 20. The biophilic healing index is a number ranging from 0 to 20. This number measures the biophilic content—and absence of stress—of diferent buildings, and portions thereof, in a rough yet revealing manner. We can compare buildings belonging to distinct architectural styles, from diferent periods and locations, and in diferent shapes and sizes. Such useful comparisons are independent of the usual concerns about architectural fashions and styles. The biophilic index measures diferent locations within a single building, and also works to compare interior with exterior spaces, open with closed spaces, etc. A numerical biophilic healing index facilitates us in devising experiments. The index is immediately understandable to the general public because our bodies have a built-in preference for all of the biophilic components, and conversely, experience stress in their absence (Coburn et  al., 2019; Ryan et  al., 2014; Salingaros, 2015, 2019). The infuence of biophilic environments on human well-being was historically of central importance and still is in traditional cultures. Nevertheless, it was grossly neglected by dominant architectural culture after the rise of industrialism.

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Methods Conjecture: ‘The biophilic index correlates directly with long-term healing efects of the built environment.’

Experimental verifcation should encompass long-term clinical trials, to be carried out by healthcare professionals. One needs to track human health indicators in a wide variety of specifc built environments and then plot the results against the values of their relative biophilic healing indices. A positive correlation establishes the healing efects of distinct geometrical properties (and negative correlations show what to avoid). Such epidemiological projects have a prohibitive cost and take a long time. A more feasible frst step analyzes existing data on how healing environments correlate with specifc places having high or low biophilic healing indices. Immediate, short-term results are possible using relatively modest means. We can employ commercially available portable medical sensors to measure parameters such as heart rate, skin temperature and conductivity, adrenaline level, pupil size, eye tracking, etc. Those factors indicate the physiological state of the body, which afects our health directly. Positive short-term indicators boost human health in the long term. Stressful environments have negative efects, and we can observe direct avoidance. Results from this set of experiments would provide a strong incentive to undertake separate, longer-term clinical trials. Eye-tracking experiments reveal where the eye fxes frst, which provides the initial and determining environmental signal for action. Already, classic experiments performed with cumbersome fxed laboratory machinery (using images) confrmed the need for the biophilic components Detail and edges to draw the eye (Salingaros, 2006). Nowadays, miniaturized portable devices have opened up a vast new potential for eye-tracking to assess every geometrical feature of our physical environment directly (Sussman & Ward, 2017). Yet another set of fxed laboratory experiments measures brain activity through functional MRI studies. Those resolve whether the geometrical organization described by biophilia and design patterns puts the brain into a more ‘comfortable’ state. Previous results show that this is indeed the case (Murray, Kersten, Olshausen, Schrater, & Woods, 2002). Also, reduced stress in mentally processing environmental information correlates with reduced oxygen consumption in the visual cortex, and vice versa, which can also be measured directly (Wilkins, 2016). This suggests one more experimental path to investigate.

Theoretical Support From the Free-Energy Principle Recent work on modeling mechanisms for action, learning and perception reveals a useful parallel with our work on modeling environmental complexity. The research of Karl Friston indicates that value is inversely proportional to surprise (Friston, 2010). Namely, that a relative lack of ‘surprise’ is of high

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evolutionary value. That’s because with high information but low surprise, we can predict essential features of our environment from only a few clues. This of course is what happens when buildings feature a high degree of Organized complexity, with various types of symmetries grouping the structural components into easily graspable cognitive classes (Salingaros, 2018). Saving on the brain’s energy expenditure in processing environmental information frees us to engage in negotiating our everyday environment. That energy savings enables us to spend our time in productive and valuable mental states instead of continuously coping with informational stress. We conjecture that humans prefer to confront a small number of attractive informational states: being precisely those with high value of the biophilic healing index. According to Friston, ‘valuable states are just the states that the agent expects to frequent’ (Friston, 2010). Natural selection, in optimizing our chances for survival, equipped us with the cognitive tools to explore our environment. The goal of all such explorations was to fnd cognitive states with innate value for us. We can imagine how the brain is constantly seeking to match external data to a relatively small number of internal models. But keep in mind that those exquisitely tuned internal models developed so that we could stay alive in a natural environment, not in today’s industrial world. Unexpected states are costly in terms of our energy expenditure in cognition and information processing. Some of those states are unexpected because of their geometry: The physics and tectonics makes them inherently unstable, so we don’t see them in nature except in unusual or very brief circumstances. As far as unexpected architectural forms are concerned, they can be made permanent because of modern engineering. Such ‘unexpected’ states were impossible to erect up until the 20th century because of the nature of traditional materials. Within the realm of architecture, therefore, humans are not developmentally prepared to feel comfortable with ‘unexpected’ structures.

Biophilic Buildings and Healing Environments Knowing how to achieve a high value of the biophilic healing index is the key to hospital design and long-term health in living and work environments (Sakallaris, MacAllister, Voss, Smith, & Jonas, 2015; Stichler, 2001). This knowledge is especially important for environments meant for children, because neurological development is strongly infuenced by the geometries they are exposed to (Mehafy & Salingaros, 2012). Despite the enormous implications for humanity’s future, however, design of domestic and school environments continues to be based on abstract images that are anti-biophilic deliberately (Lippman, 2010). Understanding the two distinct origins for the biophilic healing efect helps in its design implementation. First, human beings require intimate contact with nature and with other living beings. This part of biophilia is intuitively accepted

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FIGURE 4.2

Natural environments are healing through the biophilic efect.

Source: Nikos Salingaros

historically as the healing infuence of nature (Kellert, 2018; Kellert et al., 2008). Traditional medicine in all societies throughout human history is rooted in natural environmental efects, now supported by important new experimental verifcation (Greven, 2017; Hall & Knuth, 2019). Second, buildings and their parts can mimic the basic structure of living forms (with special constraints dictated by human evolution). A building can generate a similar positive healing feedback that a user experiences from living matter, without necessarily mimicking the overall shape of biological forms (Joye, 2007a). Our cognitive system automatically recognizes the vertical axis, multiple symmetries and fractal scaling (Salingaros, 2006, 2013). A specifc form is ‘natural’ if it ofers cognitive ‘handles’ in our surroundings for us to attach to. We react with alarm or detachment when those same geometrical qualities are absent. Mathematical complexity of a very special type rather than some mysterious vitalistic force holds the key to biophilia (Joye, 2007a). We beneft equally when exposed directly to nature (Kellert, 2018; Ryan et  al., 2014) and to representations of natural geometries. Since human sensory responses evolved to reach equilibrium with the Organized complexity of nature, an adaptive environment is experienced as ‘familiar,’ ‘pleasing’ and ‘emotionally nourishing.’ Architects seeking visual novelty eschewed those visceral signals and condemned their equilibrium generating forms and surfaces as ‘old-fashioned.’ The architectural style of the 20th and 21st centuries abandoned older adaptive and biophilic healing qualities (Alexander, 2001; Buchanan, 2012; Curl, 2018; Salingaros, 2006, 2017; Sussman & Chen, 2017). The one exception was in promoting the biophilic factor of Sunlight. International Style architects recognized

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its health benefts (Yuko, 2018) and adopted a new construction paradigm that emphasized glass curtain walls. Those replaced traditional load-bearing walls that only permitted relatively smaller windows.

Human Responses to ‘Organized Complexity’ Our brain evolved to process complex images that are neither simplistic (informationally trivial) nor random (with too much uncorrelated information). Unconscious human perception of complexity and organization shapes our visceral responses to our surroundings. Built complexity organized in very specifc ways (similar in all cultures and known through traditional artifacts and designs) has benefcial efects on our body. But we react negatively to both minimalism and disorganized complexity because our sensory system strains to interpret the information presented. Recall that 90% of received environmental information transmitted to the brain is visual (Gutierrez, 2014). Human perception is focused largely on the type of complexity that helps us to identify other people and interpret their intentions. Thus, the brain is hardwired to be a social engagement system, now automatically used to interpret built complexity (Sussman & Hollander, 2015). Using complexity measures developed from the work of Christopher Alexander (Alexander, 2001; Salingaros, 2006, 2018), experiments fnd a marked preference for Organized complexity (Coburn et al., 2019). People are not consciously aware they are reacting to coded information embedded geometrically and through color. The brain seeks meaningful ordering (subliminally) so as to make sense of multiple phenomena facing us at any moment. When the surrounding geometry is shaped through symmetries—refectional, scaling, rotational, translational—we can accommodate the raw information because it repeats (Murray et al., 2002; Salingaros, 2006). This compactifcation through symmetry reduces the informational burden on our cognitive system. Describing complexity as a one-dimensional problem ranging from ‘empty’ to ‘complex’ is an oversimplifed, hence misleading, notion. A more realistic mathematical model considers multi-dimensional complexity, with the key insight being that complex systems self-organize (Salingaros, 2006, 2018). Useful Organized complexity (in general systems, and specifcally to our cognitive system) is characterized by a high degree of internal correlations. Architectural and urban forms displaying architectural ‘life’ represent high complexity coupled to high organization. In emergent systems, Organized complexity is built up in a step-bystep process. Since the body feels in equilibrium with Organized complexity, a lack thereof has negative efects. There are two opposites states to Organized complexity. First, a uniform environment with no complexity has very little information to help us interpret it (and navigate it). Yet our sensory apparatus needs a minimum threshold of information to attach us to the world. The eye seeks Organized complexity, and its

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Door (left) and doorframe (right) connect to us via Gravity, Fractals, Detail and Organized complexity.

FIGURE 4.3

Source: Nikos Salingaros

absence generates either detachment or alarm in the viewer who cannot navigate that environment. We can’t force ourselves to stare at emptiness (Salingaros, 2006; Sussman & Ward, 2017). Second, high complexity that is not organized is perceptually random. It tires us (Murray et  al., 2002; Salingaros, 2018). 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. Fractals exhibit and organize subdivisions into all scales, for example from the width of a street, to street trees, to street furniture, to windows in a façade, to the window frames, down to ornament on the buildings and sidewalk.

Bilateral and Facial Symmetries Methods of ‘reading’ complexity are inherited from our pre-human ancestors. Our brain is hardwired to process bilaterally symmetric fgures (Tyler et  al., 2005). Bilateral symmetry about a vertical axis encodes both our evolution in the gravitational feld and our face-recognition apparatus. Those mechanisms endow us with a unique preference. Traditional buildings were deliberately made balanced and upright so as to respect our innate response to Gravity. They do not threaten to fall down on our head. Cantilevered overhangs and pencil columns too thin to carry weight seemingly violate Gravity (generating anxiety,

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which is bad for our health). We feel comfortable with vertical lines, but uneasy with unbalanced diagonal ones. Non-vertical lines that come in pairs and are grouped through symmetry into a balanced object are reassuring, as for example an old-fashioned gable roof. Mammalian brains developed to recognize faces (Chang & Tsao, 2017). Interpreting both animal and human faces instantly—and distinguishing whether they are hostile or friendly—is an essential advantage for the survival of our species. For this reason, we automatically ‘read’ a building just like some very large animal in our surroundings and try to guess its intentions (Sussman & Hollander, 2015). The closer a structure reminds us of facial symmetry, with components corresponding roughly to ‘eyes,’ ‘mouth’ and ‘ears,’ the more comfortable we feel in its presence because of our already built-in reference (Sussman & Hollander, 2015). We are compelled (whether we wish it or not) to interpret novel objects above a certain size in terms of their possible ‘face,’ including buildings we come into contact with. We respond positively to a very special set of organized bilateral symmetries, and conversely, miss them when they are absent. Eye-tracking studies reveal that people fnd other human fgures in a landscape before focusing on any particular architectural or structural features of a building (Sussman & Ward, 2017). A building that mimics the symmetries of a giant

Building with obvious bilateral symmetries draws us toward its entrance, which is articulated through an arch.

FIGURE 4.4

Source: Nikos Salingaros

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animal or human face will draw our attention instantly and without our conscious awareness. An abstraction of a face represented in a building’s entrance or façade facilitates our approach and helps to locate its entrance (Sussman & Ward, 2017). We connect to such a building, whereas a building that follows an abstract or minimalist design with no suggestion of facial symmetries remains cognitively invisible. A building’s composition suggesting the symmetries of a face includes the biophilic components Gravity, Representations of nature and Organized complexity. Entrances in traditional and vernacular architectures might also include Color, Fractals, Curves and Detail through abstract or naturalistic ornamentation, and those raise the biophilic healing index even further.

Scaling Symmetry and Fractals Scaling symmetry, in which objects and visible structural units are related to one another through magnifcation or reduction, reduces information overload. Similar parts repeat at diferent magnifcations: The eye recognizes their kinship and groups them together into one cognitive class (Murray et al., 2002; Salingaros, 2018). Scaling symmetry is seen throughout traditional and vernacular architectures. Fractals efciently encode what could otherwise be an overwhelming amount of environmental information. By eschewing scaling symmetry, however, monotonous repetition of the same-size unit creates alarm. Just as facial symmetries are specifc to animals and evolved in our cognitive preferences so as to respond to animals and other humans, scaling/fractal symmetries are more obvious in plants. (Yet our inner organs, including the vascular and nervous systems and the lungs, are fractal.) A plant’s external structure comprises a hierarchy of diferent-size components, from the size of the plant down to the microstructure. The plant subdivides into smaller and smaller components into one large fractal. In caulifowers and ferns, for example, different-scaled components are self-similar; in others, scaling symmetry is only statistical (Salingaros, 2013). Fractal scaling in artifcial forms is achieved through multiplicities of similar components on one scale, with their magnifed and reduced versions also present. In traditional architectures, the internal symmetries of windows and their frames may refect larger scaling symmetries elsewhere in the building. Those shapes might be found again as scaled-up motifs from nonrepresentational ornament. The multiple sub-symmetries defned by a set of windows could then be linked to the symmetrical alignment of those windows in a wall. As originally argued by Ary Goldberger (Goldberger, 1996), what we create refects the structure of our brain, which is fractal (Salingaros, 2006). Unselfconscious creation relies upon direct human feeling and feedback and so contributes to a healing environment (Joye, 2007b). Fractals characterize much folk art and vernacular architecture. Individuals who have been trained to design

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FIGURE 4.5 Self-similarity defned by using arches on many diferent scales helps to attach us cognitively to our environment.

