The following text is a room-by-room tour of a house that allows you to analyze the psychological effect of residential space. Something about all those syllables even makes my eyes glaze over and roll back in my head. So instead of saying, "analyze the psychological effect of residential space," let me say it a different way. Places sculpt behavior. Your house sculpts the behavior of everybody who walks through it and lives in it. Your house is sculpting your behavior right now, in ways you can't perceive when you try.

I can already hear you asking questions. "Is this really important?" It sounds like some dry curse from graduate school, doesn't it? It might not sound like the most important issue facing mankind. Then you say, you say to me, you with your objections, you say, "If this is so important, surely this is already somebody's job."

It is an important issue, and nobody's doing the job. For complicated reasons, the power of place is criminally neglected in the American culture and the American economy too. Our everyday physical settings exert an enormous invisible influence on us.

This book you're holding presents a wide range of practical tools to sculpt behavior in residential settings. This introduction for this book you're holding explores the logical basis for those tools, and explains why you can't easily find this advice elsewhere. This is a huge opportunity, even in your own house. Especially in your own house.

If you still want to skip the introduction I won't think any less of you.

casinos and malls

Your question: "Is this really important?" Look around.

Think through your day. The rooms you use were not designed for you. Some of them are flatly unsuitable for you. Some are unsuitable for anybody. This is true for your house, your workplace, your school, your grocery, the airport, and your doctor's office, among other places. All of the built environments you inhabit are either designed to someone else's advantage, or they're accidents. You have to be one of the lucky few, the few who have their own living spaces custom-designed. Otherwise your built environment is working against you most of the time.

Short trip to the mall.

Let's call it Meadowfield, and make it a big big regional mall. Most of us are familiar with this experience. We park the car, choose an entrance, and stroll across the threshold into a separate air-conditioned commercial realm. Make your way to the center of the mall and take a seat somewhere.

Look around, and you may notice how predictable pedestrians are. Humans tend to be attracted by the same things, things like glittery lights and fireplaces and water. We walk at the same pace of three or four feet per second, survey our surroundings the same way, maintain roughly the same interpersonal distances, position ourselves the same way, and act out a hundred other habits and patterns. (For more about the anthropology of shopping, see Paco Underhill's 1999 book Why We Buy.)

The point is, shoppers are predictable. Shoppers march themselves willingly into the lair of Big Retail. Big Retail owns this game. Shoppers walk across the threshold into a 200,000-square-foot trap, the result of an advanced, well-researched and well-funded science. Individual stores have their sales techniques, sure, but pay closer attention to the grand orchestrator of this experience, the Mall Management Company. The orchestrator chooses acceptable retail tenants to place around their anchor stores, naturally - no bail bondsmen, tattoo parlors or used shoe stores. It's more than that. They also maintain the appropriate mix of stores.

It's more than that. They arrange and rearrange these retailers in certain combinations and patterns, with as much rigor as a board game. You'll hardly ever see a clothing store next to a restaurant, for instance. The prime stores like jewelers get the coveted spots, the corners, with their multiple entrances and extra window space. You get the idea.

And it's more than that. To say that shoppers are spatially manipulated in malls is a wild understatement. Foot Locker and J. Crew and bebe and the Sunglass Hut and Brookstone love you, yes, and prefer you in a drifting, semi-conscious haze, the better to separate you from your numbers. The mall experience is about triggering more and bigger purchases. Big Retail designed this Meadowfield place to:

Expose you to the maximal amount of merchandise
Put you in a buying mood
Set your pace and relax your sense of time
Remove you from any outside influence
Give you reasons to buy

A hundred percent of the benches in the mall are positioned to face - guess what - merchandise. Your attention and imagination are kept focused on the shopping experience, not the outside world. Your pace is slowed by ambient music. Everything seems so easy. The mall is built to make it easy and desirable - tempting- to walk a complete loop, or two, around the central core, ambling past every last store. Fountains attract shoppers to the middle of the property. Mirrors on some of the walls slow the walking pace (because people predictably slow down to check themselves out). And there are dozens of other strategies and tactics, the use of color, signage and branding, social suggestions, line-of-sight games, vandalproofing, on and on.

Inside the mall you're dominated, psychologically, by the mall management company. There's never a specific moment where you feel your resistance slipping away. It just happens. It happens below the level of your active, decision-making consciousness. The odds are excellent you're going to get caught up choosing between one purchase or another, and walking away with something.

