The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was made. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature on your e-book reader.
INTRODUCTION: THE NEXT ENVIRONMENTAL REVOLUTION
xvi The built environment conveys Data in this paragraph are drawn and calculated from the United States Census Bureau, Projections of the Size and Composition of the U.S. Population: 2014 to 2060 Population Estimates and Projections Current Population Reports, by Sandra L. Colby and Jennifer M. Ortman (March 2015); census.gov/popclock/; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_of_the_United_States; Jennifer Seal Cramer and William Browning, “Transforming Building Practices trhough Biophilic Design,” ed. Stephen R. Kellert, Judith Heerwagen, and Martin L. Mador, ed., Biophilic Design: The Theory, Science, and Practice of Bringing Buildings to Life (New York: Wiley, 2008), 335–46.
xviii By 2030, Arthur C. Nelson, “Toward a New Metropolis: The Opportunity to Rebuild America,” Brookings Institution (2004), brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/reports/2004/12/metropolitanpolicy-nelson/20041213_rebuildamerica.pdf.
xviii Around the globe, a little more than United Nations un.org/esa/population/publications/sixbillion/sixbilpart1.pdf. One study helps make sense of the global trends toward hyper urbanization: Shlomo Angel, Planet of Cities (Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2012).
xviii And the number of megalopolises United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision, esa.un.org/unpd/wup/CD-ROM/.
xx To accommodate the vast migration “Preparing for China’s Urban Billion,” Global McKinsey Institute (March 2009); also see esa.un.org/wup2009/unup/index.asp?panel=1 (thanks to Christopher Rogacz for research assistance). Another way to calculate this would be to say that China needs to build one new city the size of the New York urban area every two years until 2030 http://special.globaltimes.cn.2010-11/597548.html.
xxi If you consider Stephen Kellert, Building for Life: Designing and Understanding the Human-Nature Connection (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2005), 90–122; see also William A. Shutkin, The Land That Could Be: Environmentalism and Democracy in the 21st Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
xxvi Churchill declared “Churchill and the Commons Chamber,” parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/building/palace/architecture.
xxvii Certainly, some writers have led The books cited in this paragraph, among the most influential books on urbanism of the last half century, are: Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961); Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: Crime Prevention Through Urban Design (New York: Macmillan, 1973); William H. Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (Ann Arbor, MI: Edwards Brothers, 1980); Jan Gehl, Cities for People (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2010) and Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2011).
xxvii Jacobs, Whyte, Newman and Gehl’s: Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964); Edward Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World, 2nd ed. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009).
xxviii Recently a group of cognitive neuroscientists O’Keefe found the type of nerve cell in the brains of rats that also exists in the human brain that recognize place, while May-Britt and Edvard Moser identified the grid cells that facilitate wayfinding. See Marianne Fyhn et al., “Spatial Representation in the Entorhinal Cortex,” Science 305, no. 5688 (August 27, 2004): 1258–264; Edvard I. Moser et al., “Grid Cells and Cortical Representation,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 15 (2014): 466–81; Edvard I. Moser et al., “Place Cells, Grid Cells, and the Brain’s Spatial Representation System,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 31 (2008): 69–89.
xxviii Lynch’s work highlighted John B. Eberhard’s Brain Landscape: The Coexistence of Neuroscience and Architecture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) and Architecture and the Brain: A New Knowledge Base from Neuroscience (Atlanta: Greenway, 2007) were among ANFA members’ initial forays into the field (Eberhard is the organization’s founder). Others: Harry Mallgrave, The Architect’s Brain: Neuroscience, Creativity, and Architecture (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Harry Mallgrave, Architecture and Embodiment: The Implications of the New Sciences and Humanities for Design (New York: Routledge, 2013); Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2008); Sarah Robinson and Pallasmaa, eds., Mind in Architecture: Neuroscience, Embodiment, and the Future of Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). See also Ann Sussman and Justin B. Hollander, Cognitive Architecture: Designing for How We Respond to the Built Environment (New York: Routledge, 2015). Two excellent studies that deal more extensively with urban design are Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design (New York: Farrar, Straus, 2013) and Colin Ellard, Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life (New York: Bellevue, 2015).
xxix An experience differs John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee Books, 1934): 37; Mark Johnson has an excellent discussion of Dewey, experience, and embodiment in “The Embodied Meaning of Architecture,” ed. Robinson and Pallasmaa, Mind in Architecture, 33–50.
xxxi Even in fully formed adults Eleanor A. Maguire et al.; “Navigation-Related Structural Change in the Hippocampi of Taxi Drivers,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 97, no. 8 (2000): 4398–403; Eleanor A. Maguire et al., “Navigation Expertise and the Human Hippocampus: A Structural Brain Imaging Analysis,” Hippocampus 13 (2003): 208–17.
xxxii Once he put it this way Kahn quoted in “Marin City Redevelopment,” Progressive Architecture 41 (November 1960): 153; Joan Meyers-Levy and Rui Zhu, “The Influence of Ceiling Height: The Effect of Priming on the Type of Processing People Use,” Journal of Consumer Research 34 (August 2007): 174–86.
CHAPTER 1: THE SORRY PLACES WE LIVE
1 The headline to Goldhagen, “Boring Buildings: Why Is American Architecture So Bad?” American Prospect (December 2001).
4 Thirty percent of UN Habitat, “Slums of the World: The Face of Urban Poverty in the New Millennium?” (2003) and “UN Habitat, The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements” (2003); Daniel Tovrov, “Five Biggest Slums in the World,” International Business Times (December 2011), ibtimes.com/5-biggest-slums-world-381338; “5 Largest Slums in the World”, http://borgenproject.org/5-largest-slums-world/.
4 How might a child Andrew Baum et al., “Stress and the Environment,” Journal of Social Issues (January 1981): 4–35; Andrew Baum and G. E. Davis, “Reducing the Stress of High-Density Living: An Architectural Intervention,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 38, no. 3 (1980): 471–81; Robert Gifford, Environmental Psychology: Principles and Practices, 5th ed. (Optimal Books, 2013), 253–54; Upali Nanda et al., “Lessons from Neuroscience: Form Follows Function, Emotion Follows Form,” Intelligent Buildings International 5, suppl. 1 (2013): 61–78; Esther M. Sternberg and Matthew A. Wilson, “Neuroscience and Architecture: Seeking Common Ground,” Cell 127, no. 2 (2006): 239–42.