Source: Nikos Salingaros

using abstract formal criteria, however, reject fractals (Salingaros, 2017). Products of that design mindset tend to be anti-fractal, emphasizing only the largest scale and discarding possible intermediate and smaller scales (Alexander, 2001; Buchanan, 2012; Curl, 2018; Salingaros, 2006).

Results and Discussion This chapter classifed physiological efects that reduce stress and are triggered by diferent geometrical and visual features in our environment. They are individually identifed as ‘biophilic healing factors.’ It was explained how each of those factors could be increased (leading to positive healing efects) or decreased (leading to increased stress and lowered health potential) by design. A useful overall measure combines all of those efects into the ‘biophilic healing index,’ a number from 0 to 20. Although this is a new model, traditional and vernacular architectures automatically sought a high index.

Conclusion We can measure both short-term and long-term health efects of buildings and places. Diferent experimental procedures are appropriate to distinct time scales. This chapter argues for establishing a stress-reducing index or biophilic healing index (a number from 0 to 20) for architectural analysis using portable devices to measure heart rate, skin temperature and conductivity, adrenaline level, pupil size, eye tracking, etc. in diferent built environments. These tools are relatively inexpensive and give instant physiological measurements compared to

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longer-term clinical trials (even though the latter are also very important). Results should be compared to theoretical measures of adaptation such as those introduced here, which would inaugurate a predictive basis for estimating healing environments. Experimental data will reveal whether healthier environments indeed have higher biophilic healing index, as conjectured. Those fndings should confrm preferences for special geometrical structures in our environment already known from traditional and vernacular architectures. Our research aims to change architectural practice dramatically so that it leads more purposefully to improved human health.

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Hollander, J. B., Purdy, A., Wiley, A., Foster, V., Jacob, R. J. K., Taylor, H. A., & Brunyé, T. T. (2019). Seeing the city: Using eye-tracking technology to explore cognitive responses to the built environment. Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability, 12(2), 156–171. Joye, Y. (2007a). Architectural lessons from environmental psychology: The case of biophilic architecture. Review of General Psychology, 11(4), 305–328. Retrieved from www.researchgate.net/publication/228670992_Architectural_Lessons_From_ Environmental_Psychology_The_Case_of_Biophilic_Architecture Joye, Y. (2007b). Fractal architecture could be good for you. Nexus Network Journal, 9(2), 311–320. Retrieved from https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00004007-0045-y.pdf Kellert, S. R. (2018). Nature by design. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kellert, S. R., Heerwagen, J. H., & Mador, M. L. (Eds.). (2008). Biophilic design: The theory, science and practice of bringing buildings to life. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley. Lippman, P. C. (2010). Evidence-based design of elementary and secondary schools. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley. Mehafy, M. W., Kryazheva, Y., Rudd, A., Salingaros, N. A., Gren, A., Mehafy, L., . . . Rofè, Y. (2019). A pattern language for growing regions: Places, networks, processes. Portland, OR and Stockholm: Sustasis Press and Centre for the Future of Places KTH Royal Institute of Technology, in press. Mehafy, M. W., & Salingaros, N. A. (2012, February 25). Intelligence and the information environment. Metropolis. Reprinted as Chapter 7 of Design for a Living Planet. Portland, OR: Sustasis Press, 2015. Retrieved from www.metropolismag.com/uncategorized/ science-for-designers-intelligence-and-the-information-environment/ Mehafy, M. W., & Salingaros, N. A. (2018, February 19). The neuroscience of architecture: The good, the bad, and the beautiful. Traditional Building Magazine. Retrieved from www.traditionalbuilding.com/opinions/the-neuroscience-of-architecture Murray, S. O., Kersten, D., Olshausen, B., Schrater, P., & Woods, D. (2002). Shape perception reduces activity in human primary visual cortex. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 99(23), 15164–15169. Retrieved from www.ncbi.nlm.nih. gov/pmc/articles/PMC137561/ Robinson, S., & Pallasmaa, J. (Eds.). (2015). Mind in architecture: Neuroscience, embodiment, and the future of design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ruggles, D. H. (2017). Beauty, neuroscience, and architecture: Timeless patterns and their impact on our well-being. Denver, CO: Fibonacci Press. Ryan, C. O., & Browning, W. D. (2018). Biophilic design. In R. A. Meyers (Ed.), Encyclopedia of sustainability science and technology (pp. 1–44). New York: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2493-6_1034-1 Ryan, C. O., Browning, W. D., Clancy, J. O., Andrews, S. L., & Kallianpurkar, N. B. (2014). Biophilic design patterns: Emerging nature-based parameters for health and well-being in the built environment. Archnet-IJAR: International Journal of Architectural Research, 8(2), 62–76. Retrieved from http://archnet-ijar.net/index.php/IJAR/article/ view/436 Sakallaris, B. R., MacAllister, L., Voss, M., Smith, K., & Jonas, W. (2015). Optimal healing environments. Global Advances in Health and Medicine, 4(3), 40–45. Retrieved from www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4424933/ Salingaros, N. A. (2006, 2014). A theory of architecture. Portland, OR: Sustasis Press. Salingaros, N. A. (2013). Fractal art and architecture reduce physiological stress. JBU— Journal of Biourbanism, 2(2), 11–28. Reprinted as Chapter 26 of the book Unifed

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Architectural Theory (2013). Portland, OR: Sustasis Press. Retrieved from https:// journalofbiourbanism.fles.wordpress.com/2017/12/jbu_vol2_issue2_2012.pdf Salingaros, N. A. (2015). Biophilia and healing environments. New York, NY: Terrapin Bright Green LLC and Amherst, MA: Levellers Press. Retrieved from https:// www.terrapinbrightgreen.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Biophilia-HealingEnvironments-Salingaros-p.pdf Salingaros, N. A. (2017). How neuroscience can generate a healthier architecture. Conscious Cities Journal, 3. Retrieved from www.theccd.org/articles/how-neuroscience-cangenerate-healthier-architecture Salingaros, N. A. (2018). Adaptive versus random complexity. New Design Ideas, 2(2), 51–61. Retrieved from http://jomardpublishing.com/UploadFiles/Files/journals/ NDI/V2N2/SalingarosN.pdf Salingaros, N. A. (2019). The biophilic index predicts healing efects of the built environment. Journal of Biourbanism, 8(1), 13–34. Retrieved from http://www.biourbanism.org/ the-biophilic-healing-index-predicts-efects-of-the-built-environment-on-our-wellbeing/ Stichler, J. F. (2001). Creating healing environments in critical care units. Critical Care Nursing Quarterly, 24(3), 1–20. Sussman, A., & Chen, K. (2017, August 22). The mental disorders that gave us modern architecture. Common Edge. Retrieved from http://commonedge.org/the-mentaldisorders-that-gave-us-modern-architecture/ Sussman, A., & Hollander, J. B. (2015). Cognitive architecture. New York: Routledge. Sussman, A., & Ward, J. M. (2017, November 27). Game-changing eye-tracking studies reveal how we actually see architecture. Common Edge. Retrieved from https://common edge.org/game-changing-eye-tracking-studies-reveal-how-we-actually-see-architecture/ Tyler, C. W., Baseler, H., Kontsevich, L., Likova, L., Wade, A., & Wandell, B. (2005). Predominantly extra-retinotopic cortical response to pattern symmetry. Neuroimage, 15(24), 306–314. Wilkins, A. J. (2016). A physiological basis for visual discomfort: Application in lighting design. Lighting Research & Technology, 48(1), 44–54. Retrieved from https://journals. sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1477153515612526 Yuko, E. (2018, October 30). How the Tuberculosis epidemic infuenced modernist architecture. CityLab. Retrieved from www.citylab.com/design/2018/10/ how-tuberculosis-epidemic-infuenced-modernist-architecture/573868/

SECTION II

Twenty-First-Century Tools Biometrics and Measuring the Human Experience of Place

5 IDENTIFYING BIOPHILIC DESIGN ELEMENTS IN STREETSCAPES A Study of Visual Attention and Sense of Place Peter Milliken, Justin B. Hollander, Ann Sussman and Minyu Situ

Introduction Biophilia Hypothesis Biophilia is a theory introduced by E.O. Wilson (Biophilia, 1984) valuing the human–nature interaction and describes the innate, human afnity for nature. Studied in many ways over the past decades, researchers have built upon Wilson’s (1984) and Kellert’s (1996) initial descriptions of biophilia. Research supports the infuence of biophilia on people who experience biophilic attributes and elements in everyday life. Street trees, bioswales, green roofs and other elements of foliage together represent one type of attribute of biophilic elements. Injected into urban regions, biophilic attributes create opportunities for communities and the public to engage with nature, gaining demonstrated benefts to their well-being.

Study Location: Devens, Massachusetts Devens is a census-designated place located on the border of Middlesex and Worcester counties in Massachusetts (see Figure 5.1). Bordered by Shirley, Harvard and Ayer, Devens is being redeveloped around the retired army base located within (Welker, 2019) its boundaries. MassDevelopment is a quasi-public economic development and real estate agency in Massachusetts and was given the land to develop a thriving community and business center (“Who We Are”, 2019). Devens is being developed by MassDevelopment as an example of how to reuse abandoned bases for new, adaptive uses. MassDevelopment uses the retired base as a means to increase housing options and business opportunities

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Locus map, showing Devens and the surrounding towns positioned in the commonwealth of Massachusetts

FIGURE 5.1

Source: MassGIS, Peter Milliken

in the less than 2,000-resident town (Welker, 2019). When considering the redevelopment of an area as such, it can be helpful to refect on what makes other spaces inviting. The project was improved upon through a charrette process recommended by Shirley resident and Tufts University Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning Program founder Herman Field (Lowitt, 2008). Previous Tufts University Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning Program students researched Devens. A feld projects group studied the Revolving Loan Fund (RLF) and how the community accomplished specifc projects by efectively using the RLF (Power Down Devens, 2008). The following literature review ofers a more in-depth understanding of what biophilia is and streetscape design. Research and studies of eye tracking and emulation of such technology are included to promote an understanding of how these are used to measure human interaction with spaces or other features. The method of study in Devens using VAS and photos of streetscapes will then be analyzed to determine current conditions. The biophilic elements present in some Devens streetscapes were then studied to detect a correlation with encouraging a sense of place. Research focused on what biophilic elements of urban streetscapes are, how these elements afect attention to the space and how to

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introduce them into spaces. Conclusions and policy implications are then drawn from the study for Devens and the larger body of urban design.

Literature Review Biophilic Design Natural elements have reason to be included in design aspects for all areas of human interaction. Maintenance usually plays a factor in discouraging implementation of these elements, even though residents of towns utilizing green infrastructure over other transportation elements have been shown to support and accept the maintenance costs (Sikorski et al., 2018). Biophilic elements can then be applied over all parts of the urban fabric, including transportation. In the Kellert, Heerwagen, and Mador’s (2008) book, Biophilic Design, the authors outline specifc concepts in biophilic design. Those elements were used in developing a scorecard for comparing diferent places and stops. Kellert with E.O. Wilson originated the term biophilia and identifed the concept behind it (Kellert, 1996). Conceptually, it is also important to recognize that humans evolved with this natural world and may look for it in everyday life (Sussman & Hollander, 2015). Biophilic design is also about controlling the environment and architecture humans have developed, as well as increasing the presence of the natural aesthetic. From Cognitive Architecture, some design aspects important to reiterate are ‘edges matter, patterns matter, and shapes carry weight’ (Sussman & Hollander, 2015). This leads to a consideration of diferent design elements and groupings. The design elements are largely separated into groupings. One grouping is the ‘organic or naturalistic dimension,’ which is composed of living, biological features (Kellert et  al., 2008). Elements of this grouping result in one of three experiences: direct, indirect or symbolic. The direct are experiences with an element in its natural setting, such as a tree on the sidewalk or in a park; the feature has a ‘self-sustaining’ characteristic (Kellert et al., 2008). Indirect experiences are features artifcially situated for the human experience, such as potted plants. The fnal experience is a symbolic one—taking notice of depictions of nature. This can be an ‘image, video, metaphor, and more’ (Kellert et al., 2008). The second grouping is the ‘place-based or vernacular dimension’(Kellert et al., 2008). This group is defned by the buildings and environments that attach a community to a place. Landscapes and buildings tie people to a place and the experiences they have (Kellert et al., 2008). Those two dimensions then relate to a framework of six biophilic design elements: environmental features, natural shapes and forms, natural patterns and processes, light and space, place-based relationships and evolved human–nature relationships (Kellert et  al., 2008). There are more than 70 attributes between the six design elements (Kellert et al., 2008).

