4 pages essay abt architectural design

An Introduction to Architectural Theory

1968 to the Present

Harry Francis Mallgrave and David Goodman

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

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This edition first published 2011 © 2011 Harry Francis Mallgrave and David Goodman

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mallgrave, Harry Francis, 1947– An Introduction to Architectural Theory : 1968 to the Present / Harry Francis Mallgrave and David Goodman. p. cm Summary: “A sharp and lively text that covers issues in depth but not to the point that they become inaccessible to beginning students, An Introduction to Architectural Theory is the first narrative history of this period, charting the veritable revolution in architectural thinking that has taken place, as well as the implications of this intellectual upheaval. The first comprehensive and critical history of architectural theory over the last forty years surveys the intellectual history of architecture since 1968, including criticisms of high modernism, the rise of postmodern and poststructural theory, critical regionalism and tectonics. Offers a comprehensive overview of the significant changes that architectural thinking has undergone in the past fifteen years. Includes an analysis of where architecture stands and where it will likely move in the coming years.”– Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4051-8063-4 (hardback) – ISBN 978-1-4051-8062-7 (paperback) 1. Architecture–Philosophy. 2. Architecture–Historiography. I. Goodman, David, 1974– II. Title. NA2500.M277 2012 720.1–dc22

2010043539

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Set in 10/12.5pt Galliard by SPi Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Malaysia

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An Introduction to Architectural Theory: 1968 to the Present, First Edition. Harry Francis Mallgrave and David Goodman. © 2011 Harry Francis Mallgrave and David Goodman. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

The turn toward more pragmatic concerns that we witnessed in the 1990s was not only a response to the abstractions of poststructural theory or the collapse of postmodern sensibilities. Nor did it simply reflect a strengthen- ing of economic conditions that would lead to a global building boom. Driving it from below, so to speak, was the profession’s response to a number of social and cultural issues that – with the profession’s previous assertion of autonomy – had largely gone unattended since the activism of the 1960s. It is important, however, to note the very different contexts in which these issues once again came to the fore.

Architecture’s response to such global problems of poverty, for instance, remains an issue for the twenty-first century, much as it was in the 1960s, except that the world of the 2010s is quite different, and even considera- bly more affluent than it was then. With the collapse of Communism in the 1980s and the widespread shift to market-based economies and freer global trade, many countries of Asia, South America, the Arabian Peninsula, and Eastern Europe began to experience significant economic growth; indeed, many have attained standards of living that rival those of the tradi- tional economic powers. And although advanced technologies followed these economic trends, poverty did not entirely disappear. It simply trans- formed itself as an issue, as the once-acute problem of how to feed the world’s growing population morphed into the problem of how to accom- modate people (physically and economically) migrating from rural to urban centers. On the one hand, this trend resulted in the tremendous growth of populations in many global capitals, building booms, and urban over-expansion that often have had severe consequences with respect to pollution and quality of life. On the other hand, governments were also

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forced to take dramatic steps to address the housing problem, such as building entirely new cities and new economies to accommodate the influx of rural migrants. Since the turn of the millenium, the huge increase in the scale of such international events as the Olympics has led to major increases in infrastructural spending in the countries selected, also contributing to large architectural and planning undertakings.

Of course, what we are talking about here is the phenomenon of glo- balization, the ramifications of which are myriad and filled with architec- tural implications. We are simply no longer living in the politically and economically fractured world of the Cold War era, and global economies as well as their cultures are becoming ever more closely interconnected. And if the internet and the ease with which people can interact with one another have tended to bring artistic tastes and fashions into a kind of global concordance, it has also forced changes within the profession. Architecture of the twenty-first century, quite simply, has become a global activity practiced across borders with relatively few cultural or national restrictions. This trend will no doubt continue and many architectural offices have already undertaken the necessary re-orientation. “Bigness,” as Rem Koolhaas suggested a few years ago, has become the new “normal,” and the idea that a building might be assembled from different specialists on two or three continents is no longer an unusual occurrence. The fact that many students today take at least a part of their training internation- ally of course feeds this sense of global cultural unification.