10 The difference in learning Peter Barrett, Yufan Zhang, et al., “A Holistic, Multi-Level Analysis Identifying the Impact of Classroom Design on Pupils’ Learning,” Building and Environment 59 (2013): 678–79.
10 “soft” classrooms Gifford, Environmental Psychology, 330; C. Kenneth Tanner, “Effects of School Design on Student Outcomes,” Journal of Educational Administration 47, no. 3 (2009): 381–399; Rotraut Walden, ed., Schools for the Future: Design Proposals from Architectural Psychology (New York: Springer, 2015), 1–10: Walden writes that classrooms that worked best “did not look like learning spaces but rather like individualized, comfortable living rooms.”
10 Windowless rooms John Zeisel, Inquiry by Design: Environment/Behavior/Neuroscience in Architecture, Interiors, Landscape and Planning, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 2006), 12; Lisa Heschong, “An Investigation into the Relationship between Daylighting and Human Performance: Detailed Report,” Heschong Mahone Group for Pacific Gas & Electric Company (1999); Simone Borrelbach, “The Historical Development of School Buildings in Germany,” in ed. Walden, Schools for the Future, 51–88.
10 And the sort of noise Gifford, Environmental Psychology, 308–12.
12 Explaining that he wanted Nouvel, quoted in theguardian.com/artand design/2010/jul/06/jean-nouvel-sepentine-pavilion.
12 Humans respond to Hessan Ghamari et al.; “Curved Versus Sharp: An MRI-Based Examination of Neural Reactions to Contours in the Built Healthcare Environment,” conference paper, 2014; Oshin Vartanian et al., “Impact of Contour on Aesthetic Judgments and Approach-Avoidance Decisions in Architecture,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, suppl. 2 (2011): 10446–453. See studies also by Christian Rittelmeyer, cited in Rotraut Walden, ed., Schools for the Future (Springer, 2015), 98–99; Nancy F. Aiken, The Biological Sources of Art (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), 17.
12 The color red For an interesting discussion about how seeing red becomes the experience of seeing red, see Nicholas Humphrey, Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
12 We know that Sally Augustin, Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2009), 142; Joy Monice Malnar and Frank Vodvarka, Sensory Design (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2004), 205–6.
12 An all-red environment Esther M. Sternberg, Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-Being (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2009), 35–42.
17 Our “report card” infrastructurereportcard.org/a/#p/grade-sheet/gpa; nytimes.com/2014/01/15/business/international/indiasinfrastructure-projects-stalled-by-red-tape.html?_r=o.
18 In much of Africa Marianne Fay and Mary Morrison, “Infrastructure in Latin America and the Caribbean: Recent Developments and Key Challenges,” The World Bank (Report number 32640, 2005).
19 Contact with nature confers Roger Ulrich, “Biophilic Theory and Research for Healthcare Design,” in ed. Stephen R. Kellert, Judith Heerwagen, and Martin Mador, Biophilic Design (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2008), 87–106; Kellert, “Dimensions, Elements, and Attributes of Biophilic Design,” in Biophilic Design, 3–19; Sandra A. Sherman et al., “Post Occupancy Evaluation of Healing Gardens in a Pediatric Center” in ed. Cor Wagenaar, The Architecture of Hospitals (Rotterdam: Nai Publishers, 2006), 330–51.
19 When people in Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (UK), People and Places: Public Attitudes Toward Beauty (2010).
19 Merely the view of grass Rachel Kaplan, “The Nature of the View from Home: Psychological Benefits,” Environment and Behavior (2001): 507–42; Rachel Kaplan, “Environmental Appraisal, Human Needs, and a Sustainable Future,” in ed. Tommy Gärling and Reginald G. Golledge, Behavior and Environment: Psychological and Geographical Approaches (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1993): 117–40.
19 And still, in spite worldcitiescultureforum.com/data/of-public-green-space-parks-and-gardens.
21 ambient noise levels The Environmental Protection Agency set 55 dB as the standard for outdoor residential noise in the 1970s. The World Health Organization, in 1999, recommended 50 dB; World Health Organization, Guidelines for Community Noise, ed. Birgitta Berglund, Thomas Lindvall, and Dietrich H. Schwela, 1999. The information on New York City subways is from Lisa Goines and Louis Hagler, “Noise Pollution: A Modern Plague,” Southern Medical Journal 100, no. 3 (2007): 287–94. In many cities, daytime noise levels hover around 75 decibels, even though levels above 60 dB are associated with higher rates of hospital admission for stroke: Jaana I. Halonen et al., “Long-term Exposure to Traffic Pollution and Hospital Admissions in London,” Environmental Pollution 208, part A (2016): 48–57. In London, and presumably in other similarly large, world-class cities, decibel levels of 50–55 can be found only inside urban parks and interior courtyards, or in the dead of night; info.acoustiblok.com/blog/bid/70023/Noise-Pollution-Ranking-America-s-Noisiest-Cities; theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/05/just-how-bad-noise-pollution-our-health/2008/.
22 The European Union Malnar and Vodvarka, Sensory Design, 138–39; D. Balogh et al., “Noise in the ICU,” Intensive Care Medicine 19, no. 6 (1993): 343–46;
22 The World Health Organization outlines Baum et al., “Stress and the Environment,” 23–25; Malnar and Vodvarka, Sensory Design, 138–39.
22 Noise levels higher I. Busch-Vishniac et al., “Noise Levels in Johns Hopkins Hospital,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 118, no. 6 (2005): 3629–645.
22 Exposure to continuous WHO, Guidelines for Community Noise, 47–49.
22 Children who attend Arline L. Bronzaft, “The Effect of a Noise Abatement Program on Reading Ability,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 1, no. 3 (1981): 215–22; cited in Gifford, Environmental Psychology, 309.
24 70 percent of the houses Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson, Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2009), 17, 235.
24 The logic driving An excellent introduction to the financial orientation and design methods of the US home-building industry is Anthony Alofsin, Dream Home: What You Need to Know Before You Buy (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013). And on the US construction industry’s egregious irrationalities and market inefficiencies—which greatly contribute to the multiple disincentives to innovate as well as to the appalling craftsmanship of most new American construction—see Barry B. LePatner, Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets: How to Fix America’s Trillion-Dollar Construction Industry (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2008).
24 Outdated land-use ordinances On the inefficiency and anachronism of US zoning codes, see Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (New York: Penguin, 2011). On the inefficiency and egregious anachronism of both municipal building and zoning codes, see Jonathan Barnett, “How Codes Shaped Development in the United States, and Why They Should Be Changed,” in ed. Stephen Marshall, Urban Coding and Planning (New York: Routledge, 2011), 200–26.