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The Effects and Importance of Biophilia Beatley builds an argument for biophilic elements to be used throughout city design and planning, stating, ‘nature helps make us better human beings and fosters the qualities that will be essential to resilience, sustainability, and healthy social ecologies’ (Beatley, 2017). He supports taking any step to increase the elements of nature in cities, including individual community characteristics. The use of these characteristics formulates the integration of nature into the settings organically (Beatley, 2017). Inclusion of biophilic design in urban environments improves mental health and well-being (Clancy & Ryan, 2015; Grinde & Patil, 2009). The importance of these efects comes from more than 50% of the global population being urban (Clancy & Ryan, 2015). Lohr and Pearson-Mims (2000) found nature overall more stimulating when compared to images, designer objects or other pieces. Green landscapes also out-performed water or city landscapes in improving stress levels (Velarde, Fry, & Tveit, 2007). In urban and peri-urban areas, biodiversity correlated with greater well-being. The nature experienced by participants in this study had a restorative efect, which was also correlated with the length of visits to these locations (Carrus et  al., 2015). Ekkel and de Vries (2017) recommended 300- to 500meter distances between large green spaces and dense areas to infuence human health. Nature ofers physical activity, socializing, escape from everyday routines and increased beneft from these activities outside (Ulrich, 1999). A more recent seminal book on urban design, Jan Gehl’s (2010) Cities for People, reinforces this same point, suggesting that high-quality environmental edge conditions help invite visitors and create highly desired public spaces. Also, the cost of adding nature elements can be low, making the cost-beneft higher. Hartig (1993) adds that cultural infuence and community may impact the overall efect of nature, tying to the community characteristics emphasized by Beatley (2017). Transportation systems make up a large portion of the urban fabric. Biophilia can ofer the opportunity to increase the aesthetic, intrinsic and perceived value of mass transit modes for users. Natural elements should be introduced where possible in transit networks to create positive perceptions around active modes. Biophilic elements also lead to positive physical and mental health efects. These efects make improvements to the ‘civility’ and respect a transit system conveys to its users (Walker, 2012). Capturing biophilic elements in transportation networks can provide another opportunity for the public to interact with nature in a necessary way not previously considered.

Evaluating Modeling Software for Eye Tracking Eye tracking has been used in graphic design and other computer-based visuals to measure attention, fxation or concentration on an image (Poole & Ball, 2006; Duchowski, 2009; Holmqvist et  al., 2011). A recent study highlighted ecosystem services. The services were assessed by a combination of eye-tracking information

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and decision support systems (Klein, Drobnik, & Gret-Regamey, 2016). They found certain visual features of a decision support system could increase comprehension of ecosystem services, utilizing eye tracking. Others have explored the ways that people perceive landscapes (Dupont, Pihel, Ode, & Van Eetvelde, 2013.; De Lucio, Mohamadian, Ruiz, Banayas, & Bernaldez, 1996) and urban scenes (Hollander et al., 2019).

Data and Methods Key concepts of this research will revolve around the following question: What biophilic elements of streetscapes are in urban spaces? Field research was conducted to provide a way of understanding current conditions in Devens. Photographic research will provide an opportunity for deeper, visually focused analysis. Combined, they will provide an understanding of the conditions of streetscapes in areas of Devens. Opportunities for improvement could also be highlighted.1

Field Research The feld research component is comprised of complete observation. This method will provide the greatest amount of information from study. The map in Figure 5.2 shows the location of the observation areas. The observations will

FIGURE 5.2

Map of study locations

Source: MassGIS, Peter Milliken

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provide a more dynamic description of the study locations and will yield numerical data that could also be studied (Gaber & Gaber, 2007). A total of 28 diferent frame orientations are observed at nine diferent locations throughout the Devens area. Four observations were made from Auman Street and three from a service road to Auman, the exit and sidewalk from Devens Commons, and Snake Hill Road. Two observations were made at locations at the Barracks, Bates Street, and the intersection at Devens Commons. Finally, six observations were made in Ayer’s town center.

Photographic Research Besides providing visual records of the streetscape location, orientation, design and elements, the photographs were analyzed visually (Gaber & Gaber, 2007). Photographs will be taken from similar perspectives, as well as from medium shot distances. Utilizing these restrictions will give more consistent visual analysis. Maintaining lighting for each of the photos will also be as consistent as possible. If any of these aspects are widely variable, then they will lead to inconsistent measures of analysis. Locations will be eliminated if more than two point-ofview photographs are not collected or of consistent measure. Chance Street and the walkway along Devens Commons were eliminated because of these conditions.

Visual Attention Software Analysis All images of streetscapes were analyzed with 3M’s VAS (Visual Attention Software), which emulates eye tracking, a biometric tool that maps the path the human eye takes taking in its surroundings. This will provide reports of where the eye fxates when observing the streetscapes, how the eye tracks across it visually, and will highlight diferent visual aspects of the streetscape (‘Visual Attention Software’, 2019). An example of a VAS report product can be seen below, the original color images reproduced in grayscale: Figure 5.3 shows the extracted images from the report analyzing a picture from Snake Hill Road in Ayer, Massachusetts. The image in the top right cell is a heat map of the image—the areas that glow brightest and whitest above, are where people look most. The image in the bottom left cell is the regions of interest report that shows the image with outlined regions highlighted with a numerical probability of fxation. Following the regions of interest diagram is the visual sequence report at the bottom right position. This image represents a sequence for fxation within the frst three to fve seconds when shown the image.

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FIGURE 5.3

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Example VAS report images (top left corner is the photograph taken)

Source: Rachel Herman

Identifying whether the frst and fourth fxation points fall on biophilic elements will be important to note because it will be interesting to identify whether a biophilic element is the frst or fourth thing most likely fxated on during pre-attentive processing. Since pre-attentive processing is pre-conscious processing, it could be considered instinctual, which is in line with the hypothesis of biophilia and human nature’s innate afnity for natural elements and themes. To summarize, this study will be looking at the diferent regions of fxation and the diferent sequence points of fxation for 28 diferent image orientations or positions at diferent locations within Devens. The number of regions and red regions in each photograph position will be counted and compared with the number of total biophilic attributes and elements identifed within the location. This is because when visiting a location, all attributes and elements may be experienced, but diferent positions will be experienced in diferent ways. The fxation points within the sequence report will also be analyzed in a binary nature to simplify whether biophilic elements could be identifed to increase fxation probability. This is sufcient for this study since it is not comparing biophilic elements to each other but identifying how the elements and attributes themselves may increase the fxation and attention garnered by a location.

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Results Photos of Devens were collected and data was gathered regarding the diferent qualities noted in the visualizations and reports. Counts were made of the number of diferent biophilic attributes initially observed at the locations in the focus areas noted by the VAS software. What was also noted was whether the focus orders for each image started and ended on biophilic attributes.

VAS Observations In this section, diferent report products are compared between diferent position photographs. The report from Ayer Town’s main street will be compared to a position from Auman Street and the intersection at, and exit from, Devens Commons. These are chosen because of their comparative scores for number of biophilic elements present (ranging from four to eight) and the number of fxation regions (ranging from two to fve).

Image Positions Ayer Town has the most biophilic elements at the position (eight) with fve concentration areas noted at this position (see Figure 5.4). The Auman Street position has two concentration areas but has six notable biophilic elements. The

FIGURE 5.4

Matrix of four example positions

Source: Rachel Herman

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frst position photograph from the intersection at Devens Commons has four noted biophilic attributes and two concentration areas. Lastly, the Devens Commons Exit photograph in the second position has two concentration areas with four total biophilic attributes. The Ayer town orientation presented here has eight identifable biophilic design attributes (see Figure 5.4). There are colors, identifable in the brick and sidewalk contrast, as well as the textured wood and wrought iron benches. There is also a presence of light and shadow, provided by the overhangs above the walkway. These spaces also provide an aspect of prospect and refuge because they ofer a visible space to relax a bit and also get a better perspective of the pedestrian way. The windows provide a sense of refected light. There is an order and complexity yielded by the patterning of the walkway, bench placements and the masonry used for the building wall. Signs placed along the path also ofer information (leading to cognition) and avoid placelessness in quality. The awning also gives way to a larger sense of spaciousness in the streetscape. Auman Street ofers similar, identifable biophilic attributes (see Figure 5.4). Color and plants are visible, both provided by the tree-lined streetscape and grassy lawns. The houses also ofer contrasting color with the red brick and white. Light and shadow is also apparent, provided by the sunlight and tree canopies. At night, the streetlamps could also ofer up a similar experience. Order and complexity are created by the patterned placements of the trees lining the block, as well as the pacing of the lamps. Without an urban wall, the streetscape has a quality of spaciousness. The canopies also ofer a refuge from the sunlight. The exit from Devens Commons and the intersection by Devens Commons have very similar biophilic elements, especially to Auman Street (see Figure 5.4). Both demonstrate plants, colors and spaciousness in their streetscapes. The visitor is not confronted by large, human-made structures during their stroll in these locations. Likely because they are just of of the commons. Overall, though, the exit location has a presence of activated light and shadow, whereas the intersection location is passive.

Heat Map Comparisons When looking at the heat maps for each location, similar features display as red colors in the original study and converted to grayscale, as bright white in the images above (see Figure 5.5). The trees and plants in each image, whether by the whole canopy or edges of branches, draw attention when contrasting against the sky or another background. The signage and lamps in the images also attracted the emulation software for both the Devens Commons Exit image and the Auman Street image. The bench in Ayer also is highlighted, bright white above, indicating its attractiveness as a fxation point. The Ayer heat map also has a linear quality. The heat map has spots of higher fxation likelihood from the bench to the fag post. The other three have a more concentrated quality

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FIGURE 5.5

Heat-map matrix

Source: Rachel Herman

to the heat maps, though the Auman Street map has a refected quality in how the brightest white areas around the lamppost and the tree forking are spaced by dark gray regions.

Region Report Comparisons The reports of regions (see Figure 5.6) ofer great information from the heat map about specifc probabilities for fxation around the areas highlighted. In Ayer, the linear quality present in the heat map is lost. Instead the two regions with the greatest views fall on the bench, with 72 percent, and the lamp post, with 83 percent, respectively. These are surrounded by three other less-likely viewed regions, ranging from 48 to 61 percent, the later falling on the bumper of a car. Otherwise, notably, the light refecting in the store window has attracted the VAS emulation (56 percent). The other three region reports yield similar information as the heat maps. Concentrations of likelihood are mimicked between the outlined high-view areas in these images and the temperature ranges of the heat map. It is worth noting, however, that in both the Auman Street and Devens Commons

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FIGURE 5.6

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Region report matrix

Source: Rachel Herman

Intersection regions, reports show the natural tree elements attract a higher probability of fxation compared to the other human-made structures in the images. The natural environment makes people focus ‘pre-attentively’ on the horizon and distant view. The Devens Commons Exit counters this, with the pedestrian sign attracting a lot of focus, most likely due to its bright, contrasting (originally yellow) color.

Sequence Comparisons When comparing the sequence reports (see Figure 5.7), it is important to keep in mind that these are suggested orders. Any of the four could be identifed frst during the three to fve seconds of pre-cognitive processing emulated by VAS. Interestingly, each sequence report image has highlighted a biophilic attribute adjacent to or as one of the four identifed fxation points. Both the Devens Commons Intersection and the Auman Street sequences are largely clustered around the trees in view. The points start and end around at the trees. As a contrast to this, the other two selected sequence reports do not ofer the same highlighting of biophilic attributes. Both sequences start and end at

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FIGURE 5.7

Sequence matrix

Source: Rachel Herman

non-vegetative locations in view. At least for Ayer, this is due to a lack of vegetative elements closely present in the image. Color is considered an attribute of biophilia, and both in Ayer and at the exit of the Devens Commons the sequences start near a contrasting, colorful element. The fag and the pedestrian walk sign represent these eye-catching elements. The bench is a signifcant element identifed in each of the Ayer process reports, suggesting how a point of refuge, arranged in this particular fashion, can instigate focus.

Discussion Using the results identifed by the study, consideration for how the initial research questions were answered needs to be made, starting with the frst posed question, which was: What biophilic elements of streetscapes are in urban spaces? The observed attributes noted throughout Devens and the study locations in particular were attributes of color, plants, light and shadow, spaciousness, prospect and refuge, refected light, avoiding placelessness by providing some sense of

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order and complexity. Each of these attributes were present in some combination. VAS emulation suggests observers would fxate at more positions within a location when more biophilic attributes are present.

Discussion of Findings The role biophilia plays in streetscape design is apparent in this research. The fndings represent how biophilia can infuence the human experience within the streetscape and how eye-tracking emulation software can be a useful tool to measure such infuence. Biometric tools, such as VAS, are useful for helping us better understand the human experience in a larger context for urban planning. It could be used to identify characteristics of urban settings that people are attracted to, as well as test if replications of these characteristics yields the same  results across an urban fabric. Biometric studies provide a new language, where words like fxations and pre-attentive processing enter the urban planners’ lexicon to promote better placemaking and enable more accurate assessments of existing or planned communities. The study also supports using or highlighting biophilic streetscapes in settings to improve the attention a user may give to their surroundings. The study does not give validity to statements regarding how the introduction of biophilia may improve health, well-being or interest surrounding an area in either an urban or a suburban environment.

Discussion of Limitations This study is limited by multiple factors. First, the study is limited in the scope. The study focuses on Devens, Massachusetts, and uses only a sample of its streetscape environments. The study does not compare these to other cities or towns and the streetscapes within those locations. In order to add depth to the study, choosing to collect data on developments representative of diferent densities or cities would also identify how biophilic elements could be observed in contexts other than the regional suburb. Second, the study uses emulation software unable to identify emotional responses or valence. It also does not provide insight into how the focus area afects the viewer. Adding human subjects to the study would allow for questioning surrounding emotional responses. The viewing subjects could be surveyed about how the diferent areas make them feel, either using qualitative language or a quantitative scale. Correlations could then be compared between the number of elements observed and the way the space afects a viewer’s feelings. This VAS study only examines visual stimuli and how they infuence a viewer’s fxation when observing a space. Considering others may be negatively infuenced by olfactory or auditory stimuli in a location, visual stimuli could be overshadowed by other features. Some biophilic attributes contribute to these alternative sensory stimuli, but the use of these attributes would be dictated by the

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characteristics of the space. Surveying viewers and occupiers of the space would also give the opportunity to see what elements and attributes they focus on within the space or location. This would give greater context to the experience of the space, especially by those who may use the space frequently. After identifying some of these characteristics, it would also allow the inclusion of attributes involving relationships between the human and the place. These characteristics are difcult to establish without verifcation. Identifying the diferent sensory experiences in the locations could also be informed through surveying. This study makes an important contribution regarding research of humans, nature, the relationships between them and how designed spaces can help institute those relationships. As development patterns progress and design aesthetics change, it is important to refect on how the human relationship to space is infuenced, enhanced or controlled. Biophilic elements, from this study, should be shown to have a place in this area of study. More can always be done to study how humans react to spaces and how spaces react to humanity, as well as the role nature plays. Future studies could be extended to other areas where biophilic elements could be included. Design studies could look at how biophilic elements are used in architecture throughout cities and how this infuences residences’ opinions and behaviors in ways they may not realize. Transportation planners could use this study as a way to look at how utilizing these design elements may infuence focus or attention at intersections or around bus shelters ofering important insights on how to enhance safety and wellbeing in the public realm.