Make whatever moral judgments you like. You have to admit that malls are spatially effective.

If you're done at the mall, let's hop a plane to Vegas. In 1972, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour wrote an enormously influential book of architectural criticism called Learning from Las Vegas, in which Venturi, Brown and Izenour didn't even get close to the key issues. Learning from Las Vegas concentrates on the cosmetic appearance of these casino buildings and ignores the experience of living through them.

The truly dazzling thing about Las Vegas is inside, not outside.

Roll down the Strip at slow speed and let those casinos vie for your attention. Smart people have spent decades and millions of dollars trying to get your attention, using every trick in the book, putting new tricks in the book, from fake volcanic explosions down to pure optical effects like flashing lights and bright red illuminated panels dominating your field of vision, and these buildings, on each side of the gauntlet, pull you in opposite directions with magnetic force. It's a fabulous sensation. They're fighting over you. They want you IN. It's a battle, with neon tubes and naked bodies and random bursts of madness, to get you IN.

Hop out of the car and pick your favorite. Step inside the casino. Let's make it Paris, just to choose one at random. The moment you leave the wild marketplace of the street (where all design elements long to get you inside) for the beautiful machine inside (where all design elements long to keep you) is a moment of tangible gravitational pull, a change-of-orbit. This building is a beautiful machine designed to boil away your sales resistance and skim away all available green. Inside the casino, every element works on you to reduce your resistance, it's a processing plant, it's an environment where the lighting, colors, carpet patterns, wayfinding patterns, design themes, temperature, and the steady background racket of clinking slot payoffs are tightly calibrated to keep patrons in the room, balanced between relaxation and arousal. Paris in particular encourages exploration and induces a genuine sense of wonder. The casino floor is a beautiful, self-contained psychological trap. It happens below the level of your active, decision-making consciousness Because gamblers are generally not cognitively active -- they're sort of self-hypnotized, like television watchers - they are made to do what they ordinarily wouldn't. (If you're interested in the technique of pumping odorants onto the casino floor, see the journal Psychology & Marketing of October 1995, and an article called 'Effects of Ambient Odors on Slot-Machine Usage in a Las Vegas Casino', by Professor Alan Hirsch.)

So casinos are spatially effective too, to say the least.

And if you don't believe it, the new Aladdin stands as the perfect counterexample of what happens when a casino screws up the user experience. The Aladdin has an awkward presence and no grand entrance off the Strip. It fails to exploit its exterior corner. Worse, visitors are allowed to escape from the guest rooms to shopping without being funneled through a casino floor, and worst of all both the huge main casino and the 35,000-square-foot London Club upstairs are (gasp!) hard to find and easy to exit. This is a wrong move. Screwing up the user experience can have a painful and powerful effect on the bottom line. Sitting on a prime location in a healthy Vegas, this new, hotly anticipated $1.2 billion property can't make its annual debt obligations.

architecture is social engineering

Casino designers and mall management companies are diabolically skillful at manipulating users' behavior for obvious reasons. Economic reasons. Money reasons.

The design of malls and casinos tells you that architecture can be effective social engineering.

This book is based on the premise that social engineering can be just as effective in private homes, in residences, in your residence.

Obviously you won't use the same set of spatial tools. For one thing, stores and casinos are built to handle a lot of people who use the environment occasionally, and houses are built for just a few people who use the same environment all the time. All my clients have had houses smaller than malls, for another thing. A lot of that commercial research remains secret and proprietary because it represents a real competitive advantage. It's surprising, and true, that certain retail stores have seen a powerful increase in revenue from the increased use of daylight, and they now consider daylight sort of a trade secret.

Nobody has done a similar job of applying social engineering to residential architecture. It hasn't paid to do so. While the goals are obviously different, the strategies are different, and the economy of scale is different, the central concept holds true. Residential architecture is effective social engineering.

So what does that mean? How do spaces work on people?

It's physical. We all move around in an environment of physical choices made of seats, corridors, passageways, steps, and all sorts of architectural alternatives.

Our surroundings constantly frame our activities by defining physical possibilities and options and limits and boundaries. It may be obvious, but it's not trivial: a locking door is a form of social engineering. In places where you want people to relax and hang out, you have to socially engineer some kind of seating, or your guests will leave after ten minutes. Every residential floorplan contains and expresses a grammar of pathways and apertures and obstacles, and it channels your choices through those physical structures just like a pinball machine channels a pinball. Built environments can be seen as sets of structured choices and you have to observe those choices whether you like it or not. Unless you're big and strong and don't mind walking through walls all the time.