25 developments promote lifestyles Richard J. Jackson with Stacy Sinclair, Designing Healthy Communities (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2012), 10; see also Jackson’s website: designinghealthycommunities.org/.
25 An auto-bound, sedentary lifestyle Michael Mehaffey and Richard J. Jackson, “The Grave Health Risks of Unwalkable Communities,” Atlantic Cities, citylab.com/design/2012/06/grave-health-risks-unwalkable-communities/2362/.
25 suburbs can cultivate Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000); Charles Montgomery, Happy City, 146–75.
25 They lose out Montgomery, Happy City, 227–50.
27 nature tamed by suburbia On how understimulation in both landscapes and architecture causes stress detrimental to health and well-being, see Henk Staats, “Restorative Environments,” in ed. Susan D. Clayton, Oxford Handbook of Environmental and Conservation Psychology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 445–58; Colin Ellard, Places of the Heart, 107–8; V. S. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human (New York: Norton, 2011), 218–44; Montgomery, Happy City, 91–115; and most recently, a synthesis of the basic research: Jacoba Urist, “The Psychological Cost of Boring Buildings,” New York, April 2016: nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/04/the-psychological-cost-of-boring-buildings.html.
27 Theo, the protagonist Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch (New York: Little, Brown, 2013), 221–22.
27 the same sort of tedium On the multisensory nature of how people perceive surface-based cues. One study on how people perceived wood found that subjects were quite adroit at distinguishing real wood from fake: Krista Overvliet and Salvador Soto-Faraco, “I Can’t Believe This Isn’t Wood! An Investigation in the Perception of Naturalness,” Acta Psychologica 136, no. 1 (2011): 95–111.
29 Big Dig Erich Moskowitz, “True Cost of Big Dig Exceeds $24 Billion with Interest, Officials Determine,” Boston.com (July 10, 2012), boston.com/metrodesk/2012/07/10/true-cost-big-dig-exceeds-billion-with-interest-officials-determine/AtR5AakwfEyORFSeSpBn1K/story.html.
30 Six years after Casey Ross, “Greenway Funds Fall Short as Costs Rise,” Boston.com, April 19, 2010; boston.com/business/articles/2010/04/19/greenway_hit_by_rising_costs_drop_in_state_funds/. See also Sarah Williams Goldhagen, “Park Here,” New Republic, October 6, 2010.
30 What’s more, construction See LePatner, Broken Buildings; Steven Kieran and James Timberlake, Refabricating Architecture: How Manufacturing Methodologies Are Poised to Transform Building Construction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003), 23.
32 Consider, for example On One WTC, see Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Architectural Record, January 2015.
34 architectural education The best critique of contemporary architectural education is Peter Buchanan’s The Big Rethink: Rethinking Architectural Education, published as a series in the London-based Architectural Review in 2011 and 2012, and available online. Some of Buchanan’s suggestions for the reconfiguration of architectural education echo those advanced here. In addition, D. Kirk Hamilton and David H. Watkins, in Evidence-Based Design for Multiple Building Types (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2008), lay out a sensible case for modifying the way architects approach design vis-à-vis their clients and the marketplace, 1–26. Evidence-based design (EBD) is mainly used in buildings with health-care uses (although Hamilton and Watkins argue that it should pertain to a wider range of institutions, such as schools and workplaces). The standards for EBD are and should be stringent. The approach proposed here can include EBD principles, but can and should extend beyond their rather limited province.
Christopher Alexander is perhaps one of the earliest and certainly the best-known (to architects, at least) proponents of an EBD approach: A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), although what Alexander considers “evidence” would not meet contemporary standards. A Pattern Language and Alexander’s subsequent books present a puzzling mix of trenchant observations, commonsense recommendations, and retrograde, antimodern tenets for design. And nowhere does Alexander deal systematically with irrationalities in human perception and cognition, which are legion.
34 Unusual forms and statement architecture Buchanan, “The Big Rethink I,” Architectural Review (2012), complains that at too many major schools of architecture, “rather than relevance, what is sought out is originality, no matter how spurious”; see also David Halpern, “An Evidence-Based Approach to Building Happiness,” in Building Happiness: An Architecture to Make You Smile, ed. Jane Wernick (London: Black Dog, 2008), 160–61.
34 Jeff Speck Speck quoted in Martin C. Pedersen, “Step by Step, Can American Cities Walk Their Way to Healthy Economic Development?,” Metropolis, October 2012: 30. A sensitive assessment of how students are becoming less well trained in the essential tool of being able to accurately assess scale, see also Tim Culvahouse, “Learning How Big Things Are,” at tculvahouse.tumblr.com/post/123316363707/learning-how-big-things-are.
36 Photographs confer the impression On some of the ways that photography distorts built environments in general and architectural space in particular, see these articles, all by Claire Zimmerman: “Photography into Building in Postwar Architecture: The Smithsons and James Stirling,” Art History, April 2012: 270–87; “The Photographic Image from Chicago to Hunstanton,” in ed. M. Crinson and C. Zimmerman, Neo-avant-garde and Postmodern: Postwar Architecture in Britain and Beyond (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 203–28; “Photographic Modern Architecture: Inside ‘The New Deep,’” Journal of Architecture 9, no. 3 (2004): 331–54; “The Monster Magnified: Architectural Photography as Visual Hyperbole,” Perspecta 40 (2008): 132–43.
38 photographs of another widely celebrated Lawrence Cheek, “On Architecture: How the New Central Library Really Stacks Up,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 26, 2007.
39 Most surprisingly Antonio Damasio, in The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999), 1–51, establishes (following William James) that human emotions are first and foremost body-based. He writes, “emotions use the body as their theater” (51), explaining that emotions are changes in our internal body milieu in response to either external experiences or our internal representations of those experiences. One of dozens of articles emphasizing the relationship of human emotions to spatial navigation and other aspects of environmental perception, see Elizabeth A. Phelps, “Human Emotions and Memory: Interactions of the Amygdala and Hippocampal Complex,” Current Opinion in Neurobiology 14 (2004): 198–202.
39 We also mostly ignore Anthony Giddens discusses the reliance on expertise as one of the conditions and consequences of modern life in The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991).
