Ethics and aesthetics are one.
—LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Building nearly anything consumes considerable resources. Even a modest-sized infrastructural element, edifice, park, or playground must be designed, engineered, financed, permitted—all before construction even begins. Depending upon the size of the project, it’s a process that commands the labors of dozens or hundreds of people, at a cost of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, or millions—and for the largest projects, even more. Once finished, a new urban area or park or building will likely outlast every person who designed, engineered, and built it. It will survive too the people who wrote and adjudicated the codes that dictated its permitting. And it will remain in use long after those who commissioned and paid for it are gone.
That’s why the design of our built environments must not be hijacked by short-term or parochial interests. That’s why it must not be unduly shaped by the many other things it so often is: by people’s ignorance, by apathy or reflexive antipathy to change, by corruption or greed. In the previous chapter, we examined some design principles that every person who has a hand in the shaping of the built environment should approach as inviolable and nondiscretionary. Here we extend the inquiry to ask: What operational, social, and ethical principles should guide us in the extraordinary task of building the environments of today and tomorrow? Societies and institutions need marquee buildings, landscapes, and cityscapes. Fortunately, sometimes, in some places, they get them. But already we’ve seen that building well need not mean building lavishly, even if spending heavily on a first-rate design certainly has proved worth the investment in the past and will be that much more valued and valuable in our ever-urbanizing future.
The distinction between building and architecture, between designing for aesthetic pleasure and designing (or building) for “function,” is misleading, wrongheaded, and defunct. Everyone needs better—indeed, good—landscapes, cityscapes, and buildings of all kinds, and everywhere. The only way to accomplish this is to continuously take stock of what we know and are learning about the ways the built environment shapes and affects human experience. That involves carefully analyzing how we can use that information to support people’s physical health, promote their cognitive development, and foster emotional well-being. An ever-growing body of knowledge is enabling us to more precisely devise appropriate expectations and standards and demand their implementation across the board: by the real estate developers and financiers, the contractors and builders, the code writers and the code enforcers, the city planners and designers, and the users and clients. By all of us.
Nearly anything that anyone helps to construct can and likely will affect many people, and then the lives of generations. So at a minimum, peoples and policy makers should insist—indeed, require—that every cityscape, landscape, and building first of all be designed, and second, designed by trained professionals, and third, that those professionals be thoroughly schooled in the evolving body of knowledge in environmental aesthetics and experiential design. Practitioners, researchers, and scholars should continue developing programmatic research agendas and supporting studies that will expand our knowledge, and they should use their institutional bases—public entities and nonprofit organizations, think tanks, academic institutions, and areas of the private sector (like residential and health-care architecture)—to conduct such inquiries, and programs to disseminate that information widely should be developed, funded, and promoted. Everyone should work to ensure that experientially enriching design and environmental aesthetics be incorporated into the products that companies manufacture for the building industry; into construction practices and zoning and building codes; and into municipal, regional, and federal review and oversight mechanisms.
Such broad-sweeping changes will come about incrementally, and even then, unevenly. But every step of change is realistic and realizable. One simple example will suffice. In many parts of China, building codes mandate that every newly constructed apartment receive a minimum of three hours of direct sunlight per day on the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice. Think about it. How many people’s homes would be improved if just this one law were enacted and enforced across the globe?
The built environment’s decision-makers—from real estate developers and corporate entities to private clients, public institutions, and governments—should wholeheartedly embrace the realistic goal of building experientially enriching environments. Unique projects, whether they be landscapes such as New York City’s High Line, urban places such as Chicago’s Cloud Gate, or buildings such as EMBT’s Scottish Parliament, attract people to cities and public places. But good design, be it small, medium, large, or extra-large, is an essential factor in promoting human health, development, and well-being. It is good business, improving worker satisfaction and productivity, making retail enticements that much more appealing. It is good social policy, promoting a sense of community, enhancing people’s emotional investment in a neighborhood or place. It can even be good politics, because it has the potential to promote civic engagement. Quite simply, good design is the right thing to do.