Still another significant social factor has changed the practice of archi- tecture in recent years: the demographics of the profession itself – that is, the number of minorities and women engaged with architectural practice. In the first regard, one can go back to the pioneering journal APPEND-X, founded in 1993 by Darell Fields, Milton Curry, and Kevin Fuller. Whereas this journal dealt largely with issues of African-American identity and architecture, its stated goal was to broaden the range of voices and con- cerns within the discipline, not solely those dealing with race.

Feminist voices also became prominent in the early 1990s, beginning with Beatriz Colomina’s Sexuality and Space (1992) and Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (1996). Also notable was The Sex of Architecture by Diana Agrest, Patricia Conway, and Leslie Kanes Weisman, which also appeared in 1996. Feminism as a movement, of course, had resurfaced at various times over the course of the twentieth century, and perhaps most visibly in the street demonstrations of the 1960s, but the inroads evident around the turn of the millennium were quite dramatic. If, in the architectural schools of the 1960s, females generally constituted less than five percent of students, by 2010 their numbers in

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many countries had reached near or full parity with those of males. Yet the full impact of the transformation will only be realized in the coming years as women pass into the senior ranks of the profession, potentially new or different perspectives on design will become manifest.

The Green Movement

One of the most significant changes that the architectural profession has witnessed since the beginning of the twenty-first century has been the resurgence of environmental concerns and the commensurate demand for the efficient use of clean energy.1 To be sure this issue – the interrelation- ship of global resources and their wise husbanding – never completely disappeared since entering into mainstream consciousness in the 1960s. And, in response to the earlier concerns, many governments, particularly in Europe and the Americas, initiated a series of code and ordinance reforms that, little by little, began to alter the practice of design. If the pace of change has at times been discouragingly slow, significant progress has nevertheless been made in many of the industrialized countries of the world. The quality of air in most urban centers in Europe and North America in 2010 has dramatically improved over the conditions of a few years earlier, even as the problem has become exacerbated in other areas of the world.

A number of international agencies have also taken up the cause, although with varying degrees of success. In 1987 the United Nations launched its World Commission on Environment and Development and requested a report from its “Brundtland Commission.” The report, also issued as the book Our Common Future (1987), was a wide-ranging call for global coordination to protect the natural environment, and it defined sustainable development as an activity that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” The report also argued that the next few decades will be decisive for the course of humanity: “The time has come to break out of past pat- terns. Attempts to maintain social and ecological stability through old approaches to development and environmental protection will increase instability. Security must be sought through change.”2

The Brundtland Commission resulted in a number of international con- ferences to consider solutions, mostly funded by the United Nations. The immediate successor was the Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 – the first “Earth Summit” – which pro- duced the somewhat far-reaching document known as Agenda 21. Later

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summits, such as the Kyoto Summit of 1997, the Johannesburg Summit of 2002, and the Bali Conference of 2007, continued this process, although at best with modest success. The reasons are many. The Kyoto Accords, for example, committed industrialized countries to the reduction of four green- house gases to a level 5.2 percent below the 1990 level – a goal that few countries had attained by 2010 or were likely to attain in the near future. Moreover, it excluded many large, developing countries, where the prob- lems of air pollution are often most acute. Also, political realities have delayed or prevented its ratification in several other countries, such as in the United States. If these problems were not bad enough, some of the scien- tific premises for these studies have been called in to question – leading to charges of exaggerated claims about climate change and its effects.

