Architectural design, visual attention, and human cognition: exploring responses to federal building styles

ABSTRACT

This article examines the ongoing architectural debate surrounding styles for American government buildings. It tests the results of the 2020 National Civic Art Society survey that found 72% of Americans prefer traditional federal buildings over modern designs. To gain a neuro-biological perspective on these results, eye-tracking emulation software is used to evaluate the relationship between architectural design, visual attention, and human preferences. The hypothesis that traditional buildings would capture and retain pre-attentive visual processing more than modern styles was confirmed in several experiments. The research offers valuable insights for architects, urban planners, and policymakers considering design decisions about federal buildings.

KEYWORDS:

• Federal buildings
• visual attention
• architectural styles
• biophilic design
• neuroaesthetics

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the National Civic Art Society for granting rights to reuse the images of federal buildings from the Harris Poll survey. We thank the Human Architecture and Planning Institute for providing us with access to their eye-tracking data for further analysis. We are also grateful to Andy Won, Nikos Salingaros, Ann Sussman, Justin Hollander, Alexandros Lavdas, and Nir Buras for critical discussions about various parts of this paper. Lastly, we thank the editors and peer reviewers for their feedback and suggestions to improve the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author contributions

Conceptualization, H.H and B.R.R.; data curation, B.R.R.; formal analysis, B.R.R.; investigation, H.H and B.R.R.; methodology, B.R.R.; validation, B.R.R.; visualization, H.H. and B.R.R.; writing – original draft preparation, H.H. and B.R.R.; writing – review and editing, H.H. and B.R.R. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/02697459.2024.2342755