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The Brain on Architecture VIDEO

Looking at buildings designed for purposes of contemplation—like museums, churches, and Things Not to Say to
libraries—may have positive measurable effects on mental state. a Pregnant Woman
EMILY VON HOFFMANN NOV 10 2014, 9:10 AM ET You don't have to tell her how big
she is. You don't need to touch her
belly.
!

"

&

'

Saint Basil's Cathedral in Moscow ( Katie Brady/Flickr )

At a particular moment during every tour of Georgetown’s campus, it becomes

necessary for the student guide to acknowledge the singular blight in an
otherwise idyllic environment.

“Lauinger Library was designed to be a modern abstraction of Healy Hall”: a

sentence that inevitably trails off with an apologetic shrug, inviting the crowd to
arrive at their own conclusions about how well it turned out. Much of the
student population would likely agree that the library’s menacing figure on the
quad is nothing short of soul-crushing. New research conducted by a team of
architects and neuroscientists suggests that architecture may indeed affect
mental states, although they choose to focus on the positive.

I spoke with Dr. Julio Bermudez, the lead of a new

Studies on architecture study that uses fMRI to capture the effects of
architecture on the brain. His team operates with
struggle for funding MORE IN HEALTH
the goal of using the scientific method to transform
because, Bermudez something opaque—the qualitative Why Don't People
Want to Donate
“phenomenologies of our built environment”—into
sighed, "it’s difficult to neuroscientific observations that architects and city
Their Organs?
TIFFANIE WEN
suggest that people are planners can deliberately design for. Bermudez and
dying from it." his team’s research question focuses on buildings
The Brain on
and sites designed to elicit contemplation: They
Architecture
theorize that the presence of “contemplative architecture” in one’s environment EMILY VON HOFFMANN
may over time produce the same health benefits as traditional “internally-
induced” meditation, except with much less effort by the individual.
The Brain Makes Its
Contemplative architecture contains a series of design elements that have Own Ghosts
historically been employed in religious settings: Bermudez noted that it is JULIE BECK

“logical to expect societies not only to notice [the link between built beauty and
experience] over time, but to exploit it as much as possible in their places for
holy purposes.” These elements may be used in any place intended for
contemplation or discovery, whether of a spiritual, personal, or even scientific
nature. Architectural Digest wrote of the “modernist beacon” The Salk Institute
for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California:

The nonprofit research center … interweaves private and public spaces with
a strikingly formal, inward-looking plan that echoes the format of a
medieval cloister. Composed of strong-willed yet sensuous materials—
travertine and reinforced concrete—it possesses a hushed dignity that
encourages contemplation.

Two six-story laboratory buildings form the north and south boundaries of
the complex. Each shelters an inner row of angular semidetached office
structures that face each other across a travertine courtyard. Bisecting it all
is a channel of water that seems to pour into the Pacific below. The
buildings, fashioned of concrete accented with teak, focus one’s gaze on the
horizon so “you are one with the ocean,” observes admirer Jim Olson, a
partner in the Seattle firm Olson Kundig Architects. In Focus

By showing 12 architects photos of contemplative and non-contemplative

buildings from facade to interior, the researchers were able to observe the brain
activity that occurred as subjects "imagined they were transported to the places
being shown."

All of the architects were white, right-handed men with no prior meditative
training, creating the necessary (if comical) uniformity for neuroscientific
research—the team wanted to ensure that the brain scans would not be Modern End-of-Life Services in Japan
influenced by factors unrelated to the photos, like gender, race, or handedness.
For instance, the brain scans of left- and right-handed people often look
different even when subjects are performing the same task.

In addition to posing an interesting control on the

JUST IN
The brain behaves experiment, the decision to use architects was a
differently when exposed strategic one meant to increase the researchers’ Stopping CNN in Russia
chances of achieving conclusive results. Though
to contemplative and everyone encounters architecture, studies on the
ADAM CHANDLER

non-contemplative built environment struggle for funding because, as

Boko Haram's War on Nigeria's
buildings. Bermudez remarked with a sigh, “it’s difficult to
Students
suggest that people are dying from it.” Architects MATT SCHIAVENZA
were a natural choice for the pilot study because,
the team reasoned, their critical training and experience would make them The Seismologists Accused of
sensitive to features of the buildings that a lay person might overlook. Manslaughter
 He conceded that the team "totally loaded the deck" by examining a horde of NICHOLAS ST. FLEUR

architects as they perused photos of the "most beautiful buildings mankind has
ever produced.” Among others, the sites in the “contemplative” experimental
group include La Alhambra, the Pantheon, the Chartres Cathedral, the Salk
Institute, and the Chapel of Ronchamp. In response to a critic at the
presentation he gave at the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA)
shortly after the study's conclusion, Bermudez explained that the goal of the
pilot study is to reveal something interesting that warrants additional funding
for an extension of the experiment using the general population. “It may be a
limitation of the system,” Bermudez added, “but it’s what everyone has to do.”