Far more effective from an ecological perspective has been an expanding network of national and local building codes that are directed to green architecture and planning. In 2003 the European Union passed its Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD), which led to the Green- Building Programme. These efforts were matched or even preceded by initiatives in many other countries, such as BREEAM in the United Kingdom, Australia’s Green Star, Japan’s CASBEE, and LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) in the United States. As with the political initiatives, there are many critics of these efforts from both sides of the issue. One objection is their restriction to narrowly defined criteria for individual buildings, such as energy consumption or indoor air quality, while ignoring larger systemic, planning, or regional issues. Nevertheless, such codes and guidelines have been quite effective in raising the question of a building’s environmental impact among architects, clients, and the public at large. Many larger architectural offices have also in the last few years written their own proprietary systems for evaluating a building’s greenness. Notable in this regard is ARUP’s four-quadrant Sustainable Project Appraisal Routine matrix (SPeAR), which is used internally to evaluate the environmental performance of projects, ranging in scale from the individual building to the planning of entire cities.

McDonough and Yeang

As these international concerns for the environment were reemerging in the 1990s, many individual architects, landscape architects, and planners also stepped to the forefront. In 1995, for instance, Victor Papanek, who had long been interested in ecological design, poverty, and their connec- tion with social change, updated his earlier principles with The Green

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Imperative, which reformulated the designer’s task (and fiercely attacked trends in theory over the previous 20 years) in rather stark terms:

This dismaying visual pollution signals the imminent emergence of a new aesthetic, and most designers and architects will readily agree that, after Modernism, Memphis, Post-Modernism, Deconstructivism, Neo-Classicism, Object-Semiotics, and Post-Deconstructivism, a new direction – transcend- ing fad, trend or fashionable styling – is long overdue. New directions in design and architecture don’t occur accidentally, but always arise out of real changes in society, cultures and concepts.3

In the year in which this book appeared, work was advancing on Norman Foster’s 53-story Commerzbank in Frankfurt (1991–1997). With its cen- tral atrium, natural light and ventilation, and 10 oxygenating sky gardens, Foster provided a high-tech demonstration that the notion of sustainabil- ity, even at a corporate scale, could also encompass energy efficiency or eco-friendliness. Also in this decade, we find a veritable revolution in the field of landscape design, as this profession began to redirect its focus from aesthetic to ecological concerns. In the mid-1990s, for example, Mario Schjetnan and his interdisciplinary Grupo de Diseño Urbano completed the much heralded Xochimilco Ecological Park in Mexico City. Working with modest materials and a low budget, he demonstrated in very vivid terms what landscape architecture and urban planning – what he termed “metropolitan ecology” – could contribute to the restoration of urban ecological balance.

Certainly one of the more articulate champions of ecological issues in recent years has been William McDonough. Not only has he been a con- sistent advocate of “Cradle to Cradle” design, but he has also long argued that the idea of sustainability should encompass a more comprehensive approach than simply limiting itself to environmental damage. This argu- ment reflects his belief that human activity can be productively and seam- lessly integrated into natural processes – that is, the ideal relationship between the natural and the artificial would be, like nature itself, produc- tive and mutually reinforcing, not merely sustainable.

In 1992 McDonough wrote the “Hannover Principles,” a document that in the short run was intended to provide a set of operating guidelines for the sustainable development of Expo 2000 in Hannover. These princi- ples referred to the “rights of humanity and nature to co-exist,” to the notion of “interdependence” of the natural and manufactured worlds, and to the relationship of material production and spiritual well-being. This succinct list of seven axioms was accompanied by a detailed explanation of

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best practices dealing with earth, air, water, energy, and, perhaps most subjectively, the human spirit. In describing this last concern, McDonough equates the spiritual aspect of sustainability—“the most effable of elements” – with a deep understanding of our place on earth. “Concern for sustainability is more than a matter of compliance with industrial regu- lation or environmental impact analysis,” he wrote, “it embraces a com- mitment to conceive of the work of design as part of a wider context in time and place.”4