Promoting and advocating for good design is everyone’s responsibility because the built environment, even though largely owned and constructed by private individuals, is akin more to water, energy, or digital communication in the sense that it is fundamentally a social and a public good. Yet as we have seen, most polities, societies, and individuals have not treated it as such. The sorry places where most people live fall far short of meeting reasonable standards of living. In most parts of the world, public oversight is minimal at best, and most construction projects are “designed” by people with little to no expertise in the fundamentals of human-centered design. Even projects that are designed by so-called experts can and do violate the tenets of human experience because today, most of the academic institutions that offer professional design degrees do not systematically teach what we know about how people experience, interact with, and are affected by their primary habitats, which are buildings, landscapes, places, cities. Ordinary people as well as the commissioning and decision-making elite cling to the invalidated notion that design is a luxury rather than a necessity, a matter of taste rather than of urgent public welfare. The result? A self-perpetuating system of built environmental beggary.
Society’s baseline expectations for design in the places we inhabit are wrong. Maintaining that it is enough for our constructed worlds to hew to utilitarian standards is akin to maintaining that all a person needs for a good life is a little food and water and the assurance that she will be neither poisoned nor crushed. Such benchmarks fly in the face of the vast and growing body of scientific and social scientific knowledge showing that we humans are thoroughly and profoundly embedded—physically, physiologically, and psychologically—in the environments we inhabit and upon which we rely, and that every element—building, landscape, urban area, infrastructure—ought, accordingly, to be designed to help us thrive. With decades of solid research behind us, urbanists, policy makers, developers, designers, and ordinary people must confront and begin to grapple with a truth as troubling as it is inescapable: today’s ever-more-rapidly urbanizing built environments are designed and constructed to standards that are so scandalously low that they are inhumane and unacceptable—unacceptable by nearly any measure.
To be sure, not everything about how people experience the built environment cuts across cultural and historical particularities, and individual differences, gender- and age-based differences, and cultural differences exist. (Two quick examples: elderly people perceive the slope of a ramp as steeper than younger ones do, and women seem to gravitate more toward “refuge” spaces than men do.) Still, much about experiencing the built environment is something all humans share, because it is a function of how humans adapt to and develop in their environments from infancy into adulthood, imbuing them with meaning, and of how humans collectively have evolved over tens and hundreds of thousands of years living on an earth many millions of years old.
Inequality is inscribed into our landscapes: modern apartments adjacent to slum dwellings, Mumbai, India. Dinodia Photos/Alamy Stock Photo.
That our concern and primary focus here remains the contemporary world changes little of this. Today’s trifecta of globalization, mass urbanization, and growing income inequality coupled with unprecedented levels of wealth is directly inscribed into the places we inhabit and build. The grinding poverty of slum dwelling drains people’s bodies and spirits. The widespread lack of adequate educational opportunities and the disparities in access to adequate health care are becoming not just morally unacceptable but also economically counterproductive and, increasingly, politically unfeasible.
The transitory, intercontinental flows of people, goods, and information has heightened many people’s appreciation of the fecund heterogeneity of human cultures and societies, but at the same time they have exacerbated people’s sense of disconnectedness from place. The revolution in digital technology confounds our innate desire to maintain control over our surroundings. Globalization has ignited fears—sometimes well founded—that disintegrating traditions will leave only social and cultural rootlessness in its wake. Shopping areas, airports, indeed whole new cities and suburbs, seem placeless, as though they could be anywhere. In the academy, a whole new literature decrying the pervasiveness of “non-place” places, has burgeoned. These realities already have changed, and will continue to transform how we conceive of ourselves and our place in the social and built worlds. Climate change is also forcing peoples and countries to build differently and use resources and sites with more thoughtful deliberation, compelling us to rethink the built world’s relationship to the natural world in toto.