Note 1. This research is nested within a larger project centered on Devens and coordinated by Justin Hollander and Ann Sussman, along with Peter Lowitt and Neil Angus at the Devens Enterprise Commission. The research aims to use eye-tracking emulation software to understand unconscious reactions pedestrians have to designs of buildings throughout Devens and surrounding communities. The research uses biometric tools to better understand the unconscious mind’s response to places. They base the use of these tools on a larger body of environmental psychology literature demonstrating evidence about ideal street widths, signage, lighting, signaling and landscaping.

References Beatley, T. (2017). Biophilic cities and healthy societies. Urban Planning, 2(4), 1. https:// doi.org/10.17645/up.v2i4.1054 Carrus, G., Scopelliti, M., Lafortezza, R., Colangelo, G., Ferrini, F., Salbitano, F., .  .  . Sanesi, G. (2015). Go greener, feel better? The positive efects of biodiversity on the well-being of individuals visiting urban and peri-urban green areas. Landscape and Urban Planning, 134, 221–228. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2014.10.022 Clancy, J., & Ryan, C. (2015). The role of biophilic design in landscape architecture for health and well-being. Landscape Architecture Frontiers, 3(1), 54–61.

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Duchowski, A. T. (2009). Eye tracking methodology: Theory and practice. London: Springer. Dupont, Lien, Pihel, J., Ode, A., & Van Eetvelde, V. (2013). Analyzing the perception of water surfaces in urban landscapes using eye tracking. IALE European congress, Abstracts. Presented at the IALE 2013 European Congress: Changing European landscapes: Landscape ecology, local to global, International Association for Landscape Ecology Europe (IALE Europe). Ekkel, E. D., & de Vries, S. (2017). Nearby green space and human health: Evaluating accessibility metrics. Landscape and Urban Planning, 157, 214–220. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2016.06.008 Gaber, J., & Gaber, S. L. (2007). Qualitative analysis for planning and policy: Beyond the numbers. Chicago, IL: Planners Press, American Planning Association. Gehl, J. (2010). Cities for people. Washington, DC: Island Press. Grinde, B., & Patil, G. G. (2009). Biophilia: Does visual contact with nature impact on health and well-being? International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 6(9), 2332–2343. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph6092332 Hartig, T. (1993). Nature experience in transactional perspective. Landscape and Urban Planning, 25(1–2), 17–36. https://doi.org/10.1016/0169-2046(93)90120-3 Hollander, J., Purdy, A., Wiley, A., Foster, V., Jacob, R., Taylor, H., & Brunyé, T. (2019). Seeing the city: Using eye-tracking technology to explore cognitive responses to the built environment. Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability, 12(2), 156–171. Holmqvist, K., Nystrom, M., Andersson, R., Dewhurst, R., Jarodska, H., & Van De Weijer, J. (2011). Eye tracking: A comprehensive guide to methods and measures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kellert, S. R. (1996). The value of life: Biological diversity and human society. Washington, DC: Island Press/Shearwater Books. Kellert, S. R., Heerwagen, J., & Mador, M. (2008). Biophilic design: The theory, science, and practice of bringing buildings to life. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Klein, T. M., Drobnik, T., & Gret-Regamey, A. (2016). Shedding light on the usability of ecosystem services-based decision support systems: An eye-tracking study linked to the cognitive probing approach. Ecosystem Services, 2(19), 65–86. Lohr, V. I., & Pearson-Mims, C. H. (2000, March). Interior plants. Review Literature and Arts of the Americas, 10, 53–58. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apergo.2008.02.024 Lowitt, P. C. (2008). Devens redevelopment: The emergence of a successful eco-industrial park in the United States. Industrial Ecosystems and Eco-Industrial Parks, 12(4), 497–500. Lucio, J. V. De, Mohamadian, M., Ruiz, J. P., Banayas, J., & Bernaldez, F. G. (1996). Visual landscape exploration as revealed by eye movement tracking. Landscape and Urban Planning, 34(2), 135–142. https://doi.org/10.1016/0169-2046(95)00208-1 Poole, A., & Ball, L. J. (2006). Eye tracking in HCI and usability research. Encyclopedia of Human Computer Interaction, 211–219. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-59140-562-7. ch034 Power Down Devens: Revolving Loans. (2008). Tufts University, Tisch Library. Sikorski, P., Wińska-Krysiak, M., Chormański, J., Krauze, K., Kubacka, K., & Sikorska, D. (2018). Low-maintenance green tram tracks as a socially acceptable solution to greening a city. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 35, 148–164. Sussman, A., & Hollander, J. B. (2015). Cognitive architecture. New York: Routledge. Ulrich, R. S. (1999). Efects of gardens on health outcomes: Theory and research. Healing Gardens: Therapeutic Benefts and Design Recommendation.

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Velarde, M. D., Fry, G., & Tveit, M. (2007). Health efects of viewing landscapes— Landscape types in environmental psychology. Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, 6(4), 199–212. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ufug.2007.07.001 Visual Attention Software. (2019). 3M. Last modifed. Retrieved from www.3m.com/3M/ en_US/ visual-attention-software-us/ Walker, J. (2012). Human transit. Selected Chapters. Welker, G. (2019, April 1). Devens’ former military facilities ofer chance for community with few residents. Worcester Business Journal. Who we are. (2019). MassDevelopment. Retrieved from www.massdevelopment.com/ who-we-are/ Wilson, E. O. (1984). Biophilia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

6 EXPLORING EYE-TRACKING TECHNOLOGY Assessing How the Design of Densifed Built Environments Can Promote Inhabitants’ Well-Being Frank Suurenbroek and Gideon Spanjar Introduction The fundamental physical conditions of open spaces in the built environment are shaped by the orientation and appearance of adjacent buildings. In the past, urban compaction gradually took place from the core of the city, where open spaces were perceived as ‘undeveloped’ land designated for new buildings. Most of the remaining large open spaces were covered by green, whereas others were initially designed for transport. Today, open spaces need to deliver a valuable contribution to human well-being in multiple dimensions. The physical confguration of streetscapes impacts users’ experience and behavior and, in turn, their perception of place. For centuries, Western European cities expanded horizontally with low-rise housing development and new business districts on the urban edge. The network and dimensions of streets retained a human scale, which enabled people to walk and eventually allowed for combined use by pedestrians, carriages and cyclists. This changed in the second half of the 20th century, after World War II, when in Western Europe the automobile became afordable for the lower-middle class and there was a tremendous shortage of afordable housing. In southeast Amsterdam in the late 1960s and 1970s, a new district called Bijlmermeer was constructed on reclaimed land called ‘polders’ (see Figure 6.1). Initially, the area was planned to accommodate 100,000 people in 40,000 dwellings for the middle and working classes. The modernist masterplan designed by Siegfried Nassuth prescribed highrise buildings and a strict spatial division of functions in residential, work, recreational and trafc areas. Contrary to the industrialized inner cities, Bijlmermeer was envisioned as a green, spacious, light and healthy city. This ´functional city’ concept (Luijten, 2002) lay behind the construction of raised roads for fast trafc to travel between diferent zones. Within these zones, honeycomb-shaped

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FIGURE 6.1

Bijlmermeer in 1973

Source: Stadsarchief Amsterdam (B00000034873)

ten-story fats were built, enclosed by large green spaces for walking and cycling. As it turned out, however, the urban development plan contained some crucially fawed design assumptions. For instance, the elevated road network limited navigation, and the lack of functions and services in the large green spaces between buildings resulted in a ‘no-man’s land’ with a plethora of associated safety issues. These problems persisted throughout the 70s and 80s and in 1985 25% of the complex was vacant (Luijten, 2002). The Bijlmermeer quickly gained a poor reputation with high crime rates and lack of maintenance. It was perceived as a failure by citizens as well as experts in the feld of planning and urban design. At the beginning of the 21st century, Amsterdam underwent another period of intense urbanization. Postwar neighborhoods like the Bijlmermeer were redesigned, and urban renewal plans partly replaced high-rise and modernistic morphologies with low-rise housing areas confgured in conventional (semiopen) blocks and streets. Simultaneously, obsolete industrial and waterfront areas were transformed into mixed urban areas. The design conventions had shifted and oriented to create neighborhoods on a human scale, with predominantly low-rise buildings. Due to the fnancial crisis of 2007, the urban renewal and area development projects came to an abrupt standstill, only to be restarted after the crisis around 2013 and 2014.

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FIGURE 6.2

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Model of the Sluisbuurt

Source: Roos Aldershof Fotografe

Today, Amsterdam’s economy is fourishing again, and the demand for afordable housing is increasing. In contrast to the pre-crisis period, the city is set to build large, high-rise neighborhoods. Like the construction of the Bijlmermeer back in the 60s and 70s, city planners and designers are challenged to develop high-rise neighborhoods within a Dutch cultural context in unusually extreme densities. The aim is to build a total of 50,000 to 90,000 houses by 2025, contributing almost 10% to the current housing stock. Two post-industrial locations have been designated for high-density housing projects: one is HavenCity on the west side of the center and the other is the Sluisbuurt on an island in Amsterdam’s IJ River, at the site of a former water purifcation plant. The planned high-rise developments within the existing morphological and cultural context of European cities will likely have a strong impact with irreversible implications for the functions and use of the city as a whole. Thus, the question arises in Europe of how to design in extreme densities within the existing urban fabric while still maintaining a human scale at eye level to secure livable built environments. To address this question, we started our investigation with the Bijlmermeer— the frst Dutch high-rise location of the 70s where designers intended to apply the concept of livable and healthy environments. Today, Bijlmermeer is part of

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a recently launched urban renewal program. The research project, Sensing Streetscapes, aims to enhance the decision-making process and design of both this program and other high-density developments. The emergence of a new generation of technology and methods from the feld of neuroscience open up the possibility of exploring this question in a much more sensory-driven and evidence-based way than before.

Urban Design Principles for Streetscapes on a Human Scale Throughout the second half of the 20th century, various design theories attempted to formulate design principles to create a human-scale streetscape. Those theories had a great impact on design practice but did not establish relations empirically. Allan Jacobs of MIT, for example, spent more than 20 years researching the applied design principles of the classic ‘great streets’ and boulevards. Jacobs’s research concluded that there is no standardized set of design ingredients that guarantees the construction of a physical space that people appreciate and where they will linger (Jacobs, 1993). Like other influential studies by Jane Jacobs (1961), Venturi, Brown, and Izenour (1972), Lynch (1960), Banerjee and Southworth (1990), White (1988), Cullen (1961), Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein (1977) and Gehl (2011), Jacobs managed to steer the architectural debate away from the modernistic top-down perspective that we saw applied in the Bijlmermeer, toward the human scale as the leading perspective. In general, the key design principles that give environments a human scale include, at minimum, the following principles: •

•

•

Active ground foor: a portion of the frst foor is transparent due to windows, doors and functions. This creates a relationship between the inside and outside and establishes a sense of ownership and transparency. Ornate façades: (perceived) diferences, variations and rhythms of buildings in height and width. Facing the street, these diferences create rich visual context, ofer enclosure and provide guidance for pedestrians. Tactility: Using ‘tactile’ surfaces for the skins of buildings, the pavement and the street design provides a texture, with an eye for detail and scale, stimulating fxation and engagement between streetscape and viewer.

Built Environment and Human Well-Being The conception of streetscapes has many dimensions and is partly culturally determined (see also Suurenbroek, Nio, & De Waal, 2019). Beneath these spatialtemporal settings, neuroscience points toward a deeper imprint of streetscapes on our perceptions, as shaped by evolution and biology. Psychological research emphasizes users’ (unconscious) needs due to the negative feedback loops from

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high-rise environments. These needs are conceptualized as restorative environments; places that provide the possibility of being restored physiologically, mentally and/or socially. The restorative environments theory is rooted in the work of Wilson and Kellert (1995, Wilson, 1984), Ulrich (1984) and Kaplan and Kaplan (1989). Wilson and Kellert’s biophilia hypothesis argues that humans have an ongoing need to make contact with nature and that people can concentrate better after they spend time in nature (Kaplan & Kaplan, 1989). In the built environment, even a view of green space can make patients recover faster (Ulrich et al., 1991). Some evidence exists that humans even prefer architecture inspired by nature because it evokes intuitive associations with sensory features of nature (Coburn et al., 2019). These cognitive responses to architecture may be further explained by the fact that people unconsciously search for sequences in design and bilaterally symmetrical structures in buildings (Sussman & Hollander, 2015). In terms of design, this restorative value for improving citizens’ health and well-being can be important in ameliorating the negative impacts associated with high-density environments. The level of experienced negative (and sometimes positive) feedback from a high-rise environment depends on the physical attributes of buildings, the confguration of streetscapes and the interplay with social structures. For instance, Asgarzadeh, Lusk, Koga, and Hirate (2012) show in a lab setting that the oppressiveness (environmental stress) increases when heights of buildings increase. Trees covering façades might signifcantly mitigate this oppressiveness (Asgarzadeh et  al., 2012). Greater architectural variation of buildings is often perceived as more restorative. For example, more detailed façades and overall variation at the streetscape level seemed to promote a sense of ‘being away’ (Lindal & Hartig, 2013). Fear of crime (and crime rates) is probably greater in high-rise environments but may strongly depend on if and how the entrances to buildings are controlled (Giford, 2007). Tension between inhabitants often results from high building or dwelling density and may result from dissatisfaction of the gaps between needs and preferences when residents have limited afordable housing options. Residents in high-rise environments have less sense of community, and social interaction is more difcult to manage (Giford, 2007). Conceptually, this body of research demonstrated the efects of the built environment on humans and the way this might be measurable by brain activity and stress levels.