It's physiological. Even when you know it's happening, even if you grit your teeth and close your eyes, certain elements of the environment act on your body.

You can't stop your body reacting to color, for instance. Human eyes are reliably drawn to red. Strolling into a red room will increase your blood pressure, respiration, eyeblink frequency, heart rate and metabolism - and that heightened arousal level may alter your mood and affect your perceptions. Strolling into the blue room next door will throw all those switches back the other direction. Room temperature, air mix, and perceived rhythms all reliably trigger the same sorts of autonomic responses. Humans are also phototropic and reliably drawn to light sources. Cold temps make you tense, warm temps make you relax. You can't help it.

It's social and cultural. Spaces encourage people to relate to each other in consistent, predictable ways.

Places sculpt both individual behavior and interpersonal behavior. (Don't get stuck thinking only of the spatial reactions of solitary users. It's a lot more fruitful to imagine two or more people in those landscapes. Social engineering flourishes best where people interact.) A classroom layout suggests a single authority and a one-to-many flow of information among many people. Archie Bunker chair's position in his living room, or Kirk's position on the bridge of the Enterprise, a command position in a central elevated position, suggests a single presence that dominates all activity. Seats and heights and ceilings and haptic effects can subtly suggest domination or equality, isolation or intimacy, relaxation or tension, cooperative or solitary work, social roles, and all sorts of things that happen between people. The size and character of civic buildings give us ideas about our place in society and the nature of that society. The size and character of private houses tell us who we are, who we should be, how much noise we can make. And cultures vary, of course. Latin Americans - and you've all heard this one before - have different ideas about appropriate personal space than Nordic people do; those cultural differences may end up 'encoded' into the built environment too.

And it's individual. People react to their environments based on physical choices and physical effects and cultural clues, sure. They're still individuals. They stroll onto the scene with a head full of memories, associations, and preferences. Or they charge headlong into the scene preoccupied with their own personal objectives, and pay no attention whatsoever, doing only enough sensory sampling to keep from bumping into the furniture. Each time is all unique experience. There's a level of intelligence, a level of experience, and a level of awareness that all click together, like tumblers on a combination lock, to create the experience of place.

These four layers, they're all going on, all the time, all at the same time. These four things all happen at once. The challenge of dealing with the psychological effect of the built environment is minding all these multiple layers of information.

Now take a step back. We don't have to understand the whole thing in exhaustive detail to make parts of it work.

With imagination, if you squint and hold your head sideways maybe, you can already see a big, diverse set of spatial tactics implied in those previous paragraphs. Some of the strategies are reliable and effective because they rest on physical and physiological characteristics of humans that are damned near universal. Some of these tools are purely physical. Some are physiological, some cultural. As you'll see in the following pages, there's a grammar of spatial apertures and obstacles, there's another language of seating, another language of lighting, and on and on. It's not important at this point to imagine or explain or categorize all those tools - the rest of this book is full of them. The main point holds true.

You have a large set of spatial social engineering tools that work on practically everybody. Architecture is social engineering.

The first two work on everybody. (It's hard to argue with a locked door.) The social and cultural things work reliably on people who share a cultural background.

the kicker

There's a wonderful kicker here that makes these social engineering tools a lot more powerful, even more effective. Even more dangerous, if you want to look at it that way. There's a special bonus.

Spatial tools work subliminally.

Most of the environmental information we gather, we gather subliminally. Even when you're paying full attention, some of the details always tease at the edges and corners of perception.

The environment presents a lot of information, way too much to consciously keep track of. Perception is selective. Sensory impressions are gathered like a dot-to-dot; and humans, unfortunately, or fortunately, have cognitive limits that force us to direct our attention to one thing or another, tuning in, then tuning out. You can see people conserving cognitive bandwidth when they close their eyes to visualize a math problem, for instance. A great deal of environmental information flies in under the radar of the senses and reaches us subliminally. I'm somehow aware of the air conditioning's reassuring hum without directly paying attention; same with the window, I know it's a dark parallelogram to my left without having to look. Somehow I perceive the plane of the ceiling stretching out above my head without even glancing at it this evening, probably from a set of acoustic clues and other clues, received and interpreted in the background, and also because it's been over my head the same way for a couple of years now.

