Cognitive Architecture

Designing for How We Respond to the Built Environment

Ann Sussman, Justin Hollander

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000403077
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Diseño arquitectónico

In this expanded second edition of Cognitive Architecture, the authors review new findings in psychology and neuroscience to help architects and planners better understand their clients as the sophisticated mammals they are, arriving in the world with built-in responses to the environment. Discussing key biometric tools to help designers 'see' subliminal human behaviors and suggesting new ways to analyze designs before they are built, this new edition brings readers up-to-date on scientific tools relevant for assessing architecture and the human experience of the built environment.

The new edition includes:

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• Over 100 full color photographs and drawings to illustrate key concepts.

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• A new chapter on using biometrics to understand the human experience of place.

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• A conclusion describing how the book's propositions reframe the history of modern architecture.

A compelling read for students, professionals, and the general public, Cognitive Architecture takes an inside-out approach to design, arguing that the more we understand human behavior, the better we can design and plan for it.

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

Whilst Man, however well-behaved,

At best, is but a monkey shaved!

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859)

Evolution. It is the first and last word in this book. The thesis of this book is that the more we understand how human beings are an artifact of Darwin’s theory of evolution, the more creatively and successfully we will be able to design and plan for them. Evolution holds that all life evolved, or transformed, from a common ancestor. This holds true for modern humans, a relatively recent species believed to have been on earth about two hundred thousand years. As such, we carry significant baggage from a very long journey: our planet Earth is 4.6 billion years old and the first life appeared on it some 3.8 billion years ago. In this book, we explore how our evolutionary path can be seen at work in the ways humans function, including how we walk, think, see, and prioritize viewing things in our environment. Our sense of aesthetics is at root biological, evolving over millennia.

Many books on architecture and planning refer to nature, but most do not talk about humans as evolved mammals with their perceptual systems a product of ‘natural selection,’¹ the mechanism for evolution naturalist Charles Darwin defined in his most famous text, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859. This book has this idea at its core. We believe that because of the burgeoning research on the brain and cognitive science particularly happening now in the early twenty-first century, more books like this will follow. Hardly a day goes by without some new finding in evolutionary biology, psychology, neuroscience, or genetics, reframing our understanding of what it means to be humans and how we came to be.²

There is a central paradox to architecture and planning that this book also addresses. Practitioners rarely meet the people who will be most affected by their work. Most buildings outlive their creators. Post-occupancy evaluations are expensive and infrequent. Even in residential design, with an average American staying in a house only 13 years, the building will likely long outlast its original tenants (Emrath 2009). What should the architect or planner know about the human as a generic client? How should they think about something as complex as ‘human nature,’ or establish guidelines for designing successful places for people never met?

The intent of this book is to answer these questions or at least provide a basic framework for doing so, teasing out innate human responses and expectations of the man-made built world. However, here again, we run into another central paradox that provides a foundation for this book. “Our perceptual systems are designed to register aspects of the external world that were important to our survival …” wrote Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2003: 199). In other words, we see the ‘reality’ nature intends us to see, the one that led to our species’ survival in the past, which was for almost all of human history, the one outside in the natural world, and not man-made. Our oldest cities are only about 6,000 years old. We never evolved to live in the situations most of us find ourselves in today. What this suggests for architecture and planning is our subject.

Twentieth-century urban observers including writer Jane Jacobs maintained that the way forward in planning and architecture would be to better understand how people are “a part of nature.” Jacobs, an outspoken critic of most mid-twentieth-century planning projects, criticized planners for treating people like cars. It certainly is easier to design for cars than people, she noted, and though it may be easy to treat people as though they were purely mechanical, proceeding this way never produces places with lasting public resonance. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she wrote:

Underlying the city planners’ deep disrespect for their subject matter … lies a long-established misconception about the relationship of cities—and indeed of men—with the rest of nature… Human beings are, of course, a part of nature, as much so as grizzly bears or bees or whales or sorghum cane.

(Jacobs 1961: 443)

In the chapters ahead we outline what it means, according to our best interpretations of recent science, to consider people exactly as Jacobs would have it, as “a part of nature, as much so as grizzly bears or … sorghum cane.” It turns out that people have multiple unconscious tendencies and behaviors that govern their responses to built environments—no wonder they flummoxed mid-century planners. Jacobs was right: the planners’ work overlooked the essential aspects of human make-up. But, to be fair, these traits were not well documented at the time and, because they are unconscious, by definition can be hard to see. In the chapters that follow we outline what these hidden aspects in human nature are, each in its own chapter, culling out the behaviors that we believe are most significant for architecture and urban planning.

Chapter 2, ‘Edges Matter,’ begins with exploring a phenomenon that Jacobs found curious: people avoid the center of open spaces and tend to stick to the sides of streets, even in car-free zones. Understanding the biological and evolutionary basis of this hidden tendency is critical for urban planning, particularly if planners hope to create walkable places. We discuss the recent psychological research describing the trait as a survival and orientation strategy and introduce its scientific name: thigmotaxis. We also look at thigmotaxis to demonstrate one of Darwin’s essential insights: that nature is ‘conservative,’ or traits that are successful reappear in new species again and again. We chart the research record on thigmotaxis to help us appreciate how fantastically conservative nature gets. Researchers have documented thigmotaxis in organisms 3.6 billion years old and a host of other species that have evolved over millions of years since, including Homo sapiens, who are the relative newcomers on the planet.