Research Design Psychological research using emerging techniques and technologies demonstrates the relationship between features in the built environment, such as green areas, and the way they afect our well-being. We assumed the efects of the formulated design principles could be investigated in a similar way.

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We focused on the visual sense, which is humans’ most dominant navigational sense. When people are in public spaces, they scan their surroundings, mostly unconsciously, and adapt their (walking) behavior, also primarily unconsciously. This unconscious scanning and response to a person’s environment is measured by eye-tracking technology in triangulation with the measuring of stress and behavior. Our research conducts a combination of lab tests and tests in the feld.

Experiment 1: Eye Tracking Outdoors For our frst round of experiments, we turned to Bijlmermeer, Amsterdam’s former high-rise district and currently an urban renewal area. We studied parts of the Bijlmermeer as a single case study to test the potential of eye-tracking technology in urban design practice. We focused primarily on ‘transition spaces,’ or locations that bridge the neighborhood with rapidly developing adjacent areas, which potentially may prove vital for the regeneration of the area. Situationally, the four-story building blocks in these transition zones are again part of an urban renewal process. The blocks were built in 1982 as a response to the failure of the original high-rise plan. Ten randomly chosen passers-by participated in the study at the entrance/exit of the subway, where the panorama of the district unfolds (see Figure 6.3). Most of the participants were residents and only a few were frequent visitors. Participants were asked to observe the environment for one minute, but only the frst 30 seconds were recorded (people might observe the environment diferently or get distracted when the time is almost up). To test the consistency of eye tracking in the feld, we also conducted interviews with passers-by and behavioral observation.

FIGURE 6.3

Eye tracker setup in a transition zone of the Bijlmermeer

Source: Frank Suurenbroek and Gideon Spanjar

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Experiment 2: Eye Tracking in Lab Setting The second experiment contained photographs of the Bijlmermeer and recently built high-rise developments in Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam, London and Paris. Gehl, Gemzoe, Kirknaes, and Sondergaard (2006) emphasize that viewpoint and distance play a key role in human perception and that we experience buildings differently from far away than when we are walking next to them. Following Gehl’s research, the photos were classifed according to two viewpoint zones of façades; between 14–23 meters (labeled ‘distant’) and 1–5 meters (labeled ‘close-up’). A third set of photos was added with a viewpoint of enclosed spaces (see Figure 6.4). The visual experience is built up from the interplay between buildings and adjacent public spaces. To be able to test all the mentioned urban design principles, the angle and proportion of building(s) covered 2/3 of the frame and 1/3 of the adjacent space. Almost all photos were taken in cloudy weather conditions to ensure there would be no direct sunlight on the façade. Street signs and text, as well as people, were avoided where possible. The set of photos for each group totaled 62 (distant), 59 (close-up), and 10 (enclosure). The locations were selected based

FIGURE 6.4

Selected viewpoints for the eye tracker lab setup

Source: Figure made by Suurenbroek and Spanjar, and adapted from Gehl et al. (2006)

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on the presence or absence of one or more of the three design principles in high-rise environments (see Figure 6.5). The sample size was comprised of young adults, mostly students from Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences who were enrolled in the second year of their Applied Psychology course or who were doing a minor in Design Thinking by Doing. The students were recruited (on a voluntary basis) as part of the module programs. They were all Dutch but with diferent ethnic backgrounds. Other participants were junior researchers and assistants who were not involved

Selection of photographs of diferent locations where design principles were present or absent

FIGURE 6.5

Source: Frank Suurenbroek and Gideon Spanjar

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in the project. This group of participants was relatively young and unbiased with regard to city design. None of the participants lived in the locations where the photos were taken. Contact lens wearers were included but people with spectacles and self-reported visual problems were excluded from the eye tracker experiment. As in the Harvard study (Andreani & Savegh, 2017), an open source model was used for the experiment. Participants were frst asked to do the following: open yourself up to the street spaces shown, but postpone judgement on what you see. This was an attempt to imitate the discursive attitude of the pedestrian (Matos Wunderlich, 2008), making the subjects more ‘open’ to the space. After each image was fnished, the participants were asked to express their feelings and opinions about the place in a few short statements.

Preliminary Results Eye-tracking results of Experiment 1 show that the movement of pedestrians, cyclists and cars crossing the street created the most eye fxation for most participants (see Figure 6.6A). The underpass to the cofee bar, including the signboard above, drew the attention of several participants (see Figure 6.6B). Buildings with windows, and in particular balconies, were eye-catching (see Figure 6.6C). Based on our interviews and observations in this area, the transition space seemed to be regularly used. Business people working for companies in the adjacent area used this space as part of their recreational walking track because of the popular cofee bar (design principle: ‘Active ground foor’) and green (design principle: ‘Tactility’). None of the participants fxated their eyes on the large black fagpole-shaped object (see Figure 6.6D). One reason might

Eye-tracking patterns of a participant at the exit of the subway and entrance to Bijlmermeer

FIGURE 6.6

Source: Frank Suurenbroek and Gideon Spanjar

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be that its black color efectively served as ‘a blind spot’ against the colorful buildings in the background. In general, the eye-tracking results from Experiment 2 show that participants’ eyes followed the length of the façades toward the end of the street and the horizon. Most participants showed multiple gaze points when a proportion of the frst foor had a sequence of doors and windows (design principle: ‘Active ground foor’) (see Figure 6.7). When there were no windows and only one door, the eye ignored the façade and focused on contrasting structures (see Figure 6.8). When participants viewed images of streetscapes with a more distant viewpoint, buildings with variation in structures and colors (see Figure 6.9) drew the eye, and eye movements followed their rhythmic variations (design principle: ‘Ornate façades’). Green objects and space, such as the large trees in Figure 6.9, attracted several participants momentarily. The study kept views of people to a minimum or showed them in a less dominant position (e.g., only from behind) because people shown from the front immediately draw viewers’ attention. In line with other research studies, participants’ eyes fxated on people. Even when social activity could be expected, for example at restaurants and bars, social activity attracted people’s eyes immediately (design principle: ‘Active ground foor’).

FIGURE 6.7

First eight seconds of one participant’s eye fxation with viewpoint

close-up Source: Frank Suurenbroek and Gideon Spanjar

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FIGURE 6.8

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First eight seconds of one participant’s eye fxation with viewpoint

close-up Source: Frank Suurenbroek and Gideon Spanjar

FIGURE 6.9

First eight seconds of one participant’s eye fxation with viewpoint

distant Source: Frank Suurenbroek and Gideon Spanjar

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Discussion This chapter explored the application of eye-tracking technology in urban design to gain a deeper understanding of the physical-behavioral interrelationship of streetscapes in European high-density built environments. Experiment 1 took place on location, in the ‘old’ high-rise district of Bijlmermeer where urban renewal is taking place. Experiment 2 was conducted in a lab setting, using photos of Dutch streetscapes in high-density environments. The preliminary results suggest that the assessed design principles ‘Active ground foor’ and ‘Ornate façades’ might be important factors in predicting dominant eye patterns. ‘Tactility’ appears to be a more subtle design principle. All of these design principles need further investigation. Moreover, eye-tracking research needs to be supported by additional social research to fully identify the observed eye patterns and to investigate the efects of the visual experiences on users’ behavioral changes and derived place perception. Assessing the visual experience of a multitude of (high-density) built environments and using contrasting locations where design principles are present or absent may help to analyze the patterns. Thus, this pilot study shows promising preliminary results but also reveals a range of methodological issues that appear to be related to the complex transdisciplinary nature of the feld of neuro-architecture. Although the sample sizes need to be larger to validate the design principles, the pilot study suggests the potential of eye tracking for urban design practice. Yet, this conclusion touches upon a more fundamental question that needs to be answered: Does the new hybrid feld of neuro-architecture aim to articulate generalizations that can be implemented in any given high-rise environment? Or are we searching for situational evidence about certain relationships between ‘designed space’ and ‘perceived space’? It might be both. The design failure of the Bijlmermeer that has been described, where modernistic principles were fully applied, disregarding cultural context, emphasizes the importance of situational evidence about certain relationships between design space and perceived space. The urban design principles had a radically diferent take on human scale and elementary physical-behavioral interrelationships that contribute to human health and well-being. The two experiments demonstrate that the valuable combination of emerging technology and theories from neuroscience and architecture ofers to unravel the complexity of cognitive responses to the built environment. It allows us to assess and match common design principles according to the (visual) experiences of streetscapes and to start formulating biometric guidelines to work toward healthy and livable high-density environments across the globe.

References Alexander, C., Ishikawa, S., & Silverstein, M. (1977). A pattern language. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Andreani, S., & Savegh, A. (2017). Augmented urban experiences: Technologically enhanced design research methods for revealing hidden qualities of the built environment. IAAC Active Public Space Conference Proceedings, 124–132. Asgarzadeh, M., Lusk, A., Koga, T., & Hirate, K. (2012). Measuring oppressiveness of streetscapes. Landscape and Urban Planning, 107, 1–11. Banerjee, T., & Southworth, M. (Eds.). (1990). City sense and city design: Writings and projects of Kevin Lynch. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Coburn, A., Kardan, O., Kotabe, H., Steinberg, J., Hout, M. C., Robbins, A., & Berman, M. G. (2019). Psychological responses to natural patterns in architecture. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 62, 133–145. Cullen, G. (1961). The concise townscape. New York: Routledge. Gehl, J. (2011). Life between buildings: Using public space. Washington, DC: Island Press. Gehl, J., Gemzoe, L., Kirknaes, S., & Sondergaard, B. S. (2006). New city life. Copenhagen: Danish Architectural Press. Giford, R. (2007). The consequences of living in high-rise buildings. Architectural Science Review, 50(1), 1–16. Jacobs, A. B. (1993). Great streets. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jacobs, J. (1961). The death and life of Great American cities. New York: Random House. Kaplan, R., & Kaplan, S. (1989). The experience of nature: A psychological perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lindal, P., & Hartig, T. (2013). Architectural variation, building height, and the restorative quality of urban residential streetscapes. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 33, 26–36. Luijten, A. (2002). A modern fairy tale: The Bijlmer transforms. In D. Bruijn et  al. (Eds.), In Amsterdam southeast (pp. 9–25). Bussum: Thoth Publishers. Lynch, K. (1960). The image of the city. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Matos Wunderlich, F. (2008). Walking and rhythmicity: Sensing urban space. Journal of Urban Design, 13(1), 125–139. Sussman, A., & Hollander, J. B. (2015). Cognitive architecture: Designing for how we respond to the built environment. New York: Routledge. Suurenbroek, F., Nio, I., & De Waal, M. (2019). Responsive public spaces: Exploring the use of interactive technology in the design of public spaces. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. Ulrich, R. S. (1984). View through a window may infuence recovery from surgery. Science, 224, 417–419. Ulrich, R. S., Simons, R. F., Losito, B. D., Fiorito, E., Miles, M. A., & Zelson, M. (1991). Stress recovery during exposure to natural and urban environments. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 11(3), 201–230. Venturi, R. D., Brown, S., & Izenour, S. (1972). Learning from Las Vegas. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. White, W. H. (1988). City: Rediscovering the center. Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania Press. Wilson, E. O. (1984). Biophilia. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. Wilson, E. O., & Kellert, S. R. (1995). The biophilia hypothesis. Washington, DC: Island Press.

7 ATTENTION AND FOCUS IN THE PERCEPTION OF PERSIAN ARCHITECTURE Saeid Khaghani, Jamal Esmaeilzadeh Vafaei and Seyed Behnamedin Jameie

Introduction Understanding the efect of the built environment on human beings and, in reverse, the role of cognitive process on the formation and perception of architecture has been one of the most important concerns for architects and architectural researchers. Aiming to understand the cognitive principles of architectural forms, researchers focused on the role played by the brain and the mind in architectural perception. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, in The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, writes, ‘Our perceptual systems are designed to capture aspects of the external world that are important to our survival’ (Pinker, 2003, p. 199). In that regard, what should an architect or urban planner know about a human being and the cognitive process? How should they think about something as ‘human nature’ or about which guidelines are useful in designing successful places for people (Sussman & Hollander, 2015)? The general aim of this research is to understand the common logic behind the mind as a perception machine. After considering the activities of the brain, attention and focus will be reviewed in detail on cognitive principles. The focus of this research is Persian architecture with the aim that through the study of mind and logics of perception, the rationale behind forming principles of this architecture can be partially investigated. A possible method to reach this goal is to place people in selected environments and then measure their mental responses to the environment. A more confdent approach is to scientifcally record the mental process of the observers. However, due to limitations in performing the experiment, questionnaires were used and analyzed on a theoretical basis to understand the connection between attention and the forming principles of this architecture.

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Mind and Cognition The mind and brain have broad functions and should be studied in diferent branches. Carl Stopp divides the main functions of the mind that are examined in cognitive science into six categories: perception, memory, attention, excitement, language and understanding (Kolak, Hirstein, & Waskan, 2006). Perception is the entrance gate for the sensory cells, and this occurs through these sensing channels: 1. 2. 3.