McDonough extended this line of reasoning in his paper “Declaration of Interdependence,” which he delivered at a symposium at MIT in 1996. Here he argued that sustainability had up to this point been little more than “a code word for maintenance,” and that what was needed was a true “restorative agenda” for architecture and urbanism, one in which the built environment would actually purify soil and water and act as a net producer of energy, thereby returning something to the ecosystem.5 This agenda was most directly illustrated in the principle of “waste equals food,” a state- ment that placed architecture and urbanism within a metabolic chain of energy consumption and re-absorption. McDonough would eventually label his approach of connecting production, consumption, and re-use a “cradle to cradle” strategy, which became the title of his best-selling book of 2002, coauthored with the chemist Michael Braungart. Here the authors argue not for an abandonment of industrial processes, but rather for a creative application of technology, an “industrial re-evolution” that would create a functional link between the built and natural environments:

Natural systems take from their environment, but they also give something back. The cherry tree drops its blossoms and leaves while it cycles water and makes oxygen; the ant community redistributes the nutrients throughout the soil. We can follow their cue to create a more inspiring engagement – a partnership – with nature.6

The fundamental idea behind such a statement is that manufactured envi- ronments can be designed to emulate the logics of the natural ecosystem (“waste equals food”), and therefore to interact productively with it. McDonough thus defines the role of the ecologically driven architect to be a creative one; the architect is the designer of both an individual prod- uct and its productive relationship to its physical context.

McDonough also implemented these principles in his many designs for industrial objects and buildings, as well as master plans. His “GreenHouse” office and manufacturing facility in Holland, Michigan (1995), for instance, incorporated both biophilic and “phylogenetic” approaches to

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design. He restored the surrounding prairie and wetlands and amply endowed the interiors with an abundance of natural light and the sensory richness of garden and water features. He also created devices for orienta- tion and social interaction within the complex, and designed spaces that were intended to perform a regenerative function for its occupants, much as the building itself was intended to do with respect to its immediate physical context. Another step to the notion of a “restorative” architecture was taken with the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies at Oberlin College (2001), which draws much of its energy from the sun, uses geothermal systems for heating and cooling, and filters wastewater through a greenhouse-enclosed “living machine” of wetlands for re-use in toilets and landscape. More recently the building has become a net energy exporter to other buildings on campus.

Beyond these functional efficiencies, however, McDonough has argued that one of the more important benefits of these efforts in conservation and regeneration is in fact their educational value. A building, in this view,

Figure 12.1 William McDonough + Partners, Herman Miller “GreenHouse” Office and Manufacturing Facility, Holland, Michigan (1995). Image courtesy of Herman Miller, Inc.

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might perform the dual functions of saving and regenerating resources on its limited site while it provides an instructive example of how this can be done. Leon van Schaik, architect and professor of architecture at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, has expressed a similar view in com- menting on the expressive value of buildings like McDonough’s, arguing that their overt display of sensitive environmental strategies and technolo- gies is useful “when a government or a corporation wishes to let people know that something indeed is being done.”7 For van Schaik, then, the aesthetic or expressive dimension of a sustainable architecture might either emerge organically from the very forms and strategies that allow architec- ture to be energy efficient, or a sustainable building might instead be designed in part to further the notion of sustainability. In the latter sense, van Schaik notes, the strategies employed in some of the more expressive sustainable works resemble Konstantin Melnikov’s constructivist “emo- tion-activating” architecture of the 1920s, where a style of exaggerated industrial forms was promoted to symbolize the Soviet Union’s aspirations of industrialization, notwithstanding the country’s weak industrial base. In doing so, this rhetorical approach would ostensibly spur the creation of progressively more developed ideas of sustainable architecture, until it became the rule rather than the exception.