Close your eyes, experiment on yourself and you may discover a wonderful thing, that you know a lot about your immediate surroundings that you never consciously noticed. You know things about the shape and size of windows and doors nearby, a working mental map of the floorplan with escape routes, a somehow-kinesthetic memory for where the furniture is, different shapes and textures of armchairs and tables where you make contact, the usual pitch and volume of the air conditioner's hum, and a lot of other elements that form your working memory of the space. You've gathered this information subliminally. Substitute a slightly louder or a bit more grinding noise for the A/C and you might notice right away, which is cool, since it suggests we have subliminal monitoring systems of some kind. All this happens below the level of your active, decision-making consciousness.

People also tend to accept their places as given. Users of buildings tend to accept them just as they are, and act as if the walls are unchangeable, permanent and God-given. With the exception of those of us who run around rearranging the furniture of every new room they come in to, we tend not to run around rearranging the furniture of every new room we come in to.

All of which says, people aren't usually consciously engaged when it comes to their physical surroundings. People usually accept the building as a background, or a stage setting. They're usually concentrating on what they're doing or who they're with.

When people receive subliminal messages, or when they have too much environmental stimulus to process and deal with, or when they're not cognitively engaged, they aren't given the full chance to disagree. They're not making decisions right now. They're less likely to criticize.

Advertisers and retailers and casino designers already know, and those pesky advertisers and retailers and casino designers have known for some time now, that they don't want their audiences cognitively engaged. It works better for them if the audience isn't fully awake. (The landmark study here is "Central and Peripheral Routes to Advertising Effectiveness: The Moderating Role of Involvement," by Richard E. Petty, John T. Cacioppo and David Schumann, the Journal of Consumer Research, September 1983, if you're interested.) People who respond to the pretty sounds and happy pictures of television commercials aren't stupid, necessarily, they're just not paying attention. Advertisers like the idea of using feelings rather than arguments, and therefore like the idea of an audience in a non-decision-making state.

And that makes our spatial tools more effective.

Because spaces go unnoticed so often, spaces give you social engineering tools as powerful as television.

Follow this idea down one direction, and you see how much architecture and interior designers and landscape architects are responsible for the way people feel and react. This is a responsibility design professionals usually don't want to hear about.

Follow this idea down another direction, and you begin to realize how much this gives you the ability to manipulate people. And once you recognize the manipulative power of space, you'll understand why it's important for you to take control of your own physical environment, as soon as possible.

manipulation in the home

You may have concluded, based on the last few paragraphs, that consumers are so spatially manipulated in every retail space they walk through that they're puppets on a string. And that architectural social engineering has a range of powerful and subliminal effects and can make you do things you'd rather not. And that typically consumers have no place of their own, no satisfying turf, tailored to their personal advantage. If you admit that these architectural messages have a huge daily and cumulative emotional impact, and serve as a framework for our sensations and experience, is there any doubt that you're being systematically manipulated? Well there's no doubt about it.

This might make you angry enough to make you shun the idea of social engineering through architecture as a distasteful mind game.

I'd like to convince you that sculpting behavior at home is a positive, wholesome, and necessary thing to do.

Taking control of your home environment is necessary because, for one thing, you can't rely on the random workings of the universe to bring your own living spaces up to any reasonable standard of psychological quality. If you ignore interior design, you don't get no interior design, you get bad interior design.

Bad buildings damage their users in real, measurable ways. There's clinical evidence that people, children in particular, are physiologically damaged by broken environments in inner city schools and in public housing. (See Amos Rapoport on this topic, particularly his studies of early sensory deprivation.) This is easy to understand if you've ever lived in a housing project. The buildings themselves begin to bang on your physical health, mental grasp and agility. It's more than the effect of lead paint or no heat or high monoxide content in the air, it's the effect of living in featureless towers in a concrete plaza, in heartless, humorless, unworkable, demeaning, intimidating and poverty-stricken places. This is what the random workings of the universe will bring you.

Back in your home, you must be willing to take control of your environment. An environment is the result of a bunch of decisions, and those decisions must benefit you. (You can usually slash straight to the heart of any architectural controversy by looking around the space in question and asking one thing: "Who dominates here?") If you're living in a house designed by a developer, that space was designed and built with an eye towards cost-effective buildability, not with your interests in mind. Unfortunately, when people hire architects, interior designers, or feng shui experts, there's no guarantee they have your interests in mind either - especially when they can't explain their design principles in an understandable way.

