The Place of Architectural Psychology:
A Consideration of Some Findings
by David V. Canter
BA, PhD, Research Fellow, Building Performance Research Unit,
Strathclyde University
Facts without Theories
It is often believed that new instruments
for research do of themselves produce great
increases in knowledge. Even if this view
is rarely stated explicitly it underlies much
of the thinking about methods of categorising
spaces such as that by Thiel (1961) or the
listing of techniques for research (Craik 1970,
Sanoff 1968, Canter and Wools 1970). When
startling insights do not come tumbling out
from the latest technique, the research
workers show some puzzlement.
They should not be surprised because an
instrument can be no better than the theory
upon which it is based and the data collected
from an instrument are of no more value than
the hypothesis they help to support. As
Brecht illustrates the emissaries from the
Pope refused to look through Galileo's tele-
scope because the data it presented were
irrelevant to their understanding of the universe.
This is not to dismiss technology or empirical
data in the development of science. The
results of doing so would be sterile theorising
and the production of concepts which are in-
applicable to the real everyday world.
The implications for design of facts
without theories are possibly even greater
than they are for psychology, for if these
facts are to be used by a designer they must
be couched in spatial terms. They therefore
inevitably present the designer with a pre-
digested design solution. In other words,
the research worker takes upon himself that
task for which the architect is particularly
suited; the manipulation of space. If the
architect is not to modify, manipulate or
create spatial forms, what is he to do?
22
It is assumed that given the right tech-
niques we shall eventually produce a complete
list of human needs and will learn what aspect
of the environment will satisfy each0 The
asides in the human needs literature belie this
basic concept of people consisting of a set of
distinct, static needs each of which can be
separately satisfied.
What then is the place of architectural
psychology? If collecting data on the specifiC
architectural requirements of building users is
going to lead to unimaginative architecture and
is based on a doubtful psychological premise,
what is the contribution to be made?
The answer is not simple and is not likely
to be readily accepted by the present generation
of architects. It can be briefly stated by say-
ing that the contribution of psychology should
be to study the processes of interaction between
buildings and their users with the aim of
making architects understand more clearly the
psychological impact of the built environment.
This will influence their designs by changing
their attitudes towards architecture. This
approach is unlikely to produce any design
solutions, but architects themselves are the
experts in the production of design solutions
and assistance at that level from psychologists
or sociologists is neither necessary nor
desirable.
2 Towards a Theory
What is really being suggested is that more
effort should be put into the development of 8
theory that will explain the facts we have at
present and which will guide us in the facts
we are to look for in the future.
 Before entering into the dangerous waters
:: theory building, two warnings from the
C21andhui conference should be borne in mind o
Stringer (1970) suggests if an understanding of
t:.e relationship between architecture and
psychology is to be achieved, we must deal
·,'.-Hh the process of architecture and the
!=,ocess of psychology in the same terms.
Tjis means that our explanation of how people
::-:teract with their physical environment should
31so contribute to an understanding of how
j"Jildings are designed. The second warning
'Canter 1970) is that the subjective experience
:)f a building and the objective observation of
:)Iners using it must both be taken into account
if we are to gain anything like a complete
picture of the process of building/user inter-
3ction. If such all-embracing warnings are
to be dealt with we must start from some
simple fundamental observations. Such
observations can be made all around us. The
:-:10 st common fact of the interaction of people
with buildings is that in the great majority of
cases behaviour and the places in which it is
carried out seem appropriate to one another.
It is generally accepted that people sleep in
bedrooms, sit in sitting rooms, do clerical
work in offices, and so on. So far research
workers have come up with few surprises with
regard to where people do things. This fact
of appropriateness deals with the first warnings
because it can be seen that it is precisely
because architects are aware of the patterns of
appropriateness which exist that they are able
to produce usable buildings, and it is because
most people are also aware of these same
,:Jatterns that they are able to use these pro-
ductions. The second warning is also heeded
if we start from this point. The experience of
appropriateness and the observation of
appropriate behaviour are both amenable to
study and complement each other.
3 The Search for Appropriateness
However, if patterns of appropriateness
are considered only as a state which does or
does not exist then much of the reality of
human behaviour will be lost and many research
findings will remain unexplained; rather they
should be considered a goal towards which
people aim.
Two examples from research at
Strathclyde will serve to illustrate some of the
potentials of this approach for the interpre-
tation of findings.
In a study of the effect of office size on
clerical performance (Canter 1968), office
workers doing similar jobs in the same depart-
ment but working in rooms of different sizes
were given clerical aptitude tests. When the
subjects were tested in the offices where they
normally worked, a marked decrease in
ability was found as office size increased,
but a control group tested in other rooms
showed no such relationship with room size.
Any approach which deals only with the direct
effect of the physical environment on be-
haviour would have difficulty explaining these
results. On the other hand, some approach
which considers the possibility of clerical
workers searching (consciously or not) for an
appropriate or suitable working environment
can easily explain the fact that the more able
workers tended to work in surroundings
generally accepted by clerical workers as
more acceptable; that is, smaller offices.