Chapter 3, ‘Patterns Matter,’ looks at how the human brain does not treat our senses equally. Lacking the sonar of bats or the smelling skills of bears,³ the human brain is essentially oriented toward vision. More of our gray matter is devoted to creating our visual representation of the world than anything else. The implications of this fact for design and architecture are significant, suggesting how important detail and visual diversity are for building elevations and urban layout. Once you realize that most of the sensory information going to the human brain concerns visual processing,⁴ no other conclusion becomes tenable. Moreover, our mental apparatus does not handle visual inputs equally either—it prioritizes the face. The evolutionary reasons for this are clear: identifying faces quickly, whether friend or foe, proved critical for survival. An apparent by-product of our finely evolved adeptness at face-processing is that we see faces everywhere and unconsciously arrange facial features out of random data. This includes, for instance, ‘seeing’ faces in inanimate things where they are not, from the ‘man in the moon’ to a ‘Virgin Mary’ in a burnt piece of toast (BBC News 2004; Liu et al. 2014). The impact of this trait on architecture and aesthetics is something we are only beginning to appreciate. Research suggests we also see faces in many of our favorite houses and streetscapes and in so doing most easily and surreptitiously make emotional attachments and memories of these places. We review computer science literature that suggests this tendency needs to be programmed into future robots to make them more human-like, as well as more capable helpmates able to anticipate our responses to our surroundings.

Further delving into the dominant characteristic of the face, in Chapter 4, ‘Shapes Carry Weight,’ we consider bilateral symmetry, which is common to animals generally. People are bilaterally symmetrical and so is much we intentionally make, including the patterns in our craft and in many of our building and city designs (see Figure 1.1). We look at why this form prevails, again from a Darwinian perspective, learning that animals and humans consistently associate the shape with power and robustness. Bilateral symmetry carries deep, innate psychological significance. In research studies when human subjects of both sexes were asked to choose between symmetric and asymmetric faces—and even symmetric and asymmetric geometric patterns—they consistently preferred the more symmetrical. Looking at these studies is seeing natural selection at work.

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

Figure 1.1 A house plan from Roman architect Vitruvius’ De Architectura (translated as the Ten Books of Architecture), prepared for the Emperor Augustus, first century BCE. The plan features nearly symmetrical men’s and women’s sections (‘men’s quarters’ [left]; ‘women’s quarters’ [right]) and in each of these areas multiple bilaterally symmetrical elements including room plans and column layouts. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

People also like looking at nature and seeing landscapes that recall their species-specific past. This is the subject of Chapter 6, ‘Nature Is Our Context,’ which draws together the book’s earlier chapters. An expression of how we are ‘a part of nature’ as Jacobs noted is that we love looking at life. The eminent Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson labeled the idea that there is an innate bond between humans and all other living things, “the biophilia hypothesis,” in his book Biophilia. Our “urge to affiliate with other forms of life is to some degree innate,” he wrote (Wilson 1984: 85). Our hunter-gatherer ancestors came into their humanness in the grassy plains with scattered trees of the African, and later European and Asian, savanna, Wilson explains. In a certain sense, no matter where we go today, tens of thousands of years later, we never leave this landscape behind. Given the possibility of living anywhere, people still “gravitate statistically” toward a savanna-like view, he noted, and “will pay enormous prices to have (it)” (Wilson, Chapter 2: The Nature of Human Nature, in Biophilic Design, by Kellert et al. 2008: 23).

Biophilic design, the approach to building design rooted in the biophilia hypothesis, strives to ensure new projects recognize and meet the human need to observe and engage with nature. In this book, we seek to tease apart the evolutionary scrim that humans look through to empower designers to not only make their projects biophilic but also more ably anticipate and fit our humanness. The big idea here is profoundly simple: the more you know about human behavior, the better you can anticipate and design for it.

Chapter 7, ‘Buildings, Biology + Biometrics,’ reviews key biometric tools that allow us to see our hidden evolutionary traits at work. Focusing on eye tracking, which follows conscious and unconscious eye movements, enables us to tease apart how the architectural experience begins in milliseconds and why it remains mostly outside of our conscious control. And lastly in Chapter 8, ‘The Twenty-First-Century Paradigm Shift in Biology and Psychology Reframes Architecture + Its History,’ we reveal how greater knowledge of how people function, and how evolution has largely preset our responses to external stimuli, has remarkable significance for architectural history and reframes the narrative of how modern architecture, post-WWI, came to be.

We do not expect readers of Cognitive Architecture to have prior knowledge of workings of the brain or its parts, but in the Appendix we outline different ways of thinking about its organization and its development. Enjoy what follows, we see bridging the arts and sciences as an on-going adventure and hope readers will find it that way, too.

A Note on the Title

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

Exercise for Chapter 1: Watching People

• Visit a suburban or urban center and, with camera, notebook, or mobile device in hand, observe people: where do they gather; how do they walk? Preferably draw or sketch...