Like McDonough, the Malaysian architect Ken Yeang has been working with ideas of sustainability since the 1970s. Once a student of Ian McHarg at the University of Pennsylvania, he completed his doctorate at Cambridge University with a dissertation on ecological design and planning.8 In both his practice and his writings, Yeang has largely focused his attention on sustainability in tall buildings, an area that he believes is necessary to explore because the skyscraper, though ubiquitous and necessary for the growth of our cities, is inherently “un-ecological” because of the added energy and material needed to ensure its proper functioning. In his book Eco Skyscrapers (1994), Yeang countered the hostility of many environ- mentalists toward tall buildings with the argument that the architect’s goal should be to “mitigate” the negative environmental effects of the skyscraper and create “humane and pleasurable” interiors for the user.9

Yeang is therefore is somewhat more pragmatic than McDonough, although he too argues for a symbiotic relationship between the natural and built environment, a relationship he terms “benign and seamless bio- integration.”10 For Yeang, the best way to achieve this relationship is not necessarily through the application of novel technology, but instead through passive or “bioclimatic” means, a strategy he applied to the design of the IBM tower in Kuala Lumpur (1992), which lies just north of the equator. This building – with its permeable exterior facade, landscaped

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“skycourts” spiraling along the tower’s length, solar shading, and naturally ventilated elevator lobbies – presents an object lesson in an environmen- tally sensitive architecture that returns to passive environmental strategies (an attention to solar orientation, deep overhangs, etc.). This salute to the indigenous architecture of Malaysia, however, is also combined with a high-tech vocabulary. Indeed, the search for a sustainable architecture points directly to the re-establishment of regional typologies based on responses to the local climate. In this sense, this is an evolution of the idea of critical regionalism that aims for an organic synthesis of a building’s form and performance within its particular biosystem. Yeang has long argued, in fact, that this approach is analogous to the development of sur- gical prosthetics; like the prosthetic, the building must be integrated “both mechanically and organically” within its host system, lest it results in the “dislocation” or rejection of the prosthetic by the host.11

Yeang’s work has both its supporters and its critics. His principal design manual, Ecodesign (2006), remains one of the most comprehensive guides to sustainable design and is an intelligent (even invaluable) translation of the idea of a pattern language to green design in that it is both informative and helpful without being overly prescriptive. At this same time, his more recent study, EcoMasterplanning (2009), is less convincing in the social vitality of urban spaces that his designs suggest. This point reflects a larger consensus that is now emerging that “green architecture,” as defined in recent years, has given too little attention to the human dynamics of a truly sustainable built environment. In simpler terms, ecology needs to be recast in broader human terms.

Green Urbanism

Urban planners, like their counterparts in architecture and landscape architecture, have seen their profession undergo a revolution since the 1980s. European cities, in particular, have been leading the way – both in preserving their historical centers and in initiating a number of model “ecological” projects in the effort to revitalize them as well. Cities like Helsinki and Copenhagen, for instance, have not only preserved the for- ested areas that historically have penetrated deep into the downtown areas, but in many instances they have expanded them and planned future growth with a view to their preservation and accessibility. In the case of Copenhagen, the city’s “five finger” master plan, first proposed in the 1970s, has limited all suburban development to the fingers emanating from the town center, organized along mass-transit arteries. In between the fingers the lie of the

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land has been preserved not only as rural landscapes but also as wooded areas in close proximity to the urban residents who may avail themselves of them at leisure. Similarly, Helsinki, in two master plans issued in 1978 and 2002, has not simply protected the limits of its Central Park but extended it to a much larger geographic area of connected parks and waterways that now encompasses the whole of Töölö Bay.12 This is significant because, since the 1980s, planning theorists and psychologists have been gathering evidence about the stress-reducing and restorative effects of natural envi- ronments in close proximity to urban residents. In this regard the notion of “green space” of which many planners speak has in the process taken on a grander and more literal interpretation.

Europe’s many demonstration housing projects have also often struck a sustainable theme. One of the more prominent is the new community of Kronsberg outside Hannover, Germany. Set on 1200 hectares and expected to house 15 000 residents in non-detached units, it was an ecological development planned for Expo 2000, and it combines such features as a strict land management plan with an ecological farm, green schools, and a street system that minimizes the use of the automobile. The town is largely powered by wind turbines, an extensive system of PV panels, and a number of heat recovery methods. The town plan also incorporates the surrounding rural countryside and wooded areas, and gray water is recy- cled through a series of reclamation features and scenic ponds. Housing units, which in both scale and style recall the Siedlungen of the 1920s, are built to the strictest standards of natural light, passive design, and energy efficiency.