Which brings us to positive. These architectural influences can have extraordinarily powerful effects. This book represents a large set of spatial social engineering tools that work on everybody. What exact outcomes are we talking about? Properly used, these psychological tools have the potential to:

keep your family together physically and emotionally
increase your sheer amount of physical comfort
improve communication and understanding among residents
increase individual productivity and effectiveness
increase group productivity and effectiveness
encourage intimacy and trust between couples
promote health (particularly improved sleep)
define (or redefine) your own position in the family
promote economic self-discipline
promote self-determination
sculpt self-concept
promote bliss and variety and mystery and beauty

Now that word wholesome. Is manipulation wholesome? Does the notion of 'architecture as social engineering' sound like a chilly experiment when you apply it to residential architecture? It sure does to me. On the other hand, do you think it's manipulative to give a guest an extra pillow? So do you think it's manipulative to promote deep and restful sleep for your guest by amplifying white noise in his room? Do you think it's manipulative to introduce a subliminal message that tells him to do the dishes tomorrow?

That loaded word 'manipulation' suggests forcing behavior against the will of the subject. And the question boils down to a moral one.

And I'm not here to give you any moral advice, apart from pointing out that the following tools can have a potent effect on behavior, and should be treated with respect. Sure, a controlling, creepy, manipulative person could read the following room-by-room advice and take it to some unpleasant extreme. The extent to which you want to sculpt interpersonal behavior is up to you.

You are, however, perfectly free to influence your own behavior. Just using a few of these tools can set your own working pace, increase your productivity in measurable and tangible ways, and improve your sleeping habits. There are dozens of behavior-sculpting improvements like those. This isn't a self-help book, but you can use it for one if you like, and you won't be manipulating anybody.

As I said, sculpting behavior at home is a positive, wholesome, and necessary thing to do.

I think you still had that other question. That was an excellent question and an ideal segue.

"It's this is so important, surely this is already somebody's job."

Well, no. This is important. And nobody's doing it.

wrestling with un-science

Is there a science to this? Yeah, sort of. It's called Environmental Psychology.

Environmental Psychology is an interdisciplinary field that fits on campus, uncomfortably, in the deep stylistic gulf between the Psychology Department and the Architectural School. Those guys don't usually sit together at lunch. As icing on the interdisciplinary cake, the ten or twelve graduate-level environmental psychology programs across the United States - at the University of California in Berkeley, at the University of Missouri in Columbia, and nestled in the snowy ravines at Cornell - each of the define the field differently and view their goals differently.

When you're a budding environmental psychologist you'll quickly figure out that the accuracy of findings in environmental psychology depend on the physical measurement of humans - called anthropometrics, a word which sadly isn't even in my spellcheck - and also in knowing how human senses work - called perceptual psychology. Both of those are prerequisites. You can't talk confidently about the effect of a 20-foot ceiling, for instance, until you know how tall your average user is, and if humans demonstrate some kind of perceptual consistency in regard to ceiling heights. So, yeah, it would be enormously helpful if environmental psychologists had good bases of data to build on.

Unluckily both anthropometrics and perceptual psychology are in poor shape.

Humans can visually distinguish about three items or objects per second. That's an astonishingly sketchy level of perception. Even in familiar settings, your eyes don't look as much as they take rapid-fire spot checks, an ongoing dot to dot. People scan their environments and, to some extent, their input is shaped by expectations. They see what they expect to see. The act of human perception is about as subjective and unmeasurable a thing as there is. This is how Raymond De Young puts it, in the Encyclopedia of Environmental Science :

…What humans know about an environment is both more than external reality in that they perceive with prior knowledge and expectations, and less than external reality in that they record only a portion of the entire visual frame yet recall it as complete and continuous.

And this is Edward T. Hall on the complexities of perception, from An Anthropology of Everyday Life: An Autobiography:

(Visual perception is) a dynamic, highly structured, selective process in which the entire visual system cooperates in creating from material passing before the eyes those images which the viewer will find the most useful. At the same time, the system eliminates extraneous data by a process of 'selective inattention.' The system also showed that vision is not only arbitrary, but operates according to certain tacit rules of visual grammar. . . Vision is not only highly selective, it is a transaction between the viewer and the world -- in effect, we humans put together our own perceptual worlds according to rules and principles which are quite arbitrary. Furthermore, perception is greatly modified not only by the psychological state of the individual but by culture as well.

