Architectural Myopia
Have you ever looked at a bizarre building design and wondered, “What were the architects thinking?” Have you looked at a supposedly “ecological” industrial-looking building, and questioned how it could be truly ecological? Or have you simply felt frustrated by a building that made you uncomfortable, or felt anger when a beautiful old building was razed and replaced with a contemporary eyesore? You might be forgiven for thinking “these architects must be blind!” New research shows that in a real sense, you might actually be right.
Environmental psychologists have long known about this widespread and puzzling phenomenon. Laboratory results show conclusively that architects literally see the world differently from non-architects. Not only do architects notice and look for different aspects of the environment than other people; their brains seem to synthesize an understanding of the world that has notable differences from natural reality. Instead of a contextual world of harmonious geometric relationships and connectedness, architects tend to see a world of objects set apart from their contexts, with distinctive, attention-getting qualities.
So begins an incisive and insightful treatise by Michael Mehaffy and Nikos A. Salingaros, originally posted on Shareable: Cities. This lengthy and somewhat heavy article takes a hard and critical look at the architecture profession to assess how it can be so out of touch with the rest of humanity. The problem, according to the authors, is a fundamental difference in values which began diverging in the early 20th century. The disconnect happens at the most basic, foundational level of motivation and aspiration; modern architects celebrate the machine or, at the very least, the idea of a unique object yet people naturally resonate with a celebration of humanity. It is in this context that we find a scathing critique of modernism:
Since the early modernists saw their work as a revolution, this radical break was an important symbolic element of their agenda. Previously, architects took relatively straightforward, human-adaptive building types, and created elaborate ornamentations of them. These artistic ornamentations were fantastic, exciting, moving; yet they remained within the discipline of a human-adapted building. After the caesura of the Bauhaus, one could mutate the entire structure to create some kind of extravagant dramatic visual statement — perhaps sheer size, or daring engineering feats of cantilevers and the like. Those would show our technological prowess, our economic prosperity, or our status as enlightened moderns.
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In the last half-century, the clear result of “architectural myopia” is buildings whose makers have been so concerned with the drama of their appearance that they fail on the most fundamental human criteria. They isolate people; they do not provide enough light; or provide a poor quality of light; they provide a hostile pedestrian environment at their edges; they cause excessive shade; or create winds in what is known as a “canyon effect”; or they trap pollutants in the “sick building syndrome”; they use resources wastefully; etc. Moreover, the buildings themselves are a wasteful use of resources, because they are not likely to be well-loved, cared for, repaired, modified, and re-used over many years. In short, it is not just that people find them ugly, but they represent a fundamentally unsustainable way of building human environments.
While this article takes a more decisive stand than is warranted, I think there are some important kernels of insight. There are some great points about the perils of treating architecture as purely art, the focus on crafting places that are fundamentally human, and the role of buildings in creating a human urban fabric. The latter seems to dovetail nicely with my previous thoughts about the importance of applying the concept of citizenship to buildings.
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