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ArchDaily News How Architecture Affects Your Brain: The Link Between Neuroscience

How Architecture Affects Your

Brain: The Link Between
Neuroscience and the Built
Environment
09:30 - 25 July, 2017 | by Martin Pedersen

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This article was originally published by Common Edge as

"Sarah Williams Goldhagen on How the Brain Works and
What It Means for Architecture."

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Sarah Williams Goldhagen has taken a big swing. Her new MORE INTERVIEWS
Membran & Structures -
book, Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Type EV | MDT-tex
Brasil Arquitetura Reveals
Shapes Our Lives, is nothing less than a meticulously
How Building Recovery is
constructed argument for completely rethinking our way
About Meeting the Real
of looking at architecture. A longtime critic for The New
Demands of Society
Republic and a former lecturer at the Harvard Graduate
School of Design, Goldhagen has taken a deep dive into
Tatiana Bilbao:
the rapidly advancing field of cognitive science, in an “Architecture Should
attempt to link it to a new human-centered approach to Benefit Every Single
the built world. The book is both an examination of the Human Being on This
science behind cognition (and its relevance to Planet”
architecture), and a polemic against the stultifying status
Benjamín Romano: "I
quo. Recently I talked to the author, who was busy
Focus on Improving the
preparing for a year-long trip around the world, about the
Building"
book, the science, and the state of architectural
education.
More Interviews »

Martin C Pedersen: Your book argues that the built

MOST VISITED
environment has a profound impact on people’s lives. I
agree. And, yet, given the state of architecture today, you Tess + JJ’s House / po-co
wouldn’t know it. Not just with what’s on the ground, Architecture
which you write about very eloquently, but also the
greater perception. We’re surrounded with architecture,
and yet it’s stunning the extent to which we’re oblivious.
What’s that disconnect about? When Is the Best Time to
Look for an Architecture
Job?
Sarah Williams Goldhagen: I’ve thought a lot about this.
When I started writing criticism for a general audience,
one of my earliest articles was on why most of the built
Natural Light and
environment, particularly in the US, was so bad.
Ventilation: 17
Economics is only part of it. More important is that people
Remarkable Interior
don’t value the built environment and fail to appreciate Courtyards
how it’s affecting them. People can gravitate to spaces, for
example, that may not be psychologically good for them.
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Research shows that when we habituate to something, MOST VISITED PRODUCTS

whether it’s an environment or a pattern of buying, we
Minimal Frame Window -
tend to prefer that pattern, even if we’d be better off with
PH 38 - Flexibility |
something else. This gets at one of the book’s main
PanoramAH!
arguments, which is that most of our experiences in the
built environment are nonconscious. I use that word quite
specifically. It’s not unconscious, because that suggests
Facade Panel Natura |
something that we’d be unable to access. Nonconscious EQUITONE
refers to cognitions that we could access consciously, but
mostly don’t.

Most of our cognitions fall below the radar of conscious Concrete Facade - öko
cognition. If we stopped to focus on them, we could skin | Rieder Smart
become more aware of them. A good deal of Elements
cognition—some experts put it as high as 90 percent—is
nonconscious. So, if you’re not aware that something is
affecting you, then society’s failure to accord built
environmental design the immense value that it deserves
makes some sort of perverse sense. As it is now, there’s About Contact Submit Advertise
this mass of buildings of which we’re only dimly aware,
and then there’s the occasional piece of architecture,
which is essentially a luxury good purchased by elite
clients. But what we now know about cognition and
human experience demonstrates that this cannot stand as
a paradigm. There’s no such thing as a “neutral”
environment: your built environment is either helping
you, or it’s hurting you.

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MCP: You cite a lot of studies in the book. But the science
and research around the built environment that I’ve come
across is pretty thin. Where did you find, what I’m
guessing, is better science?

SWG: It’s an excellent question. Most of the research that

directly pertains to architecture and landscape happens
in environmental psychology. But that’s not a field that
so-called hard scientists take very seriously. It’s difficult to
conduct verifiable, reproducible studies on the built
environment because you can’t sufficiently control for all
the factors. There is good work out there, but this is the
challenge that researchers of the built environment face.
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When I started working on Welcome to Your World I knew

that from new imaging technologies we were learning a
lot more about how the brain works than we’d known
even one generation before. Our understanding of how
memory works has radically changed in last 20 years; our
understanding of spatial navigation has been
revolutionized. I could go through the list. Brain mapping
is reliable, albeit rapidly developing, science. Most of the
studies that I clawed through didn’t have much to do with
the built environment, per se. They focused on human
cognition and perception. In many cases, I was the one
making the links: these scientists weren’t specifically
researching the built environment. I was the one who was
sitting there, knocking my head against these studies,
thinking: OK, what does that mean for how we
understand the built environment?

MCP: Where’s the specific link between cognition and the

built environment?

SGW: The easiest example relates to long term memory.