Light-sensitive cells in the retina. Pressure-sensitive cells in the cochlea. Movement-sensitive cells in the atrial system. (Reuter-Lorenz, 2010)

After receiving data from the environment, the senses through cells that are specifcally developed to absorb external phenomena direct certain electrical fows toward the brain. These cells are actually nerve neurons that grow as parts of the sensory neurons and can grow in diferent parts of the body, including the eyes, ears, nose, tongue and even the skin and the body. They create nerve receptors which carry all sensory information to the brain in order to be analyzed and responded to. The fact is that the human brain does not act equally with all our senses. The human brain is visually inclined. Most of our cortex is dedicated to creating a visual representation of the world, in comparison to other sensory channels. While this should not be interpreted as visual hegemony in design and architecture, the consequences of this fact are remarkable. It refects how important visual details are for architects and urban designers when we realize that half of the sensory information that goes to the human brain is related to visual processing (Kandel, 2012, p. 238). Eyes are like a camera. Yet, this camera does not understand the reality unless it processes what we see and feel in our cerebral cortex. In other words, we do not see in the eye. The fact is that the brain rebuilds reality based on its own biological laws (Kandel, 2012, p. 301). The mind does not represent the world without the intervention of active memory, and it needs motives and emotions by relying on a system of signs and symptoms (Hogan, 2003). This system of signs and symptoms afect the activity of the cortex, which makes processing possible at higher levels. Understanding mental functioning explains the correlation between the outside world and preferences of the mind, through which a possible result would be creating better environments. Because of the importance of memory in architectural perception, the subjects of focusing and attention have become the subject of this research. This helps us understand how environmental data is processed in the mind, which builds our judgements and reactions.

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What Is Attention? Attention is a cognitive process through which the focused mind ignores unnecessary environmental stimuli. As the processing power of the mind is limited due to time and personal condition, the nervous system faces a huge amount of sensory data and memory information to choose between. Because of this constraint, the nervous system chooses important information for more precise control of targeted behavior and information. This is a phenomenon called ‘attention,’ which is one of our most important cognitive powers (Reynold & Chellazi, 2004). In 1985, Robert Dismone recorded signals in the visual cortex of a monkey when he was doing an attention test. When the monkey was paying attention to a specifc point, the neurons responded to increased visual stimuli, and they could distinguish visual stimuli better. Repetition of this observation in other cortical and subcortical regions led to the conclusion that attention increases and improves the quality of the sensory signals in the sensory cortex (Reynold & Chellazi, 2004). The fact of choosing the most important and ignoring the unimportant at the same time shows the human ability to set up the mind and action toward particular goals. Brickenkamp (2002), the author of the d2 test, explained the phenomenon as this: If living organisms were not able to pay attention, due to the simultaneous infux of a large amount of stimuli, any process of their targeted behavior would have been disrupted. If attention does not focus on the input information within fve seconds, the information in the sensory memory will be lost. The brain continuously evaluates and compares information and chooses the most important information. Sensory features are determining in attracting attention. This kind of attention control is called ‘outward attention,’ or attention from the bottom-up. In bottom-up attention, objects possess qualities that allow them to absorb and maintain attention. The mind is also able to intentionally focus on an object or a place in the visual feld. This type of attention is referred to as endogenous or top-down attention. A possible relationship between architecture and the subject of attention is to ask what formal and spatial qualities can get more attention, therefore building a memorable place with a stronger and more desirable mental image. The most important feature of attention is selectivity. This selection is based on one of the chosen stimuli or a mental plan, which is used to perceive, imagine, understand or process. In other words, attention can be considered a mechanism for controlling perception. It means that the outcome and the processing of the mind decide what is allowed to enter the consciousness and what is not. Studies of electrical stimulation and temporary deactivation with pharmacological methods in the last two decades show that a wide network of the cerebral cortex, including cerebellar cortex, central cortex and intermediate

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brain, plays a role in target selection (Fecteau & Monuz, 2006). All brain activities, including attention, are necessary for the health of anatomical structures that are underpinned by vigilance, but its electrochemical health, which places all of the brain in an acceptable state, is the prerequisite for brain functioning (Kimiyayi Asadi, 1390 AH (2010)). There is a diference between attention and focus. Attention is the general readiness for information or the selection of specifc behavioral patterns, but focus is the concentration on the number or aspects of particular information or behavioral patterns, which requires greater cortical activity. In other words, attention is related to the process of connecting to and perceiving the outside world, and focusing is on the mental processing of what has been received. Attention is a necessary condition of focus. Through research on the subject of attention and focusing, it potentially becomes possible to provide clear patterns and examples of the association of these phenomena within the understanding of the human environment. Hollander and Foster (2016) tested the possible utility of EEG to measure attention levels in studying urban environments. Examples of some of these patterns have become more prominent, and study analyses in this chapter are based on these patterns.

The Perception of the Architectural Forms Symmetry Symmetry has a long record in the history of humankind and the built environment. Looking at two-way symmetry is an example of how our sense of aesthetics has a biological root (Sussman & Hollander, 2015, pp. 108–115). Mutual symmetry is considered important progress since it ‘expanded the way for the development of directed movement, developed the sensory organs, and ultimately reached the development of the large and complex mammals’ brain’ (Prosser, 2012). A study published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior in 2006 states, ‘Symmetrical decoration improves the attractiveness of faces and abstract designs’ (quoted from Andres & Harris 2006; Sussman & Hollander, 2015, p. 120). Psychologists who study symmetry perception fnd that people process bipartite (vertical) alignment in objects much faster than other forms of repetition or other types of symmetry (Makin, Wilton, Pecchinenda, & Bertamini, 2012, p.  3250). Psychologists Rodrigo Anders Cardenas and Loren Julius Harris at Michigan State University selected 40 undergraduate students to select a series of symmetrical and asymmetrical patterns from native cultures (Cardenas & Harris, 2006). They asked students to choose those they prefer. Students consistently chose the symmetric patterns that

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were organized around the vertical axis compared to those that were asymmetrical, and they also tended to choose symmetry in the vertical axis rather than the horizontal.

Bilateral Symmetry and Biology Without two-way symmetry, biologists point out that the possibility of our existence as human beings would be put at risk. Vertical orientation refects the structure of the human body and its role in the perception of the outside world. An example of this is the fact that our eyes are placed in our head parallel to the horizontal plane. Perhaps, if our eyes were perpendicular to the horizon our way of seeing would also be diferent (Sussman & Hollander, 2015). The two-way symmetry does not only afect the path we walk on or what we see, but it seems to be deeply connected to our feelings as well, to what we love in the world and we fnd attractive. Biologists call this trend ‘an evolved preference’ (Cardenas & Harris, 2006, p. 11). Recently, psychologists have tried to prioritize the widespread benefts of symmetry. For example, recent psychological studies have examined whether adding symmetrical patterns to faces and objects like artistic pieces increases their attractiveness. It showed that people consistently prefer symmetric phenomena to asymmetric ones (Cardenas & Harris, 2006). Researchers have paid attention to patterns of symmetry in arts and crafts, whether in pottery, fabric design, tile decoration or body decoration. Similar trends in handicrafts seem to have been created independently around the world, which shows the perceptual basis of our species. Bilateral symmetrical objects in diverse and far-away areas are found from the Navajo in the American West, to the Aonikenk, tribes of Patagonia, South America, to the Yoruba tribe of Nigeria (Cardenas & Harris, 2006).

Faces in the Building Another common phenomenon is to see architecture in the form of a human face (Sussman & Hollander, 2015). It seems that our ability to understand faces is very strong and that faces are deliberately drawn into sections of a building or on façades of buildings. Anthropomorphic names are given for architectural elements and parts, for example, head, face and ears (e.g., in Persian architecture the two small rooms at the side of a bigger saloon is called gushwar, which means earring or ear-like). This can be understood as an unconscious tendency to attract faces in random cases, which has an important role in design, aesthetics and the utilization of buildings and urban designs (Figures 7.2 and 7.3) ‘Neuroscientists found that the 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, p. 333).

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Face in façade, Kerman national library

Source: Jamal Esmaeilzadeh Vafaei

Narration of the Mind Just as the human brain is ready to fnd faces and enjoy regulation like symmetry in the outside environment, our brain tends to build a narration of them. How we see our world and how we see ourselves ultimately embraces a story and a narration. Narration is an unusual ability of the mind to create stories through which it fnds various ways to communicate with the environment and fnd a place in that environment. Biologists believe that we have a high level of ability to adapt to narratives in the future. Researchers have recently identifed a distributed neural network that creates narration in the central nervous system. This shows how these pathways are crucial for storytelling and even for our self-perception in the world. Narration can be addressed in a number of ways. Individuals communicate with historical events and characters associated with a location (Sussman & Hollander, 2015, p. 135). Narration in the built environment means creating a connection between separated spots and building a meaningful connection between these spots. This ability helps us to fnd our place in the world. This is a two-sided path, which means the place should give sensible connections between the spots in order to make better narrations of the place.

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The aforementioned patterns can play an important role in creating attention in the perception of the outside world. The present research investigates these patterns in the perception of Persian architecture and their place in getting attention in the built environment.

Persian Architectural Patterns Similar patterns are detectable in the formation of Persian architecture. Examples of this include axial arrangement in plan, central orientation in main forms, symmetry in the façade and the plan, and sequential hierarchy of movement in spaces. Central orientation organizes spaces in order to eventually reach a unity in architectural spaces. Through this process, axial order and central orientation are combined, causing one to focus on the main structure, which usually is a grand portal at the center or a colorful dome. Chartaqi (literally means four-arc dome) is an ancient prototype with a square basis, a transitional neck and a dome head, which autonomously, or combined with a portal at the front, is the main component of all structures such as mosques, schools, caravansary and even garden kiosks (Figure 7.3). Charbaghs (quadrilateral Persian gardens) were the main outline for organizing designed green and urban spaces. It is important to mention that in this architecture, continuity and similarity of the principles do not end in repetition and tediousness. Not unlike Persian calligraphy, in which every letter and rules of combination are defned while providing a great space for creativity and individuality, in this architecture as well, despite similarity of components and a defned spatial grammar, every building represents a unique character. Symmetry and hierarchy are also visible in all the façades, decorations and even sections and plans. Not only does symmetry shape architectural units, it also arranges pairs on the sides of the main axis in façades. Hierarchy in Persian architecture exists in both the sequences of spaces and also the forms. Many of the symmetrical forms have a triangular hierarchy. They have a top, transitional middle, and a square bottom as an interconnected form. If the symmetry implies organization and purpose, the hierarchy also creates the order of attention. In individual forms, a metaphoric reference to human body exists. This is visible in the form of the human body, with the head, body and legs, and the human face with eyes, nose and mouth. This shows an order that we can easily and intuitively understand. Finally, the fundamental concept of unity prevails throughout the whole idea of Persian architecture (Ardalan & Bakhtiar, 2000). While there is multiplicity of architectural spaces in a courtyard complex as the main ordering outline in Persian architecture, the spaces come to a spatial and physical unity at the end, which is visible in the façades, plans and architectural spaces. It also helps to create a holistic narration in spatial sequences, which is a forming principle in Persian houses as well as other architectural complexes. In order to examine the rules of attention and focusing in the formation of these principles, fve diferent architectural sites were chosen, and frst-time

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visitors were asked to defne their points of interest and what they remembered. The outcome was an analysis of the rules behind these particular attentions.

Research Method Along with the attempt to fnd rules of attention and focusing, the aim of this research is also to fnd an empirical way to examine formal and spatial principles forming Persian architecture. New methods developed by new technologies and cognitive sciences for this purpose include OAI, MEG, PET, fNIRS, fMRI, DTI, qEEG, ERP and mental mapping. One of the methods used is the fMRI imaging method, which can be understood by measuring the oxygen of red blood cells in diferent parts of the brain. Nonetheless, this experiment has some limitations. For instance, researchers need to be exactly sure what the point of attention is in the human brain. These cases have not yet been fully solved in the feld of neuroscience in regard to understanding real environments. Another approach is using the eye contact method in order to identify the focus and concentration of the eye on a specifc subject by using specifc cameras and sensors. This method also has limitations and difculties in applying in the real environment. In this research, a more convenient and practical approach was taken by using analytical and visual questionnaires. Based on the data obtained from theoretical studies and with the help of neuroscientists and psychologists, a questionnaire was designed. The questioned persons (20 in every site) were chosen among the tourists and frst-time visitors as those with the least pre-acquaintance with Persian architecture. To carry out this experiment, fve diferent architectural spaces with diferent spatial patterns were selected. The feld research was undertaken on December 7–13, 2018, one or two days in every site to complete the questionnaire. The data has been analyzed in two ways: qualitatively and quantitatively. The data were analyzed statistically and then comparisons were made.

CASE STUDIES Nasir al-Molk Mosque Nasir al-Molk Mosque is a local mosque built by the city governor in the Qajar period (1876–1888) in Shiraz. The mosque has an entrance and hashti (lobby), followed by an open courtyard with pools in the middle with two iwans (portals) in the north and south, and two shabistan (hypostyle) in the west and east. The southern iwan has two short moazeneh (place for calling to prayer). The mosque is covered with tiles, and because of the color is named the ‘Pink Mosque.’ The most distinctive feature of this mosque is the eastern shabistan with its curved columns and colorful windows, which create a magical space in the light.

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FIGURE 7.2

Nasir al-Molk Mosque, Shiraz

Source: Jamal Esmaeilzadeh Vafaei

FIGURE 7.3

Nasir al-Molk Mosque, Shiraz

Source: Jamal Esmaeilzadeh Vafaei

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Amir Chaqmaq Square Amir Chaqmaq complex is an urban plaza with a large face in front of a small bazaar (originally it was the façade of a tekyeh, a place for religious commemoration during moharram) and a grand mosque and water storage at the sides. The square itself has a grand pool in the middle with modern statues surrounding it. The main feature of this plaza is the presence of market entrances on the main front, which are the source of the attraction and attention of the visitors.

FIGURE 7.4

Amir Chaqmaq Square, Yazd

Source: Jamal Esmaeilzadeh Vafaei

Shazdeh Mahan Garden In the heart of the Kerman’s deserts, a green island is created with fowing water and a wall of trees at the sides. Taking advantage of the slope ground, it has created a staged process from the square in front of the entrance gate to the peak of the garden palace. The sequence of falling waters and the path around it on the main axis, emphasized by colorful fowers at the middle and a wall of trees at the sides, has created a strong spatial scenario. The entire path of the garden consists of 12 levels, which increases the depth of the garden and focuses attention on the end point (Naeima, 2015: 168).