All this can and should continue and improve in the coming decades. We have a colossal amount of building to do. The status quo must not continue. Today, every day, children around the world, especially underprivileged ones, are robbed of opportunities for social advancement and self-actualization. One large part of the reason why is that they live in unhealthy or cognitively dulling habitats and attend school in buildings that put a drag on or literally undermine attention, motivation, and effective learning. Every day, millions of people fail to find comfortable, inviting, well-designed streetscapes, buildings, parks, and plazas where they can simply escape the stresses of daily life or share the easy company of others. Every day, the least privileged members of our society return to inhospitable, decrepit, soul-deadening homes, including the many hideously ugly “affordable housing” developments in my own neighborhood, East Harlem. The world is literally littered with places that were built on the cheap and violate practically everything we now know about what makes for salutary, enriching environments. Such places take their substantial toll, as they practically shout in the faces of their occupants every day that their lives don’t matter—at least, not to the people who govern and shape the society and polity of which they too are members. Today, well into the twenty-first century, all this is much more scandalous because now we know that design matters in people’s lives, and that it matters in lasting, profound, and indeed, in foundational ways.
“Non-place” places: cityscape, China. Photo by Kai M. Caemmerer.
Enhancing Human Capabilities
People usually discuss and evaluate design in the narrowest of terms: is this “good” or “bad,” tasteful or crass, practical or extravagant. Overly simple and dichotomized criteria mean little, and we must begin to evaluate our built environments from a different, larger framework. A good starting point comes from the well-established position of Martha Nussbaum, a philosopher, and Amartya Sen, an economist, who argue that the obligations of a polity to its citizens extend well beyond the provision of political stability and economic sustenance. A well-ordered, ethically justifiable society, maintain Nussbaum and Sen, must guarantee more than negative freedoms, by which they mean our right to be free from political and social institutions that thwart the pursuit of basic human needs, such as to protect, feed, and educate oneself and one’s family. The well-ordered, ethically just society ought to actively support and promote positive freedoms, by which they mean the liberty to develop our individual capabilities so that each one of us has the tools and positions to pursue a full, successful, and meaningful life. From Nussbaum and Sen’s orienting question, “What is each person able to do and be?” they propose a roster of political, social, and cultural conditions that would establish the fullest, correct meaning of human development, whereby every person inhabits a society that allows him or her to develop his or her particular capabilities of body and mind, of individual spirit and social connections.
Some housing shouts in the face of occupants that their lives don’t matter: East Harlem, New York. Sarah Williams Goldhagen.
Nussbaum and Sen’s Capability Approach is neither effete academese nor utopian fantasy. It has centrally influenced contemporary international human rights thinking and policy initiatives. The World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme have adopted its central premises and endeavored to operationalize them. Indeed, Nussbaum and Sen’s Capability Approach underlies the UN’s annually updated Human Development Index (HDI), a widely used measure of the health of countries and peoples around the globe. So extending these precepts to the standards by which we evaluate today’s and tomorrow’s built environments makes good sense.
What is each individual able to do and be? Nussbaum and Sen explain that the processes by which we cultivate our individual capabilities and become productive members of society rely on a roster of conditions that only properly oriented political and social institutions can provide. Inferring the built environmental dimensions of them is easy. Each individual must be guaranteed both physical safety and some minimal standard of bodily and mental health. They should be able to reasonably anticipate the availability of both, for themselves and their families, in the present and in the foreseeable future. A good education inculcates children with the foundations for the lifelong project of self-actualization; this includes imparting practical knowledge of the social norms necessary to participate actively in society, and the critical thinking capacities at the root of practical reasoning and supple, creative imagining. In addition, people should be positioned to “live with and toward others” (Nussbaum’s words) through the emotional connections they develop to groups and the institutions in which they and their social reference groups are embedded.
Good design—landscape, urban, and architectural—is an essential factor in all of these. Consider housing, the obvious example because it figures in the guarantee of safety, and physical and mental health. Properly designed housing can and must vary by economy, region, culture, and individual needs. Two government-sponsored projects in South America help to illustrate the wide range of possibilities. For Iquique, a port city in northern Chile, Alejandro Aravena’s firm Elemental grabbed the paltry budget on hand to design and construct low-cost housing, devising a multifamily development of what they called “half a house” homes. Three-story townhouses, upon completion, supply just enough space to house a family in toto. But the firm also included walled-in empty areas that families could use as a patio or, if the owners’ fortunes improved, to inexpensively construct an extra room. The Quinta Monroy project was the first of such projects, which since have been constructed in Santiago, Chile, and in Monterrey, Mexico.
