We Need Human-Centered Architecture Back!

Margarete
Margarete
Sep 3, 2018 · 8 min read
Which architecture do you think is more rejuvenating, right or left? Source: Reykjavik University/Cities that Sustain Us Research Project

Architecture influences the emotional life of every person who comes into contact with it — positively or negatively, says researcher Colin Ellard in Monika Leykam’s great article about “This Architecture is not good for us”. However, architects and urban planners are still far from seriously integrating this knowledge into their projects. In the last years a handful of researchers and startups have taken on the task to set the focus back on human-centered architecture.

1. People Physiologically Respond to Urban Environment Conditions

Current research investigates the direct relationships of biofeedback and spatial environment in field studies and in VR laboratory experiments to quantify the importance of environmental influences. Like Dr Matthias Standfest who led the experimental design at ETH Zürich (Dept. Information Architecture) when conducting a study about Anthropocentric Urban Sensing. The research group investigated how humans perceive their urban environment and what features of urban environment influence the humans’ physiological arousal states. Participants took a leisure walk in an urban environment while biofeedback devices measured the physiological conditions of the participants. Afterwards urban environment features were analysed using Machine Learning methods.

Antropocentric Urban Sensing

The researchers found out that participants’ physiological responses were highly sensitive to the environmental conditions. A few environment features such as temperature, humidity, field of view, and illuminance were dominant in influencing participants’ physiological response. It could be shown that in a few spots of the neighborhood a majority of participants tended to respond in the physiologically aroused state. Geo-referencing of average physiological response across all participants allowed them to investigate as to how participant responsed during the actual walk and what additional urban feature would have influenced participants’ physiology.

2. Green and Diverse Architecture Makes People Feel More Comfortable and Happy

Researcher Colin Ellard, Chairman of the Urban Realities Laboratory at the Canadian University of Waterloo, for example, provided test persons with measuring wristbands and let them stroll through different streets of houses in New York, Berlin and Mumbai. They walked through passages with edged, closed and monotonous facades, and parts with green and lively rows of houses with bistros and small shops. The bracelets recorded the psychological reactions. This data was supplemented by on-site surveys.
Ellard found out that the small-scale shopping streets with bistros, small shops and green areas were perceived much more positively, i.e. people felt more comfortable and happy than it was the case when being around houses with closed, monotonous facades.

The fact that buildings are enthusiastically celebrated by critics but often disrespected by the residents shows that architectural ideologies and perception yawn apart.

3. Street Design Can Be Mentally Rejuvenating

Pall Jakob Lindal, architect, owner of the TGJ office in Reykjavik and environmental psychologist at the University of Iceland, and his colleagues conducted a field study in which participants were shown various streetscapes. The simulations differed in two ways: in degree of diversity and complexity of building construction in terms of roof shape and facades ornateness; and on the other hand the building height, varying from one to three stories.
The participants were being asked to imagine that they were on their way home from work, mentally exhausted. Then they should grade each presented image according to its restorative potential. They should rate how they perceived the streets to be offering the chance to explore and discover, and its ability to break out of routine.

The three streets are perceived as providing different levels of restorative power (The least (left), medium (middle) and maximum (right))

The research showed that buildings with both optical complexity and coherence, for example, “playful” facades, but the same low height contributed to the perception that the environment was restorative — allowing the participants to rest and recover, as Christian Jarrett summarises. It could also be identified that taller buildings had a less restful effect on humans than lower ones.

4. Green Areas Can Support Longer Lifetime

This fits well with the findings of a research group led by Richard Mitchell from the University of Glasgow. He has been able to empirically demonstrate that the increased mortality rate of low-income people could be reduced by increasing access to green space in their living environment.

5. New Architecture Causes More Discomfort Than Old

Arnold Wilkins of the University of Essex developed computer models that mimic facial and pattern recognition by the human brain. According to these models, the discomfort of looking at facades of new residential buildings is significantly higher than that of houses built 100 years ago. Wilkins sees the reason for this in the way of information processing. Natural patterns can be processed better than patterns from the urban environment. Evolutionary patterns of plants and landscapes are in fact connoted more positively in the brain. This is on the one hand because this was associated with food and survival in the course of evolution, and on the other hand because visually diverse patterns can be blanked by the human brain. Architectural patterns — which happen to appear in “modern” architecture — with hard lines and dominant rectangles, contrarily, are perceived as strong stimuli that rather strain the perception. This has physiological effects such as a higher oxygen consumption which can cause migraines for sensitive people.