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FIGURE 7.5

Shazdeh Garden, Mahan, Kerman

Source: Jamal Esmaeilzadeh Vafaei

Dowlat-Abad Garden Dowlat-Abad is also a green garden at the outskirts of the city of Yazd. It is a royal garden formed on a central axis divided into two symmetrical sections, which ends with the main building at the end of the path with its tall wind tower. The palace itself is an octagon with a central dome that creates a symmetrical shape, and at the top, there is the tallest octagonal wind catcher (it is 30 meters high). At the top is a beautifully covered dome with a net of arches, which creates a beautiful pattern under the sunlight entering from the top of the dome.

FIGURE 7.6

Dowlat-Abad Garden, Yazd

Source: Jamal Esmaeilzadeh Vafaei

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Jameh Mosque of Yazd: The Jāmeh (congregational) Mosque of Yazd is a slightly different case from the other case studies. Well before facing the building, unlike some other mentioned cases, this mosque has an entrance portal that attracts attention in the skyline of the city. This entrance, with its tall minarets beside the dome house of the building and its star-shaped ornaments, is the main subject of attention for the visitors. Minarets with turquoise tiles receive the most attention by the visitors.

FIGURE 7.7

Jāmeh Mosque, Yazd

Source: Jamal Esmaeilzadeh Vafaei

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Results and Discussion The questionnaires were designed specifcally for visitors who did not have a deep acquaintance of the place, which aimed to identify the points of attentions in those places. For the frst question, the frst point of attention was asked in each place. In Yazd’s Jāmeh Mosque, the entrance with two symmetrical minarets and tile decorations received 80% of the responses (n  = 16), and the remaining 20% of respondents chose the dome and the courtyard (n  =  4). In the Nassir al-Molk Mosque, spiral columns and colored glass received about 70% of the responses (n  =  14) and the remaining went to the southern iwan, pool and the courtyard. In the Shazdeh Mahan garden, the points of attention for all the visitors were the mansions on the opposite side of the garden, the water pool and the stepped way to the mansion. Because of the wind catcher in the garden of Dowlat-Abad, the structure attracted the main attention of the respondents (about 60% of the responses, n  = 12). Almost 30% mentioned the axis and the waterway (n  = 6), and the remaining 10% mentioned the colorful glass of the windows of the mansion (n  =  2). In the Amir Chaqmaq Square, the central minarets and regular arches received most of the attention, about 50% to the buildings itself (n  =  10), 40% to the tiles and ornaments (n  =  8), and the rest to the pool and the plaza (n  = 2). In the next question, diferent images, each with diferent architectural features, such as axis, symmetry, architectural spaces and structures, were shown to the respondents. Pictures belonging to diferent architectural heritages, including neoclassical, Asian, European and Persian gardens and buildings, were shown to the respondents. The questionnaire intended to consider diferent architectural types, asking the person to choose the most similar architecture to the atmosphere in which they are present. Regardless of the diference in architectural spaces, landscape and gardens in the research area, 75% of the respondents associated the visited places to the architecture of the Boroujerdi House, a traditional Iranian mansion. Even for the case of the gardens that were questioned, the percentage of the choices of the images of garden was low. Respondents tended to choose cases that resembled the place they were visiting, in the case of the symmetry in façade and the general composition of dome and arches. It can be concluded that regardless of the environment in which we were located, the Persian architectural pattern was almost identical to viewers, and the same symmetry and construction form attracted the attention of the viewer. In the third question, the visitors were asked which places reminded them of the visited sites. The answer to this question sought to test what similarities the mentioned places have with the visited site, and to conclude which patterns the mind identifes. In the mosque of Yazd, about 80% of the respondents mentioned the Imam (Shah) mosque of Isfahan as the frst place they were reminded of (n = 16). More than the form, it is the spatial narrative of a person passing through an iwan and then to the courtyard with a dome on the central

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FIGURE 7.8

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Boroujerdi mansion

axis that both mosques have in common. The visitor passes through the same sequences from the portal to reach the pivot of the complex, which is the dome. The responses of people in the Nasir al-Molk Mosque, due to the complications of light and colored glass, were diferent. Some of them mentioned old Kashan’s mansions with a central courtyard, and some of them chose similar hypostyle spaces with columns. In Amir Chaqmaq Square, the symmetrical presence of a building in an open urban space must have come to the minds of the respondents since they choose the Naghsh-e-Jahan Square in Isfahan. The next question was about the visitors’ favorite part of the visited sites, which sometimes difers from the initial point of attention. The person who is acquainted with the space and pays more attention to the rest of place might focus on something other than frst points of attention. For example, in the mosque of Yazd, after the initial attention to the entrance, minarets and decorations, due to its form and decorations, the dome house replaced the frst point of attention of the visitors. In Nasir al-Molk, despite the initial attention to colored glass and lights, the best point in architecture mentioned was the hypostyle, the courtyard and the ornaments of the porches. In both gardens, after wandering in the garden, the water fow and the water route were added to the options of the best architectural spaces. And in Amir Chaqmaq Square, the vaults of the building were very much considered. With the same purpose, in another set of questions, we sought to discover the points of attention in the mind of the visitors, this time by showing the

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images of the visited places. Based on the responses, we could fnd the initial attention and focus points. In the mosque of Yazd, seeing the details of the mosque and its spaces, about 60% of the respondents chose the entrance and the tiles (n  = 12). The rest chose the ornaments of the dome. In Nasir al-Molk Mosque, the images of the glass and the beautiful light of that space received half of the answers. The courtyard and the image of the pool received 30% of the responses (n  =  6) and tiling and decorations received the remaining 20% (n  =  4). In Dowlat-Abad Garden, 40% chose the axis and the water route (n  =  8), 30% chose the façade and the form of the mansion (n  =  6), and the rest of the pictures were selected from under the wind catcher and the internal form of the mansion. In Amir Chaqmaq Square, minarets and arches comprised 70% of the choices (n  =  14), the overall image of the plaza with a general perspective comprised 20% (n = 4), and the wall decoration images were selected by 10% (n  = 2). Finally, due to the existence and importance of color in Persian architecture, the respondents were asked which color absorbed their attention. Here we sought to understand how diferent people among diferent tones and colors chose the prevailing one. It potentially shows how the mind selects and focuses on one among many colors. In a completely diferent set of images, a completely diferent question was asked from the visitors. Six diferent images, including one of a carpet, three of diferent contemporary architectures, one of a piece of curved modern furniture and one of a mandala were presented to the visitors. The respondents were asked to select only the image that they liked regardless of the context and the subject. The responses to this section showed valuable results. About 45% of the respondents chose the carpet image (n = 9). They chose the centerpiece and symmetric pattern and to some extent, they chose to consider the image representing Iran. Interestingly, about 20% chose the mandala’s image, which is also center-oriented and symmetrical (n  = 4). It showed that the majority of the respondents (65%) seek similarity in pattern rather than similar subjects.

Conclusion This research, by examining the patterns of Persian architecture and measuring the subject of attention in fve diferent Persian architectural sites, indicated that patterns including symmetry, formal composition, spatial hierarchy, color and ornamental emphasis attract bottom-up attention. These fndings reemphasize the basic assumption that the human mind is more interested in these patterns. The interesting discovery of this study was that the point of attention and the interest matched. In addition, it showed that certain patterns build stronger and memorable perceptions of the buildings while other parts and details are ignored. The fact that a signifcant number of visitors with diferent cultural backgrounds chose symmetrical forms, with simple yet strong compositions, showed that the

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human mind tends to have common principles in perception and attention. Despite the fact that subjective and conscious presuppositions have a signifcant impact and can infuence perception, in all cases, after a short acquaintance with the place, common rules and principles prevail in peoples’ perception and judgment. This study showed that under a layer of changing tastes and time, principles guide our approaches to the outside environment. It calls us to put energy into fnding commonalities for building better environments rather than only focusing on diferences and changes in the name of creativeness. For future studies in this area, in order to reach more reliable and scientifc results, new methods in neuroscience can be applied in architectural perception. At the moment it is hard to come up with new features such as fMRI imaging, because information about the function of the mind is not yet fully understood. However, there are many ways that this can be achieved through eye-tracking experiments and mental performance recordings. This research was only a preliminary step and can take on new approaches for more detailed and stronger results.

Acknowledgments We would like to thank Anita Khalili and Dr. Poor-Khaghan for their help in planning the feld research.

References Andres, R., & Harris, L. J. (2006). Symmetrical decorations enhance the attractiveness of faces and abstract designs. Evolution and Human Behavior, 27(1), 1–18. Ardalan, N., & Bakhtiar, L. (2000). The sense of unity: The Suf tradition in Persian architecture. Chicago, IL: Kazi Publications. Brickenkamp, R. (2002). Test d2; Aufmerksamkeits-Belastungs-test. Göttingen: Hogrefe. Cardenas, R. A., & Harris, L. J. (2006). Symmetrical decorations enhance the attractiveness of faces and abstract designs. Evolution and Human Behavior, 27(1), 1–18. Fecteau, J., & Monuz, D. (2006). Salience, relevance and fring: A priority map for target selection. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10(8), 382–390. Hogan, P. (2003). Cognitive science, literature and arts: A guide for humanists. London: Routledge. Hollander, J. B., & Foster, V. (2016). Brain responses to architecture and planning: A neuro-assessment of the pedestrian experience in Boston, Massachusetts. Architectural Science Review, 59(6), 474–481. Kandel, E R. (2012). The age of insight: The quest to understand the unconscious in art, mind and brain from Vienna 1900 to the present. New York: Random House. Kimiyayi Asadi, T. 1390 (2010). Khilqat va Takamol-e Maghz va Ravan [The creation and evolution of the brain and mind]. Tehran: Nigah-e Moasir. Kolak, D., Hirstein, W., & Waskan, J. (2006). Cognitive science: An introduction to mind and brain. New York: Routledge. Makin, A. D., Wilton, M. M., Pecchinenda, A., & Bertamini, M. (2012). Symmetry perception and afective responses: A combined EEG/EMG study. Neuropsychologia, 50(14), 3250–3261.

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Naeima, Gh. (2015). Bagh-haye Iran [The gardens of Iran]. Tehran: Payam. Pinker, S. (2003). The blank slate: The modern denial of human nature. London: Penguin. Prosser, W. (2012). Animal body plans and movement: Symmetry in action. Decoded Science [database online]. Retrieved from www.decodedscience.com/animal-bodyplans-symmetry-inaction/13171 Reuter-Lorenz, P. A. (2010). The cognitive neuroscience of mind. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Reynold, J., & Chellazi, L. (2004). Attentional modulation of visual processing. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 27, 611–647. Robinson, S. (2015). Mind in architecture: Neuroscience, embodiment, and the future of design. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Sussman, A., & Hollander, J. (2015). Cognitive architecture: Designing for how we respond to the built environment. New York: Routledge.

SECTION III

Explorations of the New Paradigm for Urban Experience and Design

8 COGNITIVE MAPPING, MOBILITY TECHNOLOGIES AND THE DECOUPLING OF IMAGEABILITY AND ACCESSIBILITY Andrew Mondschein

Introduction Urban designers and planners, as well as geographers, psychologists and neurobiologists, have demonstrated the strength of the link between urban accessibility and imageability. Accessibility is a quality of cities and places, including transportation networks and urban form, that links people with activities and destinations, whether it be jobs, services, family and friends, open space or otherwise (Levinson & Krizek, 2005). Not just a product of transportation and land use, cognition and spatial knowledge also modify accessibility (Chorus & Timmermans, 2010; Lynch, 1981; Mondschein, Blumenberg, & Taylor, 2010). Imageability, as defned by Kevin Lynch in Image of the City (1960), refers to the salience, legibility and interpretability of places in the minds of inhabitants. Urban imageability depends on cognition, as individuals experience and interpret urban environments in order to understand and make use of them (McCunn & Giford, 2018). Traditionally, urban accessibility promotes travel experiences that fll cognitive maps and the image of the city. That image, in turn, shapes accessibility, informing the activities and destinations each person might access (Mondschein & Moga, 2018). As the 21st century progresses, the human experience of travel is becoming less cognitively active as information technologies (e.g., GPS-based navigation) permeate travel decision-making and vehicle automation (e.g., driverless cars) becomes increasingly likely (Ofenhuber & Ratti, 2013). I ask whether information and automation technologies will reshape urban spatial knowledge and imageability, and if yes, are these changes likely to have signifcant efects on accessibility? Drawing on spatial learning theory, I use a cognitive mapping survey completed by Los Angeles residents to estimate the efects of increasing

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travel choice ‘passivity’ on spatial knowledge at local and regional scales (Mondschein et al., 2010; Münzer, Zimmer, Schwalm, Baus, & Aslan, 2006). I examine diferences in spatial knowledge by travel mode, controlling for other factors, fnding diminished knowledge among passive travelers. Based on these fndings on the efects of passive travel on spatial knowledge and accessibility, I propose four efects that will increasingly separate travel experience from imageability: reduced control over mobility, elimination of wayfnding, diminution of destination choice and distraction from urban stimuli. Applying the observed efects to emerging travel modes, the results suggest that the overall coherence of our city images will signifcantly degrade, separating the traditional linkage between our image of the city and our travel through it. The decoupling of imageability from daily mobility may, in turn, decouple imageability from accessibility. If we no longer rely on our cognitive maps to tell us where to go and how to get there, the number of accessible destinations may actually increase. However, access should remain a critical concern with new challenges for providing equitable, sustainable accessibility in cities, potentially reducing resilience and sustainability and increasing dependence on technology. Efectively, we may arrive in cities where the benefts they provide are ever more disconnected from their form or organization. The decoupling of accessibility and imageability underscores the ongoing salience of Kevin Lynch’s exhortation that imageability not just be a matter of form, but a matter of education and experience, where learning the city is a necessary part of living in it (Lynch, 1960).