Also in Mexico, where the housing crisis is so severe that an estimated 9 million people lack homes, the architect Tatiana Bilbao proposed a related but different approach. After interviewing the potential residents of a government-sponsored low-income housing project, Bilbao discovered that for them, a crucial source of dignity lay in three trappings of a traditional middle-class home: the sense (if not the actual experience of) spaciousness, pitched roofs, and the appearance of completion. (In Mexico, as in many other parts of the developing world, people use reinforced concrete to construct as much of a house as they can afford, and leave the metal rebar exposed, sometimes for many years, as they try to earn the money to build that hoped-for second or third story.) With the information she gleaned from interviews, Bilbao constructed for only $8,000 a solid core house that is more spacious than the state-imposed 460-foot minimum. Costs were kept down by using inexpensive and sometimes recycled materials such as concrete block, plywood, and wood pallets. Bilbao’s prototype single-family residence, the Sustainable House, sports the pitched roof residents desired, and contains a living room that seems unusually spacious owing to its high ceilings, which also promote wind circulation and help with ventilation and climate control. The Sustainable Housing looks finished. Yet because it is based on a modular system, families have many possibilities for how they can inexpensively and incrementally expand the house, adding an extra room here, a mud room or partially enclosed outdoor space there, and so on.
Positive freedoms: “half a house” to start: Quinta Monroy Housing (Alajandro Aravena/ELEMENTAL), Iquique, Chile. photo: Cristobal Palma/Estudio Palma.
Such projects—and there are many other impressive examples all over the world, such as Vo Trong Ngia’s S House, discussed in the previous chapter—illustrate how design, and even the design of low-cost housing, could and should be a component of Nussbaum and Sen’s Capability Approach. However, because the information demonstrating the centrality of the built environment’s design to people’s lives is not widely known, Nussbaum finds herself at a loss about what to say when it comes to discussing its role in the development of human capabilities. Her pathbreaking book Creating Capabilities, the fullest account of her and Sen’s paradigm, contains scant commentary—really, next to nothing—about either architecture or landscape architecture or urban design. Nussbaum clearly expresses her appreciation for their importance. Yet she writes only that “having decent, ample housing may be enough . . . the whole issue needs further investigation.” Such uncharacteristic brevity can be understood as an unfortunate artifact of the built environment’s pervasive marginalization and neglect, rather than as an indicator of its objective importance, and certainly not of its relevance to the development of human capabilities.
Modular sustainable housing (Tatiana Bilbao Studio), Chiapas, Mexico. Tatiana Bilbao Estudio.
When the design of our domiciles and institutions more reliably accords with the principles of human experience, they nurture and sustain the very capabilities Nussbaum, Sen, and many other thinkers and policy makers on the subject of human development champion. It is established fact that children develop better in spacious, sturdy, quiet, orderly homes. That they learn much more effectively in a well-designed school than in a poorly composed one. Bodily health is best nurtured in facilities designed with the most up-to-date information on environmental psychology and cognition. Experientially designed places of leisure substantively mitigate stress and help to restore easily depleted attentional faculties, and foster creativity. Workplaces can be configured to enhance people’s problem-solving, interactive skills, creativity, and focus. Design techniques and decisions of all kinds can encourage the kind of prosocial conduct that strengthens communities. In terms of social betterment—indeed, in terms of social justice—all this adds up to a claim that is at once bold and obvious: the commonly used instruments of public policy, private investment, and philanthropy such as health care, infrastructure, teacher training, and primary and secondary education would be far more effective than they are today if the built environments in which they more generally took place were better designed.
Human Capabilities and Enriched Environments
Built environments that accord with the fundamentals of human experience constitute what we should call “enriched environments,” at once a self-explanatory term and one that carries specific meaning for the small community of scientists who study the relationship between environments and cognition. Picture a rat in a standard-sized cage, outfitted with a spinning wheel: call this control setting an impoverished environment. Now compare that to a second cage. Same rat. The container is a little larger, though, because alongside the running wheel are arrayed other playground-like toys: a little slide, perhaps; a pool, a ladder, a maze. From our rodent-sized vantage point, the second cage presents plentiful and engaging things to do, places to hide, hurdles to jump, pedestals to survey the surroundings or to preen. It is, in other words, an enriched environment.