Alongside Germany, both Holland and the United Kingdom have been in the forefront of large-scale sustainable design and experimentation. One of the many new demonstration communities in Holland is the new sub- urb of Amersfoort, which is powered by an integrated PV system generat- ing a full megawatt of power. All community amenities are within walking distance, and ponds are once again a prominent feature. England has also built a number of ecological communities, such as Greenwich Millennium Village and the Beddington Zero Energy Development, both in London. Among the many features of the latter upscale community, designed by Bill Dunster Architects, are the use of colorful rooftop wind cowls to ven- tilate the units, the discouragement of non-electric automobiles, and the fact that most construction materials for this zero-carbon development were obtained locally.

On a regional level, the naturally scenic city of Vancouver, British Columbia, has been exemplary in its sustainable policies. Land ordinances have been put into place that preserves farmland, integrate large sections

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of green areas into the metropolitan areas, and channel all building development into compact neighborhoods (62 percent of the city’s popu- lation), with housing oriented toward the street to enhance urban vitality. Thus, a city of two million people has been structured in part into a city of smaller towns connected to each other through an elevated rail system. Even design elements such as impervious surfaces for roads and parking lots have been carefully limited. Walking, cycling, and mass-transit usage flourish.

Little by little, such policies are having a significant global effect. China, which initially powered much of the expansion of its new and existing urban centers with coal-fired plants, considered its first eco-city in the late 1990s – Dongtan, on the island of Chongming. Designed by Arup, the projected city of 500 000 people featured the very best of intentions: pro- tection of local agricultural areas, wildlife habitats and biodiversity, zero carbon emission, water recycling, and zero waste. Arup even designed an electric automobile for this town at the mouth of Yangtze River. Although it is now unlikely that the city will be built in its original form, the public- ity it has received has resounded through the country’s bureaucracies and will no doubt have a major influence on future planning. Similarly, the Olympic Games of 2008 held in Beijing, a capital that remains plagued with significant air-quality problems, brought home to the public and to governmental officials in the most poignant terms the unacceptable and unhealthy level of air pollution.

The gold standard of sustainable urban ventures is the new city of Masdar, now being constructed on the outskirts of downtown Abu Dhabi. The self-contained walled city, designed by Foster + Partners, has the ambitious goal of being the first zero-carbon and zero-waste city, but what is unusual is the way planners have gone about achieving this. It is a high-density, mixed-zone city for 50 000 people, anchored with a univer- sity and energy development research park, yet at the same time it is remarkably low-tech in many of its features. It is largely powered by a solar farm, receives its desalinated water from the Persian Gulf, and is sup- ported by local agriculture. Yet the scale of construction (no buildings more than six stories), together with the cultural sensitivity that was con- sidered in the fashioning of neighborhoods, make it seem like little more than an updated version of a historic Arab town. Automobiles are removed entirely from a city and replaced with tram lines and a personal rapid- transit system; pedestrian streets are narrow and aligned to remain in shadow during the warmest parts of the day, and larger urban squares are in part shielded from the desert sun by louvered screens. Water and its evaporative cooling effect is a prominent feature. Air-movement patterns

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have be carefully considered with two green shoots breaching the north- west wall to allow breezes into the town from the nearby gulf: individual building scoops and interior courtyards channel it through the units with simple convection currents. The urban density is akin to Venice, which in itself remains a viable model for an automobile-free town. In short, Masdar is masterful mediation of the new with the old and will no doubt be exten- sively studied.

Biophilic Design

One critique increasingly being voiced against the environmental move- ment is that its idea of what constitutes sustainable design has been too narrowly formed. Certainly the architect has the responsibility to use resources wisely and not denigrate the biology of the planet on which future generations will depend, but one issue often absent from the discus-

Figure 12.2 Foster + Partners, residential street from the proposed city of Masdar. Image courtesy of Foster + Partners/Masdar.