So perceptual psychology is a squishy topic.

When you're a budding steely-eyed environmental psychologist determined not to be stopped by the squishy conceptual foundation you're stuck with, you may stumble across another weakness. Environmental psychology is concerned with what's measurable and provable, like any science. The nature of the interplay between places and people makes it damned hard to design an experiment and get appropriate results. Specific environments - the mirror-and-cream-marble lobby of the Hotel de Crillon in Paris on a rainy May evening for instance - in all their multi-sensory splendor, are not portable, they're cultural and socially complex, and impossible to even fully describe, much less explain and understand. Even in the fantastic and unlikely event that you'd have sufficient grant money to authentically replicate the lush lobby of the Hotel de Crillon in the basement of the university bookstore, to truly replicate the experience of place, you'd have to construct and populate the surrounding context of Parisian streets. You see the problem.

Helen Ross said about environmental psychologists: "We know a great deal about the perception of a one-eyed man with his head in a clamp watching glowing lights in a dark room but surprisingly little about his perceptual ability in a real-life situation."

When you're a budding steely-eyed environmental psychologist determined to transcend the squishy conceptual foundation you're stuck with, and determined to transcend the difficulty of representing spatial experiences in an experimental design, you may stumble across another weakness. You won't know if your results are universal. Do certain rooms have a standard impact on humans? Is everybody going to react the same way? With an Innuit child and an 80-year-old Portuguese fisherman react the same way? Can you ever determine or predict a spatial reaction with certainty?

There are strong 'No' arguments. Any person's reaction to an environment is a unique, non-duplicable event. What we know about perceptual psychology suggests that every individual act of perception is a subjective and unquantifiable act. Spatial perceptions interact with one's immediate mental state, recent attitude and past experiences, all also subjective and unquantifiable. And to make it harder, a lot of this spatial information is gathered subliminally.

There are equally strong 'Yes' arguments. Yes, humans react to environments in a similar way. Human bodies themselves are remarkably similar. Heartbeats tend to take a common rhythm at about 70 beats per minutes, 100, 000 beats per day, and humans cover ground at a predictable pace, and walk alike, and talk alike, and conduct ourselves alike, to an amazing extent. If people's reactions to certain space configurations and other environmental information were not similar, then architecture would not work. The vocabulary of architectural effects would have no power to move us or control us or accommodate us. We couldn't navigate through the built environment.

Do certain rooms have a standard impact on humans? Humans are all unique, and humans are also all the same, so we're left with little proof either way.

Let's say you're still an unstoppable steely-eyed environmental psychologist who's neutralized the squishy conceptual foundation you're stuck with, and who's overcome the difficulty of representing spatial experiences in an experimental design, and who's gotten past the standard-impact thing, all of that, and you've still managed to break out of the lab with some practical findings based on observation. Let's say you have reliable findings, some bewitching scraps of evidence, that people work harder and longer when they have greater exposure to sunlight.

Then you're going to hit another problem, the final problem. Architects don't care.

Sorry to be so blunt.

Environmental psychology is not congruent with architects' incentives or the realities of the marketplace. These two worlds don't intersect. There's a story somewhere, not here but somewhere, an unwritten book, about the collision of environmental psychology and architecture in the United States in the late 60's and early 70's, a noble experiment that began at Sea Ranch (or thereabouts), and spawned a generation of humanely designed pedestrian malls and singles apartment buildings and shag-carpeted residential conversation pits, and imploded with the Pruitt Igoe site in St. Louis.

None of this is meant to disparage or provoke. Despite these crippling challenges of trying to develop and apply architectural psychology to the actual practice of making buildings, there are a few leading figures who deserve more attention. Some of these names and concepts and evidence you'll see as part of the knowledge base presented in this book. Kevin Lynch first developed the idea of a 'cognitive map', the idea that people's reactions are built around and applied to a mental map of their surroundings, and Lynch has worked hard to fold those findings back to practical design, I think mainly at a municipal level. David Canter is especially worthy of mention because of his wide-ranging studies, his good sense, a book-length foray into the causes of football hooliganism, and a longstanding refusal to talk speculatively. He's a scientist. In at least one of his books, Canter talks about how difficult it is to restrain himself from making unfounded, common sense recommendations about spatial arrangements. He is firstly a scientist and feels he cannot. His restraint is forever to his credit.