Rats that live in enriched environments, compared to ones in the running-wheel-only environments, flourish. They are more resilient to stress. They display superior skills of spatial navigation. Their visual systems function better and are better coordinated with their motor systems. They learn (and preserve long-term memories) more easily, and their brains are better defended against the cognitive decline that comes with age. Humans are unlike rodents in countless ways, to be sure. But we are like them in this: we too are permanently diminished when exposed primarily to impoverished environments. And when we can enjoy the manifold boons and opportunities of enriched environments, we flourish.
Of course well-designed, enriched environments nurture human capabilities! Throughout this book, we have encountered examples of such experientially designed urban areas, buildings, and landscapes. Many, many more such places exist, all over the world, fortifying our confidence in their relevance and durability: places such as the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris and the Ssamziegil mall in Seoul and the 798 Art District in Bejing. Some encourage us to restore our fragile attentional resources by allowing us to freely explore and to creatively imagine. Some, like Amiens Cathedral, Soufflot’s Panthéon in Paris, and the Sydney Opera House, awe us into a sense of our commonality with others and humility in the face of the natural world’s mysteries. Others, like the National Pensions Institute in Helsinki or the Herman Miller plant in Michigan, the Bukchon teahouse in Seoul or the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC, create settings optimal for concentrated work by helping us to focus our attention on the tasks at hand. Still others—Chicago’s Cloud Gate and Millennium Park surrounding it, Antwerp’s Museum at the Stream, La Jolla’s Salk Institute—captivate by stopping us short, forcing us to problem-solve by challenging our assumptions and expectations.
Enriched environments: 798 Art District, Beijing, China. Sarah Williams Goldhagen.
They and other projects engage us—seduce us, even—by drawing us into a whole-body, multisensory, and cognitive engagement with them. They create the circumstances for us to become smarter, more resilient, more flexible problem-solvers. Their overall forms, materials, and details are composed to accord with and build on the associative, nonconscious ways that we, as humans, experience the world. Imbued with character, they are layered with meaning and interlaced with primes, embodied and situated schemas and metaphors. Deliberately constructed as action settings that express the nature of the social institutions they house, they enrich our experience of them as places and as physical instantiations of our communal lives. And because of the memories we form in such settings and then recall and rely upon for the rest of our lives, they literally create the framework whereby we define and conceive of who we are. Enriched environments, whether attention-focusing or attention-restoring, whether awe-inspiring, defamiliarizing, or plainly comforting, will always be the habitats best suited to the human project of personal, familial, and communal well-being, self-actualization, and accomplishment.
Understanding this changes the nature of our political and social responsibility for the built environment. It establishes incontrovertibly that experiential design is not optional. Life-enhancing opportunities literally can be built into the enduring land- and cityscapes of our lives—our homes, our children’s schools, our workplaces, our streets, our parks, urban areas, and playgrounds. As we establish the design principles that enriched environments entail, they should be incorporated into the core of the Capability Approach, and be incorporated into development indices worldwide, including the World Happiness Report and the UN’s Human Development Index. Human-centered, experiential design should be seen as the fundamental human right that it is.
Enriched Environments Foster Conscious Cognitions; Conscious Cognitions Promote Agency
One last important dimension of enriched built environments remains to be discussed: their capacity to shift us out of our ordinary, nonconscious, egocentric point of view. If we conceptualize human consciousness as a spectrum from nonconscious to conscious cognitions, then an enriched environment can slide us across that scale, toward a more conscious state of awareness. Antonio Damasio writes that humans and animals both “form intentions, formulate goals, perform actions” in the process of collecting information from the environments they inhabit, but as far as we know, only people “have the capacity to do these things while at the same time using the internalized schemas of the space of their bodies and the space around their bodies to contemplate what they are doing, why they are doing it, and where they are, or are not.” This ability to think and act while at the same time watching ourselves think and act is called metacognition, an awareness that rests in part on our human capacity to conceptualize ourselves in the third as well as in the first person; or if we shift from literary terminology to environmental imagery, allocentrically, from a point of view outside ourselves, as well as egocentrically, from the inside, from the zero degree of our own body. Unlike the nonconscious and distracted ways in which we mostly apprehend our environmental surroundings, during conscious thought, we experience ourselves as physical, thinking beings from a hypothetical allocentric perspective, imagining ourselves as bodies in space, among other people and other objects.
