What makes a house cute
Dear Trivian,
The twins have been visiting for the weekend and my world was all around them and their beautiful little souls. There are a couple of things I need to write quickly, lest I forget them. I have to write down the conversation I had with them in the car about “What makes a house cute”.
We where going to visit a medieval town in the area and where driving along a valley along one of the Aveyron’s tributaries..
We passed by an old abandoned mill, with moss on the roofs and a turret.
I exclaimed: “How cute that house is!” to which Hamish, who hadn’t seen the house, replied “Why was it cute? Why was the house cute?”
In a great moment of inspiration I asked back,
“Yeah, that’s a very good question Hamish. What does make a house cute?” “Pictures of little Dogs” he said. “Maybe drawings. Yeah, drawings of little dogs”
The grown ups added “Blue shutters! And pointy angles.”
Rosie thought about it for a while and gave her own answer with a serious face:
“What makes a house cute is pictures of all the people in the world.”
“Why is that?”
“Because they would be happy, and so the house would be cute.”
Then there was a silence for a while, as we where passing bare forest branches. The wet valley was slowly becoming large expanses of fields, with cows and farms and
“Families.”
“Sorry, Hamish?”
“Families. Families make a house cute”
They’re five and a half.
We don’t know what makes us tick when we’re examining a visual field in front of us (I mean, watching anything, say, a house, and judging if it’s cute or not). The general view on this subject is that taste is subjective and that each of us see things differently.
That beauty is ineffable.
Some might want pictures of little dogs and some might want blue shutters. And they do, in a way. We have a genetic and cultural predisposition for some visual patterns or others.
But new research in my favorite “I understand nothing of this, this is fantastic” field, neuroscience, suggests that beauty is not, after all, in the eye of the beholder. It’s in their brain.
And our brains are more similar than we think.
I am quoting here Prof of Neurology Anjan Chatterjee, from the University of Pennsylvania, who is doing fascinating work in the field of neuroscience in architecture, where we use information on the human brain to shape the buildings we live it.
Our ancestral brain is looking for the exact same things in our modern environment as it was in the savanna thousands of years ago: Prospect, Shelter and Refuge. What neuroscience is now bringing to the table are actual measurements of the responses we have to the built environment. Data.
However, there is also an element of instinct, of getting to the core of what it means to be human, that architects have the talent of harnessing. We use the concepts of Prospect, Shelter and Refuge as guidelines and develop freely on them, using, on the one hand, heuristics and empirical knowledge, and on the other, pure intuition, the exercise of getting to the core of life.
As Juhani Pallasmaa said in his beautiful talk on Imagination and Empathy (link bellow, watch out, it’s heavy stuff), citing his university professor:
“The talent of imagining human situations is more important for an architect than the gift of fantasizing spaces”.
To which I would add: Imagine life in all of it’s details. Then describe it.
That’s what architects must do. Trust their intuition and work from there. I think there is a risk of design becoming prescriptive and heuristics, emotion, art being trumped by science. Neuroscience brings yet another tool to steer architects away from gut feeling decisions and into prescriptive rules might just be too much for their tortured anxious souls.
I know, I know, heuristics are prone to mistakes.. Analytical science must reign..
I had not heard of Prof Chatterjee’s three dimensions of design before (Coherence, Fascination, Hominess — he writes about them here, but I think they make sense.
It’s this feeling of Hominess that I am working on defining, steering away from status seeking visual architecture and getting back to shaping our homes in a way that help us become better people, happier, more mindful, more grounded or whatever each of us is expecting from a home space.
Family, after all, is what makes a house cute.
As always,
Jo
Here is the Juhani Pallasmaa Keynote speech:
And something cute:
Previous letters you might like:
Originally published at https://jopetroni.substack.com on February 25, 2022.