There was a famous experiment published in 2009 called
the London Taxi Drivers study. To be a cabbie in London,
you basically have to memorize the layout and street
names of the entire city. Acquiring what’s known as “The
Knowledge” takes between two and four years. So the
researchers did FMRI scans of the cabbies in training
before they started building these detailed cognitive maps
of the city, then scanned their brains again, once the
cabbies had passed the test. They discovered that an area
of the brain called the hippocampus had grown
enormously. That was a significant finding, in and of
itself, because it meant that even in adulthood, the brain
changes. We used to think that people’s brains develop
and change until they reach maturity, around age 21;
then, you more or less had what you had. This and
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subsequent studies provide concrete evidence that our

brains change as we learn, and that one of the properties
of the human brain is neural plasticity. And that brain is
changing in part in response to your environment.

Now, the other fascinating part of this is that the

hippocampus is the area of the brain in which we
consolidate long term memories: It controls spatial
navigation, and contains what we now know to be place
recognition neurons and even building recognition
neurons. What this means is, you can’t develop a long
term memory that doesn’t contain something of the place
that you were in, when you had that experience. We
navigate space using some of the same neural pathways
that we use to develop autobiographical memories. So
what does that mean? It means nothing less than that
architecture and the built environment is central to the
formation of our identities. That finding alone gives the
built environment a kind of importance and weight that
nobody would have thought.

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MCP: All of the science is going to continue to progress, so

that we’ll know even more about how the brains works in
the coming years. How do you see all that work helping us
to build a better built environment?

SWG: I’ll give you an example. Thomas Albright is a

scientist at the Salk Institute, who works on vision. He’s
part of an organization called the Academy of
Neuroscience for Architecture. He is interested in what he
calls the phenomenon of co-linearity, which is the
arrangement of one sequence in the same linear order as
another sequence. The example that he gives
is Thorncrown Chapel by Fay Jones. Of course that is
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parallel, but because you’re looking at it from below, they

don’t look parallel, and they change as you walk through
the space. The reason that people respond so well to
co-linear patterns, Albright posits, is because those
patterns resonate with the way that our visual system
works and appropriates information. Just as we know, for
example, that when we listen to music the neurons in our
brain actually fire in the exact same pattern that we’re
listening to as we hear it. Albright’s hypothesis is that
something analogous is happening when we experience
co-linear designs.

MCP: In the book, you were fairly critical about

architectural education. You spent many years at the GSD.
Tell me how your thinking evolved concerning the
education of young architects.

SWG: One thing I was struck by when I was teaching

history and theory is how off limits, not just at the GSD
but everywhere I taught, the topic of built environmental
experience was. If you brought it up, it often wasn’t long
before someone would say—this was in the 1990s and the
2000s, when I was there—“Oh, that’s too subjective, we
can’t talk about this.”

MCP: It was like talking about “beauty.”

SWG: “Beauty,” you never discussed! This is because,

throughout the academy, post-structuralism had such a
profound influence. The cultural relativism that came out
of post-structuralism, identity politics, and so forth, there
was nothing wrong with it, but it became a sort of
inviolable belief system. Even so, it wasn’t really until I
was invited to be the architecture critic for the New
Republic that I began to think seriously about what
experiential design might mean. I didn’t want to be one of
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these, “It’s great!/It’s terrible!” critics. I had to develop a

set of clear, critical criteria for how I was judging, and the
reader had to understand what those were. That threw
me back into the realm of “experience.” Because I started
thinking, who am I writing for? What’s important? And the
answer to me was obvious. What’s important is what’s on
the ground, and how people respond to it. Ultimately, the
architect’s intentions are of secondary importance.  

Back to architectural education: I found that the

paradigms that I saw students being taught, so-called
“critical architecture,” left the user experience out of the
equation. Because the fact of the matter is, whether a
building’s structure is expressed, doesn’t matter at all to
the user. What does matter is if they see and understand
how the principles of gravity are working, or the methods
of construction. Whether there’s an internal structure that
has cross beams that you can’t see—nobody, except other
architects, cares about that. If you can do something with
that architectural idea that accords with the cognitive
principles that people need, want, and seek in buildings,
then great. But it’s is not an ideology of design, in and of
itself.

MCP: And it’s often taught as that.

SWG: Yes, it’s often taught as that. The methods of

construction are important, materials, details. All of that
stuff is important. But structure itself, per se, as a guiding
principle? I find a lot of these ideologies get at some of the
cognitive things that are important, but it’s almost like
they get there by happenstance, rather than through
knowledge. In school, there were the tectonic people, on
the one hand, and the “critical” people on the other hand,
and the parametric guys, on the third hand. What was
absent from a lot of these discussions was how the users
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would actually experience these spaces.

Martin C. Pedersen is executive director of the Common

Edge Collaborative. A writer, editor and critic, he served as
executive editor at Metropolis magazine for nearly fifteen
years.

See more:

News Interviews psychology

Sarah Williams Goldhagen Common Edge

Environmental Psychology

Cite: Martin Pedersen. "How Architecture Affects Your Brain: The

Link Between Neuroscience and the Built Environment" 25 Jul
2017. ArchDaily. Accessed 4 Jun 2018.
<https://www.archdaily.com/876465/how-architecture-affects-
your-brain-the-link-between-neuroscience-and-the-built-
environment/> ISSN 0719-8884

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