For a design to nudge—in some cases, to shove—our cognitions over from the nonconscious end of the spectrum toward the more or wholly conscious end, the designer must devise ways to make us shift out of our ordinary, habit-driven state and attend to our surroundings. The environment itself makes us conscious of the interactive nature of our relationship to our own bodies, to the natural world, to the social world, and to itself, and only then can we reflect upon our experience from multiple points of view. Why is this desirable? Because promoting the awareness that we ourselves are discrete, situated beings in a particular place, at only this and no other moment in time, fosters our sense of ourselves as both individual agents and collective actors in our worlds.
What is each person able to do and be? No matter where we reside, we need the sense that we play a role in the shaping of our days and weeks, that we exercise some measure of control over the trajectory of our lives and the ways we live them. By fostering memorable experiences, enriched environments enhance our sense of place. And they lay the groundwork for us to take more of an active role in the shaping of our constructed worlds. Each new enriched environment could help effectuate the start of a momentum that will reverse the cycle of self-perpetuating beggary in which most people live, helping to put in motion and propel a self-perpetuating cycle of virtue in its place. People will expect and actively demand more from the places they inhabit. They will work harder to ensure that what gets built meets these higher expectations.
Looking and Moving Forward
More than ever, today we are all in a position to expect, insist upon, and help to create more enriched environments. We understand many orders of magnitude more about people’s experiential needs, and with each passing year, that knowledge grows. Climate change has heightened people’s general awareness about the interdependence of environments, built and natural, instigating a worldwide discussion about how we manage the earth’s resources and landscapes, which will be ongoing for decades to come. Already, one felicitous consequence of climate change is that it has changed the way designers operate. As we saw in the Scottish Parliament, which was finished in 2004, the three professions—architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design—are starting to reintegrate and collaborate after decades of operating in more or less distinct silos. New digital technologies of design and manufacturing have the potential to make it even more possible and cost-effective for designers to address an ever-wider range of people’s experiential needs, even at the mega-scale that today’s cities demand. Computer-aided design offers a powerful array of tools that greatly expand the range of forms that can be cost-effectively engineered and manufactured or constructed. Digital modeling enables practitioners to explore countless formal iterations of unprecedented complexity while maintaining a design that adheres to prespecified parameters. Inexpensive 3-D printing now enables designers to quickly model ideas. More and more tools will be available to run performance and other kinds of tests on these models. Computer simulations of auditory, wind, and other conditions have existed for years. Virtual reality has so greatly improved that neuroscientists can now study people’s neurological and psychological reactions to simulated environments in real time, as they currently do with the StarCAVE at the University of California, San Diego.
Advances have been made in the field of construction as well. The possibilities of computer-aided manufacturing, through computer numerically controlled production processes—analogous to three-dimensional digital printing, but for entire building components—are ever-expanding. As a result, designers are, for the first time in the built environment’s history, able to uncouple the mass production of building elements from the curse of simplistic repetition. The Aqua Tower by Jeanne Gang of Studio Gang in Chicago, which was built by a real estate developer admirably ready to try something new, stands as just one impressive example of how much simpler and more economical it now is to incorporate irregular and curved forms into large-scale designs. If curving surfaces entice us, architects can now design them more frequently than before. Digital computation made it economical to manufacture Aqua Tower’s swerves and irregular floor slabs on site. The lilting facade serves multiple purposes both “functional” and “aesthetic.” They stabilize the high-rise against wind forces by “confusing” the winds’ paths. Balconies are shaped to correspond to the unit’s internal layout, views, and orientation to the sun. When Aqua Tower’s swerves are seen from the proper vantage point (which includes the distance-view from which most Chicagoans see the building), they impart a kind of op art effect. A static structure, paradoxically, appears to move, to ripple, almost, in Chicago’s legendary winds.