The second example (Canter 1970) was an
investigation of seating preferences in
seminars among undergraduates. It was
found that the distance of the lecturer from
th e front row of chairS did not affect seating
behaviour when the chairs were arranged in
semi-circular form. When, however, the
chairs were laid out in a rectangular block
the closer the lecturer stood to the front row,
the further back the undergraduates sat. It
seems plausible that the form of the physical
environment gives rise to expectations about
what activities will be carried out, and
people adjust their behaviour in accordance
with these expectations. Semi-circular
seating is probably perceived as informal,
but rectangular seating is perceived as formal,
and these students did not wish to become too
deeply involved in a formal activity so they
sat further back.
In other words, what is being suggested
is that taking the accepted (or appropriate)
behaviour for a particular seating arrangement
as a starting point they modified their own
behaviour to fit into that pattern in a way they
felt would be satisfactory.
4 Categories
Before this notion of patterns of appropri-
ateness can contribute in any detail to archi-
tectural understanding, it is necessary to
understand the mechanisms by which they
develop and change and the way in which
they are organised. The ideas which Lee
(1970) put forward can be seen as central to
this. He suggests that during the process
of growing up objects and activities are mental-
ly coded, not only in terms of what they are
but also in terms of where they are. This
coding leads to the formation of schemata or
mental maps which relate things and activities
to places. As Lee shows, much observable
behaviour is consistent with the existence of
these schemata and apparent inconsistencies
in behaviour can be explained as maintaining
consistent schema.
These mental maps can be thought of as
containing summaries of a person's experience
of the relationships between things, activities
and places; summaries, that is, of patterns
of appropriateness. However, in order to
summarise these patterns or relationships it
is necessary to codify or at least describe
the constituent parts in some way. It must
be possible to say what type of place it is
and what type of thing or activity and then to
examine the appropriateness of one for the
other in terms of existing mental maps. This
categorising of the constituent parts is a
complex process and it seems likely that
categories can exist at many levels of ab-
stractness and be formed from many viewpoints
or along many dimensions.
The studies carried out in order to ex-
plore the ways in which people think about
physical environments, such as those re-
ported by Vielhauer (1965), Hershberger (1968)
and Collins (1969), are esentially examinations
of the coding systems people use. Our own
work at Strathclyde (Canter 1969a), looking at
a number of buildings and dealing with repre-
sentations as well as actual buildings, do
help to support a general pattern found in the
American studies. Four general dimensions
can be discerned all dealing with what appear
to be different aspects of what might be
called emotional response. Any naming of
these dimensions must be to some extent
arbitrary but the four central concepts may be
called 'pleasantness', 'comfort', 'friendliness',
and 'coherence' 0 It would be found that the
judgements of many different kinds of people,
including architects, could conveniently be
described in these terms, those of architects
differing mainly in their distinguishing more
clearly between the different factors (Canter
19 69b) • Further studies of this type are
necessary, particularly with regard to
eliciting the underlying dimensions of activities,
things, people from the viewpoint of the places
to which they are appropriate. Such studies
are now in process at Strathclyde, being
carried out by Stephen Tagg and John Firth 0
Once the results of these studies are available
then it will be possible to start drawing up an
overall picture of the patterns of appropriate-
ness which exist in the building context. Al-
ready it can be seen that the picture might not
be nearly as complicated as was originally
thought. The work we have carried out re-
lating aspects of building to the friendliness
dimension (Wools ahd Canter 1970, Canter
and Wools 1970, Wools 1970) has shown that
in general the furnishings account for 43%,
the roof height and angle 33% and the window
size and shape about 11% of the variance in
the friendliness scores. The residual variance
of 13% remaining unaccounted for suggests
that at least when using drawings and photo-
graphs of models we are dealing with a signi-
ficant proportion of the actual psychological
variance involved.
5 Interaction and Adaption
It is apparent all around that people do
interact with buildings and, as was mentioned
earlier, there is evidence of a positive
search for appropriateness. If the dimensions
and relationships between them grow out of an
interaction between the people and buildings
then it is likely that the building itself has
some influence on the particular dimensions
people use. Evidence for this is shown by a
factor analysis of answers to questions about
the physical environment in two different
schools. This showed that in one building
daylighting, a view and sunshine were closely
associated, but answers to questions about
'lighting' were taken to refer purely to electric
1 ighting, while heating and ventilating were
thought of as distinct from either of the other
two categorie s. In the second building day-
light and electric light plus vi.ew formed one
factor, sunlight and ventilation a second and
heating alone a third, The first school was
of relatively compact plan with a central
courtyard, the second more of a 'finger plan'.
The reasons for the groupings is obvious from
consideration of the plans but had the answers
to questionnaires been taken purely at their
face value in a study of, for instance, the
'need for daylight' they would have been very
misleading. Pursuing the implications of
this finding it might be suggested that people
think about different kinds of buildings in
:'~~:"':-ent ways. It seems that this might give
-_ Co clue as to why some bUildings are thought
:: S ",'iOrks of architecture' and others merely
5S ;)"Jildings; for some reason different ways
::: tiinking of the building s are used, different
::::-::eria are applied in assessing them.
