Guest editorial for special issue, ASR

The human experience of being in and around buildings has been an unfortunate footnote in the history of architecture. The Architectural Science Review has been a leader among scholarly outlets in publishing important research around how people perceive their surroundings and the implications for architecture and urbanism. This Special Issue seeks to invite the built environment disciplines into a larger conversation around how science can inform design.

While the environmental psychology literature has for decades studied questions of human cognition and perception in the design of buildings and places, there has been an explosion of research in cognition and neuroscience in recent years. This new knowledge has drastically changed scientists’ understanding of how people experience places around them, yet few of these findings have been employed or expanded upon by architectural scholars in their own research. This Special Issue features papers that do just that, drawing on the latest cognitive and neuroscience knowledge and methods to understand and improve the practices of architecture and planning.

Through a combination of translation of emerging scientific ideas for an architecture audience and applying some of those ideas to both frame new empirical inquiries and to devise novel methodological innovations stemming from advances in biometrics and computing technologies, these papers open up new lines of inquiry and pose a set of profound research questions that we must begin to answer as scholars: how do buildings impact people's mental health? Are there certain design characteristics that are better or worse for well-being? How universal are these impacts and what role does culture play? What tools and methods are best at quantifying the experience of being in or around a building?

In the six papers in this Special Edition, researchers grapple with these questions and ask many of their own.

Azzazy et al. offer a sweeping review of the effects that the built environment has on our ‘state of mind’. They draw on extensive scientific literature that posits, quite convincingly, that humans evolved to be happiest in natural environments. Since we almost exclusively live in built environments today, Azzazy et al. ask which elements of the natural environment can be best reproduced in our built architecture, seeking evidence from a range of biometric investigations. They argue that there is great promise for architects to be able to replicate some of the natural environment qualities that contribute to a healthy ‘state of mind’ through restorative built environment strategies, in particular through the use of curvilinear shapes.

Pektaş likewise draws heavily on previously published research to explore a related challenge: the semantic gap between architecture and the brain science disciplines, notably neuroscience. Through a scientometric analysis of author-provided keywords, she examines more than 2,000 published articles to look for keyword co-occurrence, seeking to understand how to bridge the gap between the two fields. Pektaş finds that two particular constructs, embodied spatial cognition and affordances of architectural design, provide a linguistic link between the fields. This conclusion is particularly important because it helps to open opportunities for research collaboration across disciplines, answering some of the thorny questions posed above.

Rezvanipour, et al. develop an elaborate multisensory perceptual social and physical model based on a systematic review of the literature, arguing that visual, auditory, haptic, and olfactory stimuli are critical to understand how a person experiences an urban street. They go on to test their model through a preferences survey, concluding that sociability, mobility, convenience, contentment, urbanization, pollution, safety, and nature are the most important components of the pedestrian experience.

The remainder of the articles in this Special Issue embrace laboratory and field-based research approaches, testing and exploring questions around perception, human experience, and proportion. Proietti tests twentieth century Dutch architect's Architect Hans van der Laan's plastic number system, an approach which advanced the ‘perceptive and cognitive value of proportion’, thereby quantifying architectural experience. Proietti compares Van der Laan's work with basic scientific concepts of psychophysics and Gestalt theory, describing a research project she conducted herself to test these ideas.

The contribution of Hollander et al. dovetails nicely with the literature review by Azzay et al. which discusses eye-tracking as an attractive tool to understand unconscious responses to architecture. The Hollander team write about 3M's relatively new product, Visual Attention Software (VAS), which uses a computer algorithm to predict where a person's eye might go on an image during the first 3–5 seconds, that pre-attentive period before conscious awareness kicks in. In their test of this eye-tracking emulation software, comparing New Urbanist, traditional, and modern architectural facades, they conclude that VAS is a promising tool to evaluate urban design characteristics.

Erkan and Shemesh's papers similarly build upon the literature review of Azzay et al. through the use of a range of biometrics (including Electroencephalogram, galvanic skin response, heart rate variability and eye tracking) to explore narrower questions around architectural experience: Shemesh assesses responses to geometrical criteria including scale, proportion, protrusion and curvature, while Erkan asks how do people respond to the increasingly popular glass floors now appearing in buildings globally? Both papers employed virtual reality laboratory, with Shemesh finding compelling evidence in the VR environment linking the properties of space with human emotions. Erkan wanted to understand how vertigo might be measured and anticipated in a glass floor design. Erkan found that people were hardly impacted at all when glass floors were installed 30 meters above the floor below, but once the glass floors were higher they were able to detect measurable levels of stress and anxiety in their research subjects.

Between virtual reality, eye-tracking emulation software, bibliometrics, and perceptual studies of proportion, researchers in this Special Issue collect new data and attempt to quantify the architectural experience. Debates of the past around style and design theory suddenly feel vacuous given the kinds of findings presented herein. We must always return to the core issue of our work as architects and planners who shape the built environment: what is the purpose of architecture?

At perhaps the zenith of the popularity of modern architecture globally, two titans clashed in a public forum at the Harvard Design School in 1982. Christopher Alexander, renowned traditional architect, and author of the seminal A Pattern Language (1977) debated the widely celebrated modernist designer Peter Eisenman. The event was titled ‘Contrasting Concepts of Harmony in Architecture’ and went to the heart of the discipline: what was the purpose of architecture? Alexander offered his answer: the purpose is to encourage and support life-giving activity, dreams, and playfulness. Eisenman's response was a defense of modernity: ‘architecture as a conceptual, cultural, and intellectual enterprise’ (Architectural Review 2013). He went on to recount the story of how his young children were terrified of nuclear war and how critically important it was for new buildings to speak to that angst and stress. Alexander's response was that to build such structures was simply cruel to children and adults, alike. Alexander insisted that architects have a responsibility to shape human settlements in a way that puts people at ease, helps them to relax, brings them joy.

The contributions in this Special Issue reflect full support for Alexander's position and reflect a broader societal rejection of modernism that has brought back ornamentation, bilateral symmetry, hierarchy, and the use of local building materials (see Hollander and Sussman 2021). Architectural and urban design that focuses on the human, pedestrian experience is a distinct contrast to the modernist focus on the experience of an automobile driver, in shaping the scale, form, and experience of human settlements. The science of architecture can contribute to this debate through articles like those presented in this Special Issue. There are certain designs, certain elements, certain characteristics of buildings and cities that match our hard wiring, put us at ease, and make us happier and healthier. The research presented here is compelling in demonstrating this point and offers key frameworks for future scholars to seek knowledge and insights to inform the architecture and urbanism disciplines.