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sion of sound ecological design is how people respond to the built envi- ronment. More specifically, this is the issue of whether built environments contribute to or detract from the health and well-being of their human inhabitants. Much of this reluctance derives from the patterns of past the- ory. For as we have seen, with the fall of the late-modernist worldview in the late 1960s also collapsed the belief that the architect could in any meaningful way improve the human situation. Architects were not entirely to blame in this regard. If coursework in sociology, anthropology, and psychology was very much a part of the architect’s education in the 1960s, many of the premises upon which the social sciences were based lacked any genuinely scientific grounding. The sociological assumptions leading to the colossal failure of urban renewal programs across the globe during this decade reveal in a cogent way the misery that can ensue when planning and architectural decisions are based on false or incomplete premises.

But the scientific backdrop against which we function in the twenty- first century, as many architects are beginning to realize, is vastly differ- ent. The architect now has at his or her command a bounty of new insights into the psychological and physiological nature of the human organism – from the biological and microbiological understanding of our genetic codes to the enormous strides that have been made since the 1980s in the cognitive sciences. Entirely new fields, such as evolutionary psychology and neuroscience are at the moment creating compelling evidence-based models of how we perceive and experience the world, and the implica- tions for architects are manifold. The design interests of such earlier indi- viduals as Lázló Moholy-Nagy, Richard Neutra, and Christopher Alexander are now coming full circle and being supported with a new biological platform.

One of the new areas to have gained traction since the turn of the mil- lennium has been biophilic design, also related to evidence-based design. It is a field that has grown out of the insights of evolutionary psychologists and biologists – the realization that the genetic structure by which we respond to the world is older, in fact millions of years older, than the con- structed environments that we have fashioned within the past 10 000 years.13 In short, human behavior is not just a phenomenon of will or cul- tural training but also of genetic proclivities and behaviors that have long been in place with our hominid ancestors. We are born not with a “blank slate,” a premise upon which many of the social sciences of the 1960s were based, but with distinct preferences for how we would like the world to be structured.

Parallel with this realization has been the rise of a number of habitat- selection theories suggesting that we have a particular fondness for

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environmental conditions that in an evolutionary sense have favored our biological survival.14 If, as we now know, we have evolved over the course of millions of years from a particular hominid line that thrived on the savannahs of eastern and southern Africa, might we not have a genetic preference for such landscapes? And what were the characteristics of these landscapes? For one thing they offered “prospect” (shielded visibility favor- able to hunters) and “refuge” (providing security after the chase). African savannahs are also characterized by spatial openness, visible ground tex- tures, stands of mature trees, and water – much as we might find in a pic- turesque garden, an urban park, or indeed in many suburban backyards.

Beginning in the 1980s these hypotheses began to undergo empirical testing, and the results have since become rather conclusive. Even brief exposures to natural landscapes have a variety of notable health benefits, among them a reduction of stress, the lowering of blood pressure, improve- ment in our ability to focus, and, indeed, giving us a brighter outlook on life.15 In 1984 the sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson defined this compo- nent of our biological make-up as “biophilia.”16 And in one classic study of the mid-1980s, the psychologist Roger S. Ulrich underscored its archi- tectural implications. In studying the records of 46 patients who had undergone gall-bladder surgery, he found that those patients recovering in a room with a view of a few trees had fewer complaints, took less medica- tion, and were discharged one-day earlier than patients with a similar con- dition yet whose room had a view of an adjacent brick wall.17 Since this realization, the field of hospital design has become ever more specialized in its use of evidence-based design.

On an urban scale, biophilia suggests that the central parks of Helsinki or New York do more than simply serve as the city’s “lungs”; they provide an accessible outlet for people to find relaxation and relieve themselves of the pressures of urban life. It also suggests, as Timothy Beatley has noted, that if sustainability concerns suggest higher urban densities, these densi- ties should be coupled with a commensurate increase in accessible green or wooded landscapes.18 And if we consider that may cities around the world retain their “rustbelt” remnants of an earlier industrial age, biophilia suggests both the opportunity and a strategy to rebuild and reforest them in more humane ways.