The same phenomenom can be seen
: :::curring with regard to spaces within buildings
::-. " recent study at Strathclyde, Ann Telford
:J-Jnd that the relationship between the
;:rivacy dimension and the pleasantness
::imension differed depending on which room
Jf the house was being examined.
It can thus be seen that measurable re-
~ationships do exist between the different
categories of our spatial coding system but
the se relationships are modified by the
particular building involved. One of the
mo st likely reasons for this modification is
that the categories and relationships develop
from an interaction with the particular environ-
me nt. If this were so, then a range of other
relationships should be found. The most
likely one is that between time and satis-
faction with a building for, as the interaction
with building continues, so the assessment
of that interaction, or satisfaction, would be
modified. The direction of this relationship
might well be the best overall estimate of the
quality of a bUilding that we can obtain. If it
is highly negative then the building is a poor
one as increased knowedge of it and inter-
action with it is leading to increasing dissatis-
faction. In other words, a good building is
one which 'withstands the test of time' . In
our studies of school buildings (Canter 1970b)
we have found a consistently negative re-
lationship between various aspects of satis-
faction and the age of a school building. The
curve seems to level off after about 10 years
and the relationship cannot be explained by
differences in the age or make-up of the
staff or the length of time they have been in
the building, rather the relationship seems to
be between the school organisation as a whole
and the building in general.
One other finding from our schools study
has been the relationship between expressed
satisfaction with the size of classrooms and
the space within them and the number of modi-
fications of the building which could be ob-
served on a visit to the school. Interestingly,
the relationship is such that the more modifi-
cations made the more satisfied the teachers.
This lends support again to our active model
of interaction, that the teachers positively
benefit from the modification rather than it
just keeping them up to a minimum level.
6 Complexity and Appropriateness
If this notion of a positive search for
0 appropriate patterns of interaction with the
environment is to contribute to the development
of architecture besides discovering what the
patterns are which exist, we need to know a
lot more about the underlying mechanisms which
contribute to causing any given relationship to
be accepted or considered appropriate. It
seems likely that many things will contribute
to the particular level of appropriateness ex-
pected or accepted in a particular situation.
The example given by Hill (1970) serves to
illustrate this. Hill showed that the balance
between amount of inward and outward vision
selected as desirable by people was influenced
by the type of room in which they assumed they
were and their personality characteristics.
The balance of inward to outward vision which
was appropriate for some rooms in a house was
not appropriate for others. In other words the
level of appropriateness of any particular
balance varied from condition to condition.
In this work Hill was concentrating on
the variation of a relatively small and specific
aspect of the environment, the view in and
out, and that it was partly because he was
attending to such a small part that variations
in appropriateness were so subtle. If he had
explored all the phenomena which might vary
the picture that emerged would probably have
been very complex indeed. What is needed,
therefore, is to isolate those key aspects of
the environment whose changes are critical in
determining the appropriateness of that environ-
ment for a given activity. Ideally, these
aspects would relate to the ways in which
people think about buildings (the classification
system upon which they build up their mental
maps) and as a consequence should help to
indicate the ways in which people differ in
dealing with their environment. One such
aspect of the environment might well be its
complexity; the number of different things
going on within it, the variety or intensity of
information available from it.
Exactly how to measure complexity in a
given situation is as yet difficult to determine
but it does not seem too great a leap to suggest
that, other things being equal, more complex
environments will produce a higher level of
physiological arousal in the users of those en-
vironments. This is, of course, an hypo-
thesis open to investigation but it is plausible
that the measures of arousal described by
Payne (1970) and Griffiths (1970) might well be
considered as estimates of the psychological
complexity of the environment studied.
This concept of complexity would help to
explain some of the relationships referred to
earlier, such as the reduction in satisfaction
over time being due to a reduction in psycho-
logical complexity. Relationships between
aspects of the physical environment and
friendliness such as those referred to earlier
in the studies carried out by Wools (1970)
might well benefit from examination in terms
of the complexity of the stimulus material.
One further possibility that stems from
this idea of patterns of appropriateness being
developed to meet various levels of environ-
mental arousal is that of relating environment-
al effects directly to variations between indiv-
iduals. This can be done because of the known
differences between individuals in terms of
their cognitive complexity (the number of cog-
nitive dimensions they have for handling any
particular judgement) • Briefly, it has been
found (Canter 1970c) that there are definite
relationships between satisfaction (which for
the present we may take as an estimate of
the degree to which an environment provides
an appropriate setting for a range of activities)
and the cognitive complexity of an individual.
In the school situation this is usually such
that the more complex the individual the less
satisfied he is with the school building.
The implications of this direction of in-
quiry can be drawn from some very recent
studies not yet written up. Wools has found
that dealing with simple and complex stimuli
and judgements of friendliness made by simple
and complex people there is a clear interaction
between type of person and type of stimuli in
influencing judgements. Furthermore, Firth
has found some relationship between the com-
plexity of the stimulus effects and the age of
schoolchildren. In other words, as the
children get older so the aspects of the en-
vironment which influence their judgement get
more complex. Might the development of this
latter approach not eventually give us some
rationale for school design?
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