40 Not only are consumers Processing anomalous information takes much more energy than processing typical information: William R. Hendee and Peter N. T. Wells, The Perception of Visual Information (New York: Springer, 1997). Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus, 2010), 66, discusses the dynamics of anomaly detection in his description of the “mere exposure effect”; and describes how it disposes people to deem something as objectively normative, 103. Some research robustly confirms the importance of the mere exposure effect to the development of place attachment; others cast doubt upon its relevance: in a meta-analysis of ten studies, the mere exposure effect’s pertinence to place attachment was shown to be moderate or even weak: Kavi M. Korpela, “Place Attachment,” in Oxford Handbook of Environmental and Conservation Psychology, 152.
40 In the wake Steven Pinker, for example, perpetuates this conventional view, maintaining that art constitutes nothing more than a device for “pushing our pleasure buttons”: How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997), 539; although to be sure, the comment is not about the built environment but artistic practice more generally. For a more enlightened approach, see V. S. Ramachandran and W. R. Hirstein, “The Science of Art: A Neurological Theory of Aesthetic Experience,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 6, nos. 6–7 (1999), 15–51; and Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain, 241–45.
CHAPTER 2: BLINDSIGHT
44 For understanding how Blindsight is a well-known phenomenon in cognitive neuroscience and studies of visual perception, especially because it poses salient issues for the understanding of consciousness. For one discussion, see Güven Güzeldere et al., “The Nature and Function of Consciousness: Lessons from Blindsight,” The New Cognitive Neurosciences, 2nd ed., ed. Michael S. Gazzaniga (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 1277–284. The study of the subject with left hemisphere neglect and the burning house is recounted in John C. Marshall and Peter W. Halligan, “Blindsight and Insight in Visuo-Spatial Neglect,” Nature 336, no. 6201 (1988): 766–67.
46 If someone sitting Angela K.-y. Leung et al., “Embodied Metaphors and Creative ‘Acts,’” Psychological Science 23 (2012): 502–9.
46 Or this: if your Michael L. Slepian et al.; “Shedding Light on Insight: Priming Bright Ideas,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 46, no. 4 (2010): 696–700; for the impact of bright light on emotional affect, see Alison Jing Xu and Aparna A. Labroo, “Turning on the Hot Emotional System with Bright Light,” Journal of Consumer Psychology 24, no. 2 (2014): 207–16.
46 Or this: a real estate broker Oshin Vartanian et al.; “Impact of Contour on Aesthetic Judgements and Approach-Avoidance Decisions in Architecture,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 10, suppl. 2 (2013): 10446–453: Ori Amir, Irving Biederman, and Kenneth J. Hayworth, “The Neural Basis for Shape Preference,” Vision Research 51, no. 20 (2011): 2198–206.
47 The new paradigm Effectively I am introducing here the concept of embodied cognition, which is also sometimes called “grounded cognition” or, the term I prefer, “situated cognition.” These integrally related but not completely overlapping concepts together help to constitute this new paradigm of cognition, which increasingly is finding confirmation in cognitive neuroscience. The literature on embodied cognition is vast and growing. Some sources I have found particularly helpful are by Lawrence W. Barsalou and Mark Johnson. By Barsalou: “Grounded Cognition,” Annual Review of Psychology 59 (2008): 617–45; “Grounded Cognition: Past, Present and Future,” Topics in Cognitive Science 2 (2010): 716–24, and Barsalou et al., “Social Embodiment,” in ed. Brian H. Ross, The Psychology of Learning and Motivation: Advances in Research and Theory 43 (2003): 43–92. Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1987); Johnson, Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2008), and Johnson with George Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
Recent work in psychology and cognitive neuroscience increasingly confirms the embodied mind paradigm: examples can be found in The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition, ed. Philip Robbins and Murat Aydede (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition, ed. Lawrence Shapiro (New York: Routledge, 2014); Raymond W. Gibbs Jr., Embodiment and Cognitive Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
48 The emerging mind-body-environment paradigm Barsalou, “Grounded Cognition,” 619, 635, explains the relationship of grounded to embodied cognition—plato.stanford.edu/entries/embodied-cognition/#MetCog—and writes that still in 1998 there was “widespread skepticism about grounded cognition” but that now, it is much more generally accepted. Also Paula M. Niedenthal and Barsalou, “Embodiment in Attitudes, Social Perception, and Emotion,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 9, no. 3: 184–211, at 186, write that “the main idea underlying all theories of embodied cognition is that cognitive representations and operations are fundamentally grounded in their physical context.”
50 Cognitive scientists of all stripes Johnson, Meaning of the Body, 25–35.
51 Nonverbal cognitions W. Yeh and Barsalou, “The Situated Nature of Concepts,” American Journal of Psychology 119, no. 3 (2006): 349–84.
52 One of the cognitive revolution’s Antonio Damasio emphasizes the nonconscious and embodied nature of thought in many of his books, including Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: G.P. Putnam’s, 1994); Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (New York: Pantheon, 2010), and in the previously cited The Feeling of What Happens; see also George Engel, “The Need for a New Medical Model: A Challenge for Biomedicine,” Science 196, no. 4286 (1977): 129–36.
52 We remain, in Daniel Kahneman’s words Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 24, 200.
54 That’s one kind Mental simulation is extensively discussed in the literature on embodied cognition, as well as in the literature on mirror neurons: Barsalou, “Grounded Cognition,” Barsalou, “Perceptual Symbol Systems,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22 (1999): 577–660; Damasio, Feeling of What Happens and Self Comes to Mind; Anjan Chatterjee and Oshen Vartanian, “Neuroaesthetics,” in Trends in Cognitive Science 18 (2014): 370–75; Vittorio Gallese and Corrado Sinigaglia, “What Is So Special about Embodied Simulation?” Trends in Cognitive Science 15, no. 11 (2011): 512–19, and Vittorio Gallese, “Being Like Me: Self-Other Identity, Mirror Neurons, and Empathy,” in ed. Susan Hurley and Nick Chater, Perspectives on Imitation: From Neuroscience to Social Science, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 108–18.
54 That simulation, like most Gabriel Kreiman, Christof Koch, and Itzhak Fried found that 88 percent of the neurons that fire selectively when an image is actually seen also fire when it is mentally imagined, or simulated: “Imagery Neurons in the Human Brain,” Nature 408 (November 16, 2000): 357–361. Bruno Laeng and Unni Sulutvedt found that if people mentally simulate the experience of looking into a light, their pupils dilate, as though they were actually seeing that light: “The Eye Pupil Adjusts to Imaginary Light,” Psychological Science 25, no. 1 (2014): 188–97. On multisensory and cross-modal perception, see also Mark L. Johnson, “Embodied Reason,” in Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture, ed. Gail Weiss and Honi Fern Haber (New York: Routledge, 1999), 81–102. Sensorimotor cognition is described in Erik Myin and J. Kevin O’Regan, “Situated Perception and Sensation in Vision and Other Modalities: A Sensorimotor Approach,” Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition, 185–97.