The technological innovations underlying the design and construction of Aqua Tower make it easier for designers to produce projects that will sustain people’s attentions and interest over time. Surfaces and compositions can be made to seem actively, even restlessly figural from every angle, even though they are in actuality inert. Nader Tehrani of the Boston-based firm NADAAA, working with John Wardle Architects of Melbourne, did this in the School of Design at the University of Melbourne (MSD), a building that gracefully integrates all the climatological, material, and social circumstances of its use with the building’s pragmatic and mechanical functions, and brims with stop-short moments and innovative ideas. The architects inflected each part of this large academic building to the conditions of its site, so it serves simultaneously as an active pass-through from one part of campus to the other and as a social incubator for the school’s design community.
Spanning its seventy-foot-wide central atrium is a wooden beam structure in laminated veneer lumber, modeled into deep, irregularly shaped coffers. Each coffer’s angles are canted to most effectively diffuse the bright Australian light streaming in from above, creating an origami-like structure that houses and hides the systems for ventilation and lighting. Near one end of the atrium, this heavily modeled structure dramatically erupts from the ceiling into a hung, perforated sculptural form that offers views into its habitable spaces; it houses interior classroom and studio presentation spaces.
Aqua Building (Studio Gang), Chicago, Illinois. WilsonsTravels Stock/Alamy Stock Photo.
The Melbourne School of Design interior stops us short because it deploys and challenges our form-identification, pattern-detection, and trajectory-completion schemas. Like the Aqua Tower facade, but with even greater skill and complexity, MSD entices us perceptually—over and over again—into perceiving motion when none exists. We cannot just look. We cannot but move around and explore this unusual space, trying to work out the profiles of their constructions and the contours of their forms. MSD also exhibits how fractalization can help to establish and reinforce a human sense of scale while generating patterned complexity in its overall form, the deployment of its materials, and the nature and finish of its surfaces.
Aqua Tower and MSD only begin to demonstrate the promise that digital technologies hold out for designers who wish to explore the many affordable avenues that contemporary designers can explore in order to better address human experiential needs. Today more than ever before, with age-old materials and means as well as new ones, any place can be inflected to the complexities of our various social worlds, and to the specificities of the site, the body and its multisensory systems, and our experience through the passage of time.
We have much to do, and on a vast scale. But let’s not lose sight of the good that every improvement will bring. Big changes can start with small improvements, to this apartment building, that house, this facade, the neighborhood community center, the big-box store, the neighborhood playground or park, the urban square, that office or civic or cultural building. The built environment, like a society of individual people, is a society of individual buildings, structures, places, and landscapes. Each one of them can be enriching or soul-deadening by design.
If you think it’s unrealistic to set in motion a virtuous cycle of good design, consider the Netherlands. The baseline quality of the Dutch built environment outclasses the United States by nearly every measure—design and aesthetics, quality of materials, and quality of construction. This is true of marquee projects and vernacular ones, in big cities and in small towns. Why? First, design education takes place within an intellectual context that welcomes new knowledge from fields like environmental psychology and health care. Second, most municipalities require that new projects undergo aesthetic review by a committee of licensed design professionals, whose membership rotates regularly. Third, because of all this, the Dutch are habituated to better design: they live with it, they expect it, and they demand it. As a result, standards for materials and construction, even for ordinary buildings, are higher. This is not to say that Dutch design represents the apex of development in good design; it does not. But the Dutch have grown accustomed to better buildings, and so they get them.
School of Design (NADAAA with John Wardle), University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia. Photography by John Horner/Melbourne School of Design, John Wardle Architects and NADAAA in collaboration.
Playing at Geopark: Geopark (Helen & Hard), Stavanger, Norway. Photography by Emile Ashley/Courtesy Helen & Hard.
For good and for ill, buildings and cityscapes and landscapes literally shape and help constitute our lives and ourselves. Designing and building enriched environments, ones that are informed by what we now know and are learning about how people experience the places they inhabit, will promote the development of human capabilities. Just as is true with regard to global warming and the earth’s environment, nearly everything we construct today will outlast us to affect those who come after us, sometimes generations and generations of them. Shouldn’t a better built environment be the legacy we leave to the world?