Cognitive Map Formation and Travel Behavior A cognitive map includes spatial information about the environment, including places’ and routes’ identity, location, distance and direction (Downs & Stea, 1973). Cognitive maps embody the space actually experienced by individuals. Their features are mental representations of the physical, external environment. Cognitive maps—mental repositories of our ‘city images’—have traditionally been built, in large part, through travel experience (Golledge & Gärling, 2004). How we travel, whether by car, by transit or on foot, and whether as a driver or a passenger, infuences what goes into the map. Variations in spatial experience will result in variations in cognitive mapping. In general, spatial learning occurs in a progression from ‘landmark’ to ‘route’ to ‘survey’ knowledge (Shemyakin, 1962). The process of spatial learning is tied to the experiential process of moving through space, in other words, travel (Golledge & Stimson, 1997). This path-based theory of spatial learning gives travel and navigation a primary role (Kitchin & Blades, 2002). Spatial learning theory argues that these elements are laid down during successive phases of an experiential, developmental process (Montello, 1997; Shemyakin, 1962). Each wayfnding act allows individuals to learn about their environment (Downs & Stea, 1973; He, McNamara, Bodenheimer, & Klippel,

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2018). Landmarks and then routes between places are usually the frst things learned when traveling through a new environment. Landmark knowledge of the environment such as potential destinations and other opportunities are also learned through traveling. Navigation through the environment occurs through a systematic process of movement along vectors defned at their beginnings and ends by ‘choice points.’ Choice points are the locations where individuals make some necessary decision in navigation, such as a change in direction. Cognitive mapping research has the potential to address the focus on accessibility in transportation research (Minaei, 2014; Mondschein et al., 2010). While accessibility has traditionally been conceived as proximity of (or impedance cost of travel between) one location and others, cognitive mapping research shows that physical distances are only one factor shaping how individuals make choices in a spatial context (Kwan & Weber, 2003). Individual diferences, including prior travel experiences, cultural preferences and spatial abilities, shape the cognitive map and, thereby, the cognitive proximity and accessibility of potential destinations in a region. As a result, travelers don’t necessarily follow the ‘rational’ path selection routines of standard travel models (Golledge, 1995). Neuroscientists have identifed, with increasing specifcity, the pathways in the brain associated with the development of spatial knowledge (Kropf, Carmichael, Moser, & Moser, 2015; Sargolini et  al., 2006). Place cells, direction cells, boundary cells and other specialized neurons combine to encode spatial knowledge, within and adjacent to the brain’s hippocampus (Mondschein & Moga, 2018). The role of the hippocampus in wayfnding has been demonstrated, including a fnding that London cab drivers’ hippocampi are signifcantly large compared to the populace as a whole (Bohbot, Lerch, Thorndycraft, Iaria, & Zijdenbos, 2007; Maguire et  al., 2000). The hippocampus is not just the seat of spatial memory, but also ‘episodic’ memory—the memories we keep of our experiences. In fact, our spatial and episodic memories may be deeply integrated within the hippocampus, giving spatial navigation an important role in the goals-oriented, self-actualizing narratives we store as memories of our experiences (Schiller et al., 2015). Given this relationship, urban planners and designers might expect that the human conceptualization of space and place is fundamentally tied to a sense of self and sense of purpose that daily travel and exploration has provided, at least historically. As technology reduces the cognitive burdens of mobility, will this relationship hold?

Methods Extracting the Elements of Route Sketch Maps To demonstrate the traditional relationship between travel experience and city image, I present results of a cognitive mapping survey examining the diferences in spatial knowledge by travel mode. Respondents living in Los Angeles

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participated in a Cognitive Mapping and Travel Behavior Survey. Each respondent completed illustrative sketch maps, guided by instructions to draw a map of a route between two places. The exercises were completed by 200 respondents in South Los Angeles, at a survey site adjacent to the intersection of two light rail lines between Compton and Watts. Respondents drew two sketch maps: ‘home to survey site’ and ‘survey site to LA City Hall.’ Figures 8.1 and 8.2

FIGURE 8.1

South Los Angeles ‘home to survey site’ maps

Source: Andrew Mondschein

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FIGURE 8.2

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South Los Angeles ‘survey site to LA City Hall’ maps

Source: Andrew Mondschein

highlight the diversity of the sketch maps in terms of their level of detail and the modes of travel path. The conceptual framework for evaluating the sketch maps is based on spatial learning theory. Because individuals generally proceed from landmark to route knowledge in their spatially cognitive development, sketch maps can be evaluated for their relative reliance on landmarks and routes (Montello, 1997). I  establish

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a set of categories by which each element that appears on a map can be catalogued. Initial element counts for each map were conducted independently by two research assistants. Following their assessment, I reviewed and selected a fnal value for any instances of discrepancies between the two initial values. All sketch maps were evaluated across the following categories: • • • •

Landmarks (text or icon) Route segments (line or text) Choice points (intersection or icon) Map keys (north arrow, legend, etc.)

Landmarks include real elements within the built environment that are not part of the transportation network but represent waypoints along the route. Landmarks can either be drawn as iconic images or labeled as text. Route segments are elements of the transportation network itself, whether drawn as a line segment or labeled as text (e.g., ‘116th Street’). Choice points are waypoints along a route where a change in direction, mode or vehicle is made. Thus, they could be an intersection for a driver or walker, or a transfer for a transit user. In the context of a sketch map, choice points are locations where the respondent is consciously indicating the complexity in the route. Finally, map keys comprise the remainder of the sketch, those elements used to situate the viewer, such as a north arrow or legend, rather than illustrate the path itself. Table 8.1 shows the average counts for each element across the two sketch maps: (1) ‘home to survey site’ and (2) ‘survey site to Los Angeles City Hall.’ Despite the diferent samples and mapping tasks, the ratio between landmarks and route segments for each map is roughly balanced. For all maps, there are roughly half the number of choice points as route segments. Exceedingly few respondents used map keys in their drawings. For all categories, ‘home to survey site’ maps have more elements than do ‘survey site to LA City Hall’ maps.

TABLE 8.1 Mean element counts for sketch maps

Elements

Home to Survey Site (N = 136)

Survey Site to LACH (N = 111)

Landmarks Route Segments Choice Points Map Keys TOTAL LACH = Los Angeles City Hall

3.46 3.45 1.79 0.02 8.72

3.02 3.05 1.61 0.03 7.71

Source: Andrew Mondschein

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Analysis of Cognitive Map Elements The analysis of the sketch maps examined how the basic elements respondents used to describe routes varied among groups defned by their mode of travel. I hypothesized that the cognitive maps of active travelers would vary from those of passive travelers. The more limited wayfnding and navigation experience of passive travelers should have resulted in a greater reliance on landmarks as opposed to knowledge of the streets themselves. As shown in Table 8.1, I inventoried the sketch maps by their component parts: landmarks, routes, choice points and map keys. Counts of these elements can be compared across element categories by cognitive travel style. Cognitive travel style can be active, mixed or passive. Active travelers are those who reported traveling exclusively by the cognitively active modes of auto driving or walking, while passive travelers reported traveling exclusively by the cognitive passive modes of transit or auto passenger, and mixed travelers used a combination of active and passive modes. Rather than look at absolute numbers of sketch map elements, the ratio of landmark elements-to-choice points addresses the conceptual hypothesis of landmark dominance for passive travelers. A ratio measure is advantageous also because it is a unitless measure, meaning it is comparable across maps regardless of the actual physical distance covered. Choice points and routes cover roughly the same conceptual ground of greater cognitive map refnement. The major diference in the choice point and route counts as inventoried for this analysis is that the count of choice points is limited to those moments along the sketched path where some directional or modal change is being made, while the count of route segments can include not just the segments along the path from origin to destination but also contextual route segments (such as cross streets). I argue, this is a more valid measurement of the relative dependence on landmarks because choice points, as inventoried in this study, relate only to the route itself and the respondent’s conscious expression of its complexity. The route segment count, on the other hand, may include road segments used in a ‘landmark-like’ context, rather than as integral parts of the path between origin and destination. Figure  8.3 depicts the diferences between active, mixed and passive travelers for the ‘landmarks over choice points’ ratio measure. By directly comparing landmarks to forms of route knowledge, clear patterns emerge. Passive travelers utilized landmarks in their maps far more than others did. The ratio consistently increases from active to mixed to passive travelers. The analysis of sketch map elements suggests that the construction of individuals’ cognitive maps does vary by travel experience, though other factors may also infuence the components of the maps. Before delving deeper into the factors that shape the cognitive map, the results from the sketch map analysis can be compared to the results from other exercises in the Cognitive Mapping and Travel Behavior Survey. Respondents were also asked to complete the task of describing where they lived and worked. Respondents were asked, ‘Could you tell us some identifying feature of your neighborhood: your street name,

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FIGURE 8.3

Ratio of landmark to choice point elements

Source: Andrew Mondschein

cross streets, another landmark or feature, or your zip code?’ A similar question was asked for workplace. Thus, respondents were given an open-ended opportunity to locate themselves using either landmarks, elements of the transportation network or a zip code. Figure 8.4 illustrates how the elements used to describe home and work/ school locations vary by cognitive travel style. Respondents relied more on landmarks and made less use of streets and cross streets to describe their work location. It is possible that respondents are relatively less familiar with their work locales, and thus must rely more on landmarks to describe those locations. This explanation would ft a developmental theory of spatial learning, where individuals’ spatial knowledge would be most developed near their home location and most degraded in areas they spend less time exploring. Beyond the overall trends, some diferences are evident among the groups defned by cognitive travel style. Passive and active travelers describe home and work locations in diferent ways. For home locations, passive travelers rely on landmarks doubly as much as active travelers. Streets, cross streets and zip codes, however, are

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FIGURE 8.4 Elements used to describe home and work locations, % of respondents by cognitive travel group

Source: Andrew Mondschein

fairly similarly used among groups. For work locations, active travelers are able to name streets and cross streets at a higher rate than passive travelers are. Landmarks and zip codes, however, are equivalently used among the groups for work. The mixed group shows an intriguing pattern, mimicking active travelers on the home-location exercise and mimicking passive travelers on the work-location exercise. ‘Mixed’ travelers generally walk near home but use transit or are driven to go to work, potentially explaining their similarity to active travelers near home and passive travelers at work. The exploration of the elements used to verbally describe home and work/school locations underscores that modal differences in the use of basic elements to process space extend beyond the sketch maps. Overall, landmarks play a larger role for passive travelers near home, while streets and cross streets are more apparent to active travelers near work. Experience of the built environment through travel, measured by the cognitive travel style variable, is of course not the only factor that may infuence how cognitive maps are constructed. As the descriptive statistics shown earlier demonstrate, possible non-travel-related factors may include time living in the local area, education, and employment or student’s status. In addition, other demographic factors such as sex, age or ethnicity may infuence the construction of the cognitive map, as these factors have been found to infuence the map’s dimensions and accuracy (Banerjee & Baer, 1984; Dabbs Jr, Chang, Strong, & Milun, 1998; Maurer & Baxter, 1972; McGuiness & Sparks, 1983). The relationship between cognitive map and travel behavior measures can be examined for signifcance using multiple regression, employing additional data collected in the Cognitive Mapping and Travel Behavior Survey as controls.

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Based on the results in the preceding sections, the ratio of landmark elements-to-choice points in the sketch maps stands out as the clearest representation of diference in how an individual’s cognitive map is constructed. In addition, this ratio possesses a clear relationship to cognitive travel style. The ratio is a continuous variable, roughly normally distributed, making ordinary least squares (OLS) regression an appropriate method for controlling for other factors. Table 8.2 contains the OLS regression results for two models. Note that the models were executed with robust standard errors to address concerns of mild heteroscedasticity observed during the model-building process. In practice, the use of robust errors did not substantially change the results or fndings of signifcance. Conceptually, the two sketch maps drawn by each respondent were treated as separate measures of a single phenomenon: the construction of the cognitive map. Therefore, the measures were combined in a straightforward manner, taking the mean of the ratios of landmarks to choice points for the two sketch map exercises. TABLE 8.2 Sketch map elements regression—OLS regression with robust errors

Dependent Variable: Mean Ratio of Landmarks to Choice Points for ‘Home to Survey Site’ and ‘Survey Site to LA City Hall’ Maps Independent Variables

Model 1 Beta

Sig.

Beta

Sig.

− 0.453

0.038

− 0.402

0.036

− 0.569

0.012

− 0.513

0.009

0.195 0.015 0.101 0.010 0.072 0.078 0.165

0.122 0.902 0.365 0.947 0.579 0.596 0.149 0.027

0.201

0.090

− 0.147 .

0.187 0.000

Cognitively Mixed Travel (vs. Passive) Cognitively Active Travel (vs. Passive) Years in Neighborhood Education in Years Female African American Employment Status Student Status Age Constant

− − − .

N F Prob > F R-squared

65 1.90 0.0709 0.2511

Source: Andrew Mondschein

Model 2

−

67 2.95 0.0271 0.2171

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The cognitive travel style measure is included as a set of dummy variables comparing mixed and active travelers to the base case of passive travelers. Years spent in the neighborhood captures the degree to which the cognitive map may have developed over time. Education in years could potentially capture either learned or innate skills in processing the environment, as well as overall socioeconomic status as a proxy for income. Sex (female or not) is frequently a signifcant factor in cognitive research, with researchers often fnding that women have less accurate or more truncated cognitive maps (Golledge & Stimson, 1997). Being African American is another potentially important demographic factor, linked in the literature with limited mobility and a lack of opportunity, and the only racial/ethnic variable available from the Cognitive Mapping and Travel Behavior Survey (Holzer, 1991). Employment and student status may be indicators of experience with the built environment, and age, like years in the neighborhood, may shape the cognitive map. Model 1 includes a broad set of variables, while Model 2 includes a parsimonious set of the most signifcant variables. Only a few variables are signifcant across all of the models. The small N of respondents that completed both maps likely contributes to the reduced statistical signifcance in the results. However, the cognitive travel style variables do exhibit signifcance beyond the p