54 Such schemas, innumerable Barbara Tversky, for example, writes vis-à-vis human spatial perception that it is “people’s enduring conceptions of the spatial world that they inhabit rather than the momentary internalized imagery of the current scene”: “Structures of Mental Spaces: How People Think About Space,” Environment and Behavior 35, no.1 (2003), 66–80. The neurological basis of simulation is discussed in Jean Decety and Julie Grèzes, “The Power of Simulation: Imagining One’s Own and Other’s Behavior,” Brain Research 1079, no. 1 (2006): 4–14.
55 Some of these are familiar Johnson, Meaning of the Body, cited above.
55 Haptic impressions Harry Mallgrave, The Architect’s Brain, 189–206.
58 Nonconscious and conscious Philip Merikle and Meredyth Daneman, “Conscious vs. Unconscious Perception,” The New Cognitive Neurosciences, 2nd ed., ed. Michael S. Gazzaniga (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 1295–303. Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking, Fast and Slow, differentiates nonconscious from conscious thought by using the terminology “System One” and “System Two,” but he describes the mind moving from one to another through a kind of toggle-switch system, with System Two kicking in when System One fails to produce a cognition that comports with reality. As I explain in chapter 7, I prefer the concept of a spectrum, whereby nonconscious cognitions can become available to conscious cognitions depending upon a variety of circumstances. For the model of nonconscious and conscious cognition that I prefer, see Stanislas Dehaene, The Cognitive Neuroscience of Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).
59 Like Glass’s generative river Barbara Tversky, in “Spatial Cognition,” Cambridge Handbook, describes two ways of responding to environment: one is responding from perception; the other, responding from memory, 205.
59 Even when we pay Merikle and Daneman, “Conscious vs. Unconscious Perception,” The New Cognitive Sciences; J. M. Ackerman, C. C. Nocera, and John A. Bargh, “Incidental Haptic Sensations Influence Social Judgments and Decisions,” Science 328, no. 5986 (2010): 1712–715.
59 The door, in other words In E. S. Cross, A. F. Hamilton, and S. T. Grafton, “Building a Motor Simulation de Novo: Observation of Dance by Dancers,” NeuroImage 31, no. 3 (2006): 1257–267, the authors had dancers watch the performance of an unfamiliar dance by other dancers, and identified the same neurons firing as those that would fire if they themselves were to dance: the dancers were mentally simulating the body movementss they would make were they themselves performing the dance.
60 This in turn permeates Lera Boroditsky and Michael Ramscar, “The Roles of Body and Mind in Abstract Thought,” Psychological Science 13, no. 2 (2002): 185–89; Barbara Tversky, “Spatial Cognition,” Cambridge Handbook, and Tversky, “The Structure of Experience,” in ed. T. Shipley and J. M. Zachs, Understanding Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 436–64; Catherine L. Reed and Martha J. Farah, “The Psychological Reality of the Body Schema: A Test with Normal Participants,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 21, no. 2 (1995): 334–43, and Catherine L. Reed, “Body Schemas,” in A. Meltzoff and W. Prinz, eds., The Imitative Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 233–43.
60 We now know Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 1–60.
61 Today, psychological research Pencil in mouth study: Paula M. Niedenthal, “Embodying Emotion,” Science 316, no. 5827 (2007): 1002–5.
61 In all, you assumed Niedenthal, “Embodying Emotion”; Paula M. Niedenthal, Lawrence Barsalou et al., “Embodiment in Attitudes, Social Perception, and Emotion,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 9, no. 3 (2005): 184–211.
62 Another way to say Barbara Tversky describes experiments by Sadalla and Staplan that confirm that when people travel on a route, turning corners increases their perception of the distance covered: Tversky, “Spatial Cognition,” Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition, 207.
64 contemporary skyscrapers David Childs, personal communication with the author, December 2014.
64 Ludwig Hilberseimer Richard Pommer, In the Shadow of Mies: Ludwig Hilberseimer: Architect, Educator, and Urban Planner (New York: Rizzoli, 1988).
66 Haussmann’s replanning of Paris Haussmann arranging the stars is quoted in T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris and the Art of Manet and His Followers (New York: Knopf, 1984), 42. On the putatively dehumanizing aspects of the grid, see Alberto Pérez-Gomez’s writings, beginning with Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science.
66 Today, studies on T. Hafting et al., “Microstructure of a Spatial Map in the Entorhinal Cortex,” Nature 436 (2005): 801–6; Niall Burgess, “How Your Brain Tells You Where You Are,” TED Talks, ted.com/talks/neil_burgess_how_your_brain_tells_you_where_you_are/transcript?language=en. All the neurological studies on spatial navigation discussed here, including those that identified place cells and grid cells, were conducted on laboratory rats, not humans. But it is commonly believed that the human spatial navigation system works in the same way.
67 Wright eschewed the simple rectilinear Neil Levine, “Frank Lloyd Wright’s Diagonal Planning Revisited,” in ed. Robert McCarter, On and By Frank Lloyd Wright: A Primer of Architectural Principles (New York: Phaidon, 2012), 232–63.
69 mass-customized Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake, Refabricating Architecture: How Manufacturing Methodologies Are Poised to Transform Building Construction (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004).
69 Direct responses Nancy Aiken, Biological Sources, uses the more conventional behaviorist terminology, calling direct responses unconditioned and indirect ones unconditioned; Roger Ulrich, “Biophilia, Biophobia, and Natural Landscapes” in ed. Stephen Kellert and Edmund O. Wilson, The Biophilia Hypothesis (Washington, DC: Shearwater, 1993), 78–138.
69 Anyone who has visited Esther Sternberg, Healing Spaces, 51–74.
70 These are compulsions Sally Augustin, Place Advantage, 111–34.
70 Understimulating environments Ellard, Places of the Heart, 107–24; Jacoba Urist, “The Psychological Cost of Boring Buildings,” Science of Us (April 2016).