I admire but don't share David Canter's restraint. This book is written on the basis of rational methods and repeatable results. It's synthesized partly from tangible and measurable scientific approaches, like the ergonomics of communication in regard to seating patterns, and partly from more interpretative ideas, like the intimacy gradient, and partly from original content.

Because of the limitations we just talked about, not everything in this book will meet the standards of science. But it will make intuitive and practical sense, though, with reproducible results.

architects

The dude on the street may know a handful of architectural celebrities - Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaus, Frank Lloyd Wright - and he may have this general impression that architects put up buildings, they perform some difficult cultural function that requires blueprints and hardhats. Like Mike Brady. Exactly what architects do all day is harder to pin down.

This hazy impression also comes with a pretty blue aura. The dude in the street has this feeling there's something authoritative and mysteriously noble about these professionals, and the brotherhood of architects fits into society like schoolteachers do, vital and underpaid and self-sacrificing. By the way it's a good profession for a sit-com character: positive connotations, loose schedule, and allowed to be smart-sexy. And architects bring to the culture something unspeakably deep and true, a Venerable Holy Art, which is Not to Be Questioned.

That's their story, anyway.

When you spend long enough investigating the work of those star architects, and others like Piano and Graves and Meier, you eventually learn to notice what Star Architects don't talk about. They don't talk about users. They don't talk about programming or social requirements. They don't talk about green issues or sustainability. When architects come around to explaining what they do, they cannot or will not make themselves clear. Some day they'll publish Architectural Record in an English translation. They appear to be talking about aesthetics and materials in the land of imagination.

Is it news to anybody here that architects consider themselves artists?

This is a live debate in the profession, and it kicked up again when James Stewart Polshek won the commission for the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, only because Polshek does not consider himself an artist and isn't shy about saying so. The Getty, the Guggenheim, the Reichstag re-think, whatever major projects are hot this quarter, are pitched at the user audience as works of art. Architectural works of art tend to be photographable solids. The Star Architects are playing to the textbooks. The Star Architects don't consider themselves accountable even to their clients, those walking checkbooks, much less accountable for day-to-day functional user requirements. Hah! What an idea!

This quote from an article by the environmental psychologist Robert Sommer called "Social Design: Creating Buildings with People in Mind." (This article is a great, great source for anybody looking to track the various efforts to get social scientists and architects to talk to each other, just in case anybody wants to write that unwritten book about the history of humane design). Sommer writes:

Architect Philip Thiel characterized his profession as a "charade in which students designed for their professions and practitioners designed for each other, communicating by means of striking photographs in architectural fashion magainzes." The formalist position was succinctly stated by Philip Johnson, one of the most influential of today's architects, in his comment, "The job of the architect today is to create beautiful buildings. That's all." Johnson echoed the fine arts view of buildings as great hollow structures that justified awards based on judgments of architectural photographs that omitted all traces of human presence. The omission of people from photographs of buildings has important consequences for spatial perception….. Most real buildings look forlorn and incomplete if they are visited after hours when all the occupants have gone. The fact that this is the favored manner of depiction by architectural photographers illustrates the confusion between architecture and sculpture that typifies formalistic design.

That was 1980 or so. It's even more pointedly true today, twenty years later. Sometimes this neglect of the user spills over into outright contempt, as when Rem Koolhaus said in the July 1996 Wired: "People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it." More contempt when Frank Gehry says at the opening of the Guggenheim that clients are "full of shit". More contempt when everybody's favorite Star Architect was famous for saying things like, "Roof leaking on you? Move your chair!" and "You'll get used to it," and "Anyone over six foot is a weed."

And the Star Architects are most certainly not accountable for fine-tuning the space for your benefit. That's the last thing on Frank Gehry's mind.

Down below the celebrities, down there somewhere, are the real architects, whether they're in private practice or working for a big corporate house somewhere. It's tough being one of the 100,000 architects in the US. It's a difficult job to do well. It's an underpaid and unstructured activity in which you're expected to serve many masters and do a large number of impossible things. Real architects are hard pressed to make the building stand up and satisfy the blue-haired building commission for the third time and come in on budget and by the way locate the drywall gang. Theirs is not an easy life, caught between the shining myth of the master builders and the grinding reality of finding the next cheap-minded client.

So are they going to fine-tune the social impact of your space for your benefit?

Incidentally, it's illegal for an unlicensed person to practice architecture in any of the fifty states. As a group, architects strongly discourage anybody from coming around sniffing their turf. They're serious about this brotherhood thing.