Architectural Psychology Barely Finds Its Way Into Building Practices

Why architectural psychology finds so little application has various explanations. Ruth Dalton, Head of the Architecture Department at Northumbria University Newcastle, sees the reason for this in not being able to transform scientific findings into concrete recommendations. In addition to that, architects see themselves overloaded with an additional component, the psychological, next to all requirements for costs and time (and quality) which already put them under pressure. Dalton criticises that today, the classic triangle of project management, consisting of time, cost and quality has shifted to focusing on maximizing speed and cost savings. This is done by sacrificing quality.

But also architectural ideologies play a role. German psychologist Riklef Rambow sees the issue in the Modernist doctrine that the inner function of a building should be reflected on the outer facade. Monotonous structures are by no means always the result of aesthetic doctrines, but often of urban planning guidelines. In addition, of course, different “playful” facade design costs more than a unitary design.

Pall Lindal, knows that architects do not distrust scientific research results, but rather feel their ego attacked. It annoys them to be told that architecture should improve the well-being as they believe that their work is already doing so. The question is not about improving the built environment for people, but who is right.

“Nowadays, efficiency has become an essential factor in our work, functionality dominates, humans have lost their status as a benchmark for the built environment, which is paradoxical because we are building for people.” (Thomas Neugschwender)

Feel-Good Standards For Buildings

A handful of architects have set out to break these constraints by promoting the transmission of psychological knowledge into the building practice. Ricklef Rambow sees that there are a lot of architects interested in human-centered architecture but the ideas are often pushed back because of financial constraints as aspects that cause additional costs are the first to go.

This is the reason why Lindal is convinced that the planning processes will only change if binding “feel-good”-standards are set according to which architects and planners must comply. His Austrian colleague Dr. Harald Deinsberger, from the Institute for Residential and Architectural Psychology in Austria, agrees on that by demanding political steps to set up certain human-centered qualities for buildings.

Since his research, Lindal has been fighting for more collaboration between disciplines. He demands that architects should not only work with engineers and urban planner but also integrate psychologists. This is the reason why Lindal and his team are currently developing software that will enable one to experience built environments even more realistically. This should make it possible for planners to test designs for their effects on people.

PropTech Tool To Support Human-Centered Architecture

Companies use scientific findings like this to improve planning, assessing and comparing architecture. Archilyse, a start-up that offers 1-click DNA tests for real estate, incorporates research knowledge into their simulations. Factors such as daylight access, ceiling height or view from an apartment or office, i.e. aspects that have been shown to have psychological effects on humans, are integrated in their architectural evaluation. Partially, they follow factors of the Swiss Housing Assessment System which set up 25 criteria to secure concrete benefits as well as added value for the residents.

Archilyse automises the assessment process by using floorplan data, geo-referencing it and relating it with qualitative factors. With this Archilyse can on the one hand determine how well a floor plan meets the specific needs of someone, on the other it can simulate actual living conditions. It shows you how much sunlight you will have in an apartment during a day and tell you what you are going to see from the windows. This again has an influence on how happy you will feel in a specific place. With a tool like this the search for suitable properties can be more accurately matched to one’s needs or it can help architects and planners to create more user-centered buildings.

The Great Secret — Living Quality Comes From Within and Outwith

The secret of Archilyse’s analysis is that it does not stop at the walls of a building. For its simulations and analysis it considers both the inner and outer. The quality of an apartment is determined not only by simple things like the number of rooms or square meters but also by multi- and interdisciplinary factors. How is the view from the living room couch? Do you have a relaxing lake view with snow-capped peaks in the background or a gray house facade that robs you of the sun during the winter months? If there is a noisy street in front of your building or/and a huge park 2 minutes away has a big impact on the recovery value even though those factors are only partially linked to the interior of a place. All of these aspects make a world of difference. Like a human, an apartment is not just a simple construct, but a highly complex product of various contexts.

Archilyse brings these individual elements into a multifactorial network in order to realise a more accurate and complete assessment of properties. This allows a more human-centered approach which carries with it the opportunity to increase receptiveness in the economy and the real estate market in general.

Do you want to know more about this? Check out our articles about Architecture Analysis on Medium or follow us on Twitter.

Thanks to Neil Docherty

Margarete

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This publication gives more background information about PropTech, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in Architecture Analysis and Comparison

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