70 Some places elicit Judith H. Heerwagen and Bert Gregory, “Biophilia and Sensory Aesthetics” in ed. Stephen R. Kellert, Judith H. Heerwagen, and Martin L. Mador, Biophilic Design: The Theory, Science, and Practice of Bringing Buildings to Life (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2008), 227–41.
72 Most famously, a certain hue On color, see Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970); Henry Sanoff and Rotraut Walden, “School Environments” in Oxford Handbook of Environmental and Conservation Psychology, 276–94; Sternberg, Healing Spaces, 24–53; Augustin, Place Advantage, 48, 142; Adam Alter, Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave (New York: Penguin, 2013), 157–80.
72 Maurice Merleau-Ponty Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Routledge, 1962), 211.
73 All these are instances On metaphors and concrete experience, see Lawrence W. Barsalou, “Grounded Cognition,” 617–45.
?> Metaphors are schemas George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1980); Lera Boroditsky, “Metaphoric Structuring: Understanding Time through Spatial Metaphors,” Cognition 75 (2000): 1–28; James Geary, I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World (New York: Harper, 2011); on metaphors in architecture, see my “Aalto’s Embodied Rationalism,” in ed. Stanford Anderson, Gail Fenske, and David Fixler, Aalto and America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 13–35, and Brook Muller, “Metaphor, Environmental Receptivity, and Architectural Design,” unpublished.
76 skewed fit In The Interpretation of Cultures, Clifford Geertz writes that a metaphor generates “an incongruity of sense on one level”—in reality, no building is water-like—to produce “an influx of significance on the other”—swimming pools evoke playfulness, childhood, abandon, health, nature . . . (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 210. Thomas W. Schubert and Gün R. Semin, “Embodiment as a Unifying Perspective for Psychology,” European Journal of Social Psychology 39, no. 7 (2009): 1135–141. On the aesthetic effect of exaggeration, see V. S. Ramachandran’s notion of “peak-shift,” presented in Ramachandran and Hirstein’s “The Science of Art: A Neurological Theory of Aesthetic Experience.”
76 Like the “at home” example “Important is big” and other similar metaphors are discussed in Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By and in Philosophy in the Flesh, 47–87. On people’s association of verticality with power: Thomas W. Schubert, “Your Highness: Vertical Positions as Perceptual Symbols of Power,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 89, no. 1 (2005): 1–21; with divinity, Brian P. Meier et al., “What’s ‘Up’ With God: Vertical Space as a Representation of the Divine,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 93, no. 5 (2007): 699–710.
79 The subjects holding Joshua M. Ackerman, Christopher C. Nocera, and John A. Bargh, “Incidental Haptic Sensations Influence Social Judgments and Decisions,” Science 328, no. 5986 (2010): 1712–715; Nils B. Jostmann, Daniël Lakens, and Thomas W. Schubert, “Weight as an Embodiment of Importance,” Psychological Science 20, no. 9 (2009): 1169–174; Hans Ijzerman, Nikos Padiotis, and Sander L. Koole, “Replicability of Social-Cognitive Priming: The Case of Weight as an Embodiment of Importance,” SSRN Electronic Journal (April 2013): n.p. Some psychologists have had trouble replicating the results of the clipboard experiment, causing consternation in the field. My position is this: even if the findings of one or another experiment fails to be confirmed through replication, the existence of so many studies confirming the pervasiveness of metaphors in people’s cognitive patterns is convincing.
83 human memory Eric R. Kandel, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (New York: Norton, 2006).
83 Recall a clear childhood memory Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow, discusses the “mere context effect,” which Gifford, Environmental Psychology: Principles and Practice, 307, calls the “familiar context effect.”
84 long-term memories that are autobiographical Eric Kandel, In Search of Memory, 281–95; Barbara Maria Stafford, Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007), 107–8. On the interrelationship of memory and emotions, see Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, and Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (New York: Pantheon, 2010), Elizabeth A. Phelps, “Human Emotion and Memory: Interactions of the Amygdala and Hippocampal Complex,” Current Opinion in Neurobiology 14, no. 2 (2004): 198–202.
84 place cells Matthew A. Wilson, “The Neural Correlates of Place and Direction,” in The New Cognitive Neurosciences, 2nd ed., ed. Michael S. Gazzaniga (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 589–600. Note that place cells contain both metric (allocentric) and contextual (allocentric and egocentric) information.
84 Here, then, is another stunning fact This is dramatically illustrated throughout Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, in which the two main characters, Elena and Lila, frequently define and position their past, present, and future selves vis-à-vis the impoverished neighborhood in which they were raised.
CHAPTER 3: THE BODILY BASIS OF COGNITION
93 embodied as actors Embodied cognition has already been introduced in these notes and some of its basic sources cited; to them, add Linda B. Smith, “Cognition as a Dynamic System: Principles from Embodiment,” Developmental Review 25 (2005): 278–98; Alan Costall and Ivan Leudar, “Situating Action I: Truth in the Situation,” Ecological Psychology 8, no. 2 (1996): 101–10; Tim Ingold, “Situating Action VI: A Comment on the Distinction Between the Material and the Social,” Ecological Psychology 8, no. 2 (1996): 183–87, and Tim Ingold, “Situating Action V: The History and Evolution of Bodily Skills,” Ecological Psychology 8, no. 2 (1996): 171–82.
94 More technically Ramachandran, Tell-Tale Brain, 37, 86.
95 body schemas Catherine L. Reed, “What Is the Body Schema?,” in ed. Andrew N. Meltzoff, The Imitative Mind: Development, Evolution, and Brain Bases (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 233–43; Tversky, in “Spatial Cognition,” Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition, 201–16, also has a succinct account of the basic body schemas. Linda B. Smith’s work on body schemas, cited above, emphasizes the development of body schemas through bodily motion.
96 When architects calculate Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things, rev. ed. and Norman, Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things (New York: Basic Books, 2003), discussed how everyday objects can (and cannot) be designed to appeal to human nonconscious cognitions as well as to our allocentric bodies.
97 A poignant example Discussed in Richard Joseph Neutra, Survival Through Design (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), 58.
98 designed for people’s allocentric Alvar Aalto, “Rationalism and Man,” in Alvar Aalto in His Own Words, ed. Alvar Aalto and Göran Schildt (New York: Rizzoli, 1998), 89–93.
100 City planning theorists Peter Calthorpe, The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995), for example, proposes “pedestrian pockets” linked by public transit.
103 “Interiors,” he explains Peter Zumthor, Atmospheres (Zurich: Birkhäuser, 2006), 29.