The challenge began when the researchers set out to measure an experience few
have paused to identify—they deployed online surveys in Spanish and English to
gather testimony on extraordinary architectural experiences (EAEs), or
encounters with places that fundamentally alter one’s normal state of being.
Critically, most of the buildings or sites mentioned in the 2,982 testimonies were
designed with contemplation in mind, whether spiritual, aesthetic, religious, or
symbolic, leading the researchers to conclude that “buildings may induce
insightful, profound, and transformative contemplative states, [and] buildings
designed to provoke contemplation seem to be succeeding” to a great degree. In
addition to churches, mosques, and other types of religious buildings, some art
galleries, monuments, homes, and museums are examples of contemplative
architecture—the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the Louvre in Paris, and Frank Lloyd
Wright’s “My Home” in Fallingwater were in the top 10 sites referenced in the
surveys.

Anticipating skeptics who would claim that these experiences are subjective, the
researchers expanded the question to draw on the established neuroscientific
subfield of meditation, with some important differences. Related studies to date
have focused on internally produced states that are easily replicated in the lab,
and on aesthetic evaluation, or the activity that occurs in the orbital frontal
cortex as we make snap judgments about whether we find things ugly or
beautiful.

Bermudez and his team expected that architecturally-induced contemplative MOST POPULAR
states would be strong, non-evaluative aesthetic experiences— eliciting more
activity in areas associated with emotion and pleasure, but less activity in the 1 Masters of Love
orbital frontal cortex.
2 Why Cliques Form at Some High Schools
and Not Others
The presence of an external stimulus (the photos of
Related Story the buildings) also removes the tedious self- 3 Mesmerizing Videos of Ballerinas Preparing
regulation that occurs in the prefrontal cortex Their Pointe Shoes

during traditional meditation. The interviews of the 4 Why Don't People Want to Donate Their
12 subjects revealed that “peacefulness and Organs?

relaxation, lessening of mind wandering, increasing 5 Can a Teacher Be Too Dedicated?

of attention, and deepening of experience” were all
6 Progressives Lost the Election, but Their
common effects of viewing the photos—also Ideas Are Winning
common was a slight element of aesthetic
7 The Warrior Wives of Evangelical
How Gothic Architecture Took Over judgment, seemingly inescapable in the crowd of Christianity
the American College Campus critics.
8 For a Lasting Marriage, Marry Someone
Your Own Age
The provisional conclusions of the study are that the brain behaves differently
when exposed to contemplative and non-contemplative buildings, contemplative 9 Homeland: Now Making Fun of Itself on
states elicited through “architectural aesthetics” are similar to the contemplation Sunday Nights

of traditional meditation in some ways, and different in other ways, and, finally, 10 Waiting for Republicans to Act on
that “architectural design matters.” Immigration Is Pointless
 That last conclusion sounds anticlimactic after all this talk of lobes and cortices,
but it reinforces a growing trend in architecture and design as researchers are
beginning to study how the built environment affects the people who live in it.
ANFA proclaims that “some observers have characterized what is happening in
neuroscience as the most exciting frontier of human discovery since the
Renaissance.”

Other findings discussed at ANFA’s conference get even more into the gritty
details: the optimal ceiling heights for different cognitive functions; the best city
design for eliciting our natural exploratory tendencies and making way-finding
easier; the ideal hospital layout to improve memory-related tasks in patients
recovering from certain brain injuries; the influence of different types and
quantities of light within a built space on mood and performance.

I didn’t ask Bermudez what the fMRIs might reveal if his subjects were shown
pictures of Lauinger Library, though. I suspect it wouldn’t be pretty.

' Jump to Comments (9)

! " # $ + '

EMILY VON HOFFMANN does story research for Government Executive.

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