This is how it works: in North America, an architect's basic services in standard contracts include an item called "architectural programming", which covers the act of "confirming the requirements of the project to the owner." I find 'confirm' an interesting verb in that sentence. "Architectural programming" specifically excludes setting functional requirements. Setting functional requirements is the owner's responsibility. So the owner, who has no experience in the positive, wholesome, and necessary art of social engineering, must lay out the functional requirements. The architect may elaborate and refine these requirements if he wants to spend his billable hours doing so. He won't be paid for it.

You'd expect architects to have a firm grasp of how built environments sculpt behavior, and they might. Many of them loudly claim to. Time is money, the architect is still on the phone trying to track down the drywall gang, he doesn't usually relish being made responsible for another ambiguous sub-project, and social engineering doesn't happen.

In other words, architects aren't rewarded for making their clients happy.

And architects have fewer and fewer opportunities to try. Out in the real marketplace, an astonishingly small percentage of new buildings are designed by an architect. You can be a responsible and productive member of society, and live in a developer-designed home, and visit lots of your neighbors, and work and shop in the standard sorts of offices and stores, and have a happy rewarding life, and go years without setting foot in an architect-designed space. Sure, somebody formally signed off on the plans, but architects are only involved in about 15% of new floorspace constructed every year. In a suburban development where buyers may have a choice of three available floorplans, an architect may have signed off on those blueprints years ago. It's increasingly difficult to even find lots for custom-built homes.

A few major architects attend to the user experience. Will Bruder, responsible for the magnificent Phoenix Central Library, is one of them, and James Stewart Polshek is another. Jon Jerde, designer of Horton Plaza and Universal CityWalk, knows more than anyone else about the psychology of the retail street, although he's not universally respected in the profession. And Frank Lloyd Wright, the master of so many things, also stands as the master of putting spaces together in an emotionally satisfying way - although he didn't precisely cater to his clients. I can hear him now. "You'll get used to it."

And it's probably true that a magic carpet sent to collect the fifty people in the world who know the psychology of space, would come back and dump its contents on the floor, and you'd have forty angry, sputtering architects laid out in front of you.

Architects are not social engineers. Architects do not plan or draw or build structures with a great deal of thought about the social patterns those structures create. That's not what they do.

Green Dragons Frolicking in Water

Feng shui was practiced mainly in Hong Kong until about eight or nine years ago, when drowsy customs officials accidentally let it into the United States in the cargo hold of a doomed freighter, and for reasons nobody can explain, it spread like a slow but persistent bacterial infection since. I would guess that feng shui fever peaked in 1998 or 1999, and seems to have subsided. As of this writing, in mid-2001, it's still an industry with size, weight and momentum. Dozens of feng shui books still command serious rack space at the major book retailers.

The literal translation of 'feng shui' is 'wind water', and the practice refers to the Chinese art of placement. Placement of what? As it's practiced in the US and described in these books, mainly placement of household objects. In Hong Kong it also refers to the placement of tombs, bank buildings, elevators, or whatever you want. On any scale.

And feng shui has raised all the right questions about the design of places. Which way should your bed face? How many rooms in a good house? How is this office making me feel about myself? Feng shui has provided a great popular framework for questioning thousands of these spatial decisions.

Too bad none of its answers flow from cause-and-effect relationships. Too bad feng shui authors and practitioners not only provide illogical answers, but stunningly, blissfully, gorgeously illogical answers. Enter the world of feng shui and you have to leave your old-fashioned western thinking at the threshold, you know, those poor mental habits like expecting consistency of results, wanting clear explanations, and expecting identifiable value for spendable money. Friends in Hong Kong have had direct experience with the old-school feng shui masters and their strange compasses and agonizingly high consulting rates.

And I'm telling you there is 1) no such thing as feng shui, not that a large number of people consistently agree to, and 2) it wouldn't work even if it did consistently exist, and 3) even if it did work, it wouldn't work for the reasons they give, when they do give reasons, which they don't. In its worst form, feng shui is no more consistent or responsible than supermarket astrology.

So it's great that Chinese geomancy has helped to blur the Western distinctions between interior design and architecture and urban design, because those distinctions are arbitrary and unhelpful anyway. It's great that ordinary people are more aware of the spatial choices they make.

But because feng shui masters cannot sensibly explain their reasons, they don't empower the user.