106 astonishingly, “extremely rational” Aalto, in ed. Aalto and Schildt, In His Own Words, 269–75.
106 Installed in 2006 Dimensions from cityofchicago.org/city/en/depts/dca/supp_info/millennium_park_-artarchitecture.html.
106 Before entering this courtyard Upali Nanda writes, “A person walking down the street sees practically nothing but the ground floor of buildings, the pavement, and what is going on in the street itself,” in Sensthetics: A Crossmodal Approach to Sensory Design (Berlin: VDM Verlag Dr. Mueller, 2008), 57.
110 One prominent neuroscientist Marcello Constantini et al., “When Objects Are Close to Me: Affordances in the Peripersonal Space,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 18, no. 2 (2011): 302–8; Alain Berthoz and Jean-Luc Petit, The Physiology and Phenomenology of Action, trans. Christopher Macann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 49–57.
110 It’s almost as if James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, rev. ed. (New York: Praeger, 1983); James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (New York: Psychology Press, 1986); Berthoz and Petit, Physiology and Phenomenology, 2, 66. Anthony Chemero, “What We Perceive When We Perceive Affordances: A Commentary on Michaels,” Ecological Psychology 13, no. 2 (2001): 111–16; Anthony Chemero, “An Outline of a Theory of Affordances,” Ecological Psychology 15, no. 2 (2003): 181–95; Anthony Chemero, “Radical Empiricism through the Ages,” review of Harry Heft, Ecological Psychology in Context: James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the Legacy of William James’s Radical Empiricism, Contemporary Psychology 48, no. 1 (2003): 18–21; Patrick R. Green, “The Relationship between Perception and Action: What Should Neuroscience Learn from Psychology?” Ecological Psychology 13, no. 2 (2001): 117–22, Keith S. Jones, “What Is an Affordance?,” Ecological Psychology 15, no. 2 (2003): 107–14.
111 This is true “Thinking about the world is also an act and can be modified by attention,” Berthoz and Petit, Physiology and Phenomenology, 51. See also Green, “The Relation between Perception and Action,” Ecological Psychology 13, no. 2 117–122, and Boris Kotchoubey, “About Hens and Eggs: Perception and Action, Ecology and Neuroscience: A Reply to Michaels,” Ecological Psychology 13, no. 2 (2001): 123–33.
111 Not everything in Marcello Constantini, “When Objects Are Close to Me,” Psychonomic Bulletin, 302–8.
113 Because of the embodied The extent of near space, as we perceive it, scales with arm length: Matthew R. Longo and Stella F. Lourenco, “Space Perception and Body Morphology: Extent of Near Space Scales with Arm Length,” Experimental Brain Research 177, no. 2 (2007): 285–90.
114 But objects needn’t Fred A. Bernstein, “A House Not for Mere Mortals,” New York Times, April 2008; nytimes.com/2008/04/03/garden/03destiny.html.
119 “categories are containers” Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 51.
120 Other embodied, intersensory J. Decety and J. Grèzes, “The Power of Simulation: Imagining One’s Own and Other’s Behavior,” Brain Research 1079, no. 1 (2006): 4–14; R. H. Desai et al., “The Neural Career of Sensory-Motor Metaphors,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 23, no. 9 (2011): 2376–86; Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 20–21.
123 tactile and visual cognition Harry Mallgrave, The Architect’s Brain, 189–206.
127 humans are exquisitely sensitive Daniel Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (New York: Dutton, 2006) contains much discussion of how sonic experience deeply influences our emotional states; R. Murray Shafer, The Soundscape (Merrimack, MA: Destiny Books, 1993).
127 Cathedrals create highly unusual Jean-François Augoyard and Henri Torgue, Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds (Montreal: Queen’s-McGill University Press, 2006) in particular discuss the cutout effect. Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter, Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). See also Augoyard and Torgue, Sonic Experience; Mirko Zardini, ed., Sense of the City: An Alternate Approach to Urbanism (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture and Lars Müller Publishers, 2005).
130 But the Amiens interior’s ubiquitous Blesser and Salter, Spaces Speak, 89.
130 Because of its vastness The experience of awe also affects people’s perception of time, seeming to slow it down: Melanie Rudd, Kathleen D. Vohs, and Jennifer Aaker, “Awe Expands People’s Perception of Time, Alters Decision Making, and Enhances Well-Being,” Psychological Science 23, no. 10 (2012): 1130–136. On how awe promotes prosocial thoughts and conduct, see Anna Mikulak, “All About Awe,” Association for Psychological Science Observer (April 2015); psychologicalscience.org/index.php/publications/observer/2015/april-15/all-about-awe.html, and Paul K. Piff, “Awe, the Small Self, and Prosocial Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 108, no. 8 (2015): 883–99.
CHAPTER 4: BODIES SITUATED IN NATURAL WORLDS
133 flooded with relief Rachel and Stephen Kaplan first proposed the idea that people’s evolutionary heritage made them biologically attuned to nature such that being in nature reduced stress by allowing us to replenish diminished attentional resources: Kaplan and Kaplan, The Experience of Nature: A Psychological Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), and Stephen Kaplan, “The Restorative Benefits of Nature: Toward an Integrative Framework,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 15, no. 3 (1995): 169–82; Stephen Kaplan, “Aesthetics, Affect, and Cognition: Environmental Preference from an Evolutionary Perspective,” Environment and Behavior 19, no. 1 (1987): 3–32. Dozens and dozens of subsequent studies have confirmed and refined Kaplan and Kaplan’s Attention Restoration Theory (abbreviated as ART): see ed. Paul A. Bell et al., Environmental Psychology, 5th ed. (New York: Psychology Press, 2005).
137 Another is that people The “prospect and refuge” hypothesis was first advanced by Jay Appleton in The Experience of Landscape (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 1975). Although it relies on an outdated notion of human evolution (that humans evolved exclusively in the savannahs of East Africa), studies continue to confirm the powerful biologically based pull of prospect and refuge landscapes. See Judith H. Heerwagen and Gordon H. Orians, “Humans, Habitats, and Aesthetics,” 138–72 in ed. Kellert and Wilson, The Biophilia Hypothesis (interestingly, the authors discuss gender variation in prospect and refuge preferences, with women preferring more refuge and men more prospect); see also Kellert, “Elements of Biophilic Design” and Ulrich, “Biophilia, Biophobia,” in ed. Kellert, Building for Life, 129, 73–137. John Falk and John Balling, “Evolutionary Influence on Human Landscape Preference,” in Environment and Behavior 42, no. 4 (2010): 479–93. For an accessible, updated presentation of current thinking on the varied landscapes that early humans inhabited, fostering our adaptability and immense cognitive flexibility, see Steven R. Quartz and Terrence J. Senjowski, Liars, Lovers, and Heroes: What the New Brain Science Reveals about How We Become Who We Are (New York: HarperCollins, 2002). For another discussion of prospect and refuge in architecture, see Grant Hildebrand, The Wright Space: Pattern and Meaning in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Houses (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1991).