In the last few years the idea of biophilic design has also come to archi- tecture, with a greater emphasis on such features as water, fresh air, sun- light, plants, views of nature – more literally a green architecture. The design of health facilities, schools, and workplaces are obvious areas where such strategies can be applied, but these principles, as architecture through- out its history repeatedly demonstrates, are not really new and can be

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applied to all areas of design. What is also becoming evident is the expansion of the idea of biophilic design to consider such things as architectural scale, proportions, materials, ornamentation, or more generally the human response to the built environment.19 But here biophilic design crosses over with still another new field that is also in the early stages of formation.

Neuroaesthetics

If in recent years we have made enormous strides in the molecular under- standing and sequencing of the human genome, these advances have been matched in many ways by our neurological understanding of the human brain. With the new scanning technologies – such as fMRIs, PETs, EEGs, MEGs – we now have (also becoming ever more refined) real-time images of the working brain, and our knowledge of how the brain functions has probably grown more since the 1980s than over the entire course of human history. One of the things that has become apparent, in addition to our appreciation of the tremendous neural complexity that has evolved, are the processes by which the brain actively engages or perceives the world. We are not only beginning to understand such formerly elusive phenomena as memory-formation and consciousness, but also the means by which people think creatively and evaluate the world artistically.20

The latter field has been termed “neuroaesthetics,” which can be defined as the neurological study of “the neural processes involved in human art behavior.”21 It is made enormously complicated by the fact that there are a host of variables affecting aesthetic judgments, such as the visual training we receive, our gender, the meaning of objects, emotional variables, and of course such things as culture and changing fashions. Thus, although still a young area of research, it is one that has already sprouted several distinct branches. Some researchers are attempting to define the neuro- logical stages of the aesthetic experience – that is, how we perceive, impli- cate, and integrate memories, classify, cognitively master, and evaluate artistic works and buildings.22 Others are attempting to define the loca- tions or pathways in the brain where this activity takes place as we make judgments of beauty.23 Still another school, working from an ethological perspective, sees artistic production not specifically as an aesthetic activity but as an instinct grounded in genetic structures not necessarily focused on beauty; one that arises in our emotional responses and is therefore con- nected to such communal activities as bonding and ritualization.24

The question of where all of this activity will lead is of course a difficult one to answer at the moment. Some neurobiolgists, such as Semir Zeki,

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have argued that “there can be no satisfactory theory of aesthetics that is not neurobiologically based,” and by this he means that if the brain has the Darwinian task of acquiring knowledge about the world to insure our survival, art must support this task.25 And if the role of the brain has evolved to seek out those permanent and characteristic properties of objects and surfaces, art must be an extension of these neural processes – that is, art exploits, in his words, “the characteristics of the parallel- processing perceptual system of the brain.”26 From such a perspective, art thrives on such things as thematic complexity and ambiguity, the latter defined as the certainty of several possible interpretations, all of which are equally appealing.

Wherever these directions will lead, one thing is now becoming clear through these models. Architecture – far from being a highly conceptual- ized exercise as theory has often made it out to be – is also, and perhaps preeminently, an emotive and multisensorially based experience, the response of an embodied organism to a world that provides it with neces- sary stimulation. As does music, a building has the capacity to elicit imme- diate emotive responses, and the better the architect can understand this process the more successful (life-sustaining) a design will be. Whether neuroscientists can also shed light on such traditional architectural issues as visual complexity, order, scale, rhythm, ornamentation, or even the seemingly timeless issue of whether there are neurologically preferred architectural proportions remains uncertain at this time.27 Nevertheless, it is becoming very apparent that as we advance our knowledge in these areas, the basis for design 10 or 20 years into the future will very likely look quite different to how it does today. We are, arguably, entering an entirely new phase of architectural theory.

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