138 Even if systematic Ulrich, “Biophilia, Biophobia,” in ed. Kellert and Wilson, The Biophilia Hypothesis, 96; Colin Ellard, Places of the Heart, 29–51; Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (UK), People and Places.
139 Most astonishing, the children Andrea Taylor et al., “Growing Up in the Inner City: Green Spaces as Places to Grow,” Environment and Behavior 30, no. 1 (1998): 3–27. See also Rebekah Levine Coley, William C. Sullivan, and Frances E. Kuo, “Where Does Community Grow? The Social Context Created by Nature in Urban Public Housing,” Environment and Behavior 29, no. 4 (1997): 488–94. Frances Kuo’s website contains many other research studies on the effects of nature on cognition, emotion regulation and behavior, and so on: lhhl.illinois.edu/all.scientific.articles.htm.
139 Dozens of subsequent studies Michelle Kondo et al., “Effects of Greening and Community Reuse of Vacant Lots on Crime,” Urban Studies (2015): 1–17; Austin Troy, J. Morgan Grove, and Jarlath O’Neil-Dunne, “The Relationship between Tree Canopy and Crime Rates across an Urban-Rural Gradient in the Greater Baltimore Region,” Landscape and Urban Planning 106, no. 3 (2012): 262–70; Koley, Sullivan, and Kuo, “Where Does Community Grow? The Social Context Created by Nature in Urban Public Housing”; Frances E. Kuo and William C. Sullivan, “Environment and Crime in the Inner City: Does Vegetation Reduce Crime?,” Environment and Behavior 33, no. 3 (2001): 343–67.
141 Think about this Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (UK) People and Places, 24–42; Suzanne Nalbantian, Memory in Literature: From Rousseau to Neuroscience (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 85–140.
142 Within six months Augustin, Place Advantage, 187–188; Rachel Kaplan, “The Role of Nature in the Context of the Workplace,” Landscape and Urban Planning 26 (1993): 193–201; Rachel Kaplan, “The Nature of the View from Home: Psychological Benefits,” Environment and Behavior 33, no. 4 (2001): 507–42; Ilknur Turkseven Dogrusoy and Mehmet Tureyen, “A Field Study on Determination of Preferences for Windows in Office Environments,” Building and Environment 42, no. 10 (2007): 3660–668. Researchers found that doubling the normal rate of air ventilation in an office building was associated with a sharp spike in occupants’ cognitive performance: Joseph G. Allen et al., “Associations of Cognitive Function Scores with Carbon Dioxide, Ventilation, and Volatile Organic Compound Exposures in Office Workers: A Controlled Exposure Study of Green and Conventional Office Environments,” Environmental Health Perspectives (October 2015), online.
142 Making workplace environments Judith H. Heerwagen and Gordon H. Orians, “Adaptations to Windowlessness: A Study of the Use of Visual Decor in Windowed and Windowless Offices,” Environment and Behavior 18, no. 5 (1986): 623–39; Phil Leather et al., “Windows in the Workplace: Sunlight, View, and Occupational Stress,” Environment and Behavior 30, no. 6 (1998): 739–62; Anjali Joseph, “The Impact of Light on Outcomes in Healthcare Settings,” Center for Health Design issue paper #2, August 2006, healthdesign.org/chd/research/impact-light-outcomes-healthcare-settings; John Zeisel and Jacqueline Vischer, Environment/Behavior/Neuroscience Pre & Post Occupancy of New Offices (Society for Neuroscience, 2006).
142 And these salutary physiological Sandra A. Sherman et al., “Post Occupancy Evaluation of Healing Gardens in a Pediatric Center,” in Cor Wagenaar, ed., The Architecture of Hospitals, 330–51: Several studies of well people (not patients) suggest even very short encounters with real or simulated natural settings trigger significant psychophysiological restoration, “within three to five minutes at most, or as quickly as twenty seconds.”
145 Retail environments that cater Information in this paragraph from Heschong, “An Investigation,” Heschong Mahone Group. See also Judith Heerwagen, “Investing in People: The Social Benefits of Sustainable Design,” cce.ufl.edu/wpcontent/uploads/2012/08/Heerwagen.pdf; Phil Leather et al., “The Physical Workspace,” in ed. Stavroula Leka and Jonathan Houdmont, Occupational Health Psychology (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 225–49; Zeisel and Vischer, Environment/Behavior/Neuroscience; Nanda and Pati, “Lessons from Neuroscience,” ANFA presentation 2012.
146 Children in properly daylit Malnar and Vodvarka, Sensory Design, 199–228.
147 Natural light, a boon Jennifer A. Veitch, “Work Environments,” in ed. Susan Clayton, Oxford Handbook of Environmental and Conservation Psychology, 248–75.
147 These include ones More recently, others have advanced a more complex scenario, relying on evidence of multiple changes in human habitats owing to unstable weather patterns and human migrations. See, for example, Quartz and Sejnowski, Liars, Lovers, and Heroes.
147 Exposing people even Upali Nanda, “Art and Mental Health,” Health-care Design Magazine, September 21, 2011.
151 The visual field Julian Hochberg, “Visual Perception in Architecture,” Via: Architecture and Visual Perception 6 (1983): 27–45.
151 As a result Ellard, Places of the Heart, 37–46.
152 It is as though Kahn said, “One of the most wonderful buildings in the world which conveys its ideas is the Pantheon. The Pantheon really is a world within a world,” in Louis I. Kahn, ed. Robert Twombley, Louis I. Kahn: Essential Texts (New York: Norton, 2003), 160; on the dependence of cognitions on emotions, see Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens.
153 Kahn designed these approach Kahn, quoted in H. F. S. Cooper, “The Architect Speaks,” Yale Daily News, November 6, 1953, 2.
154 Our mental representations Semir Zeki, “The Neurology of Ambiguity,” Consciousness and Cognition 13 (2004): 173–96; Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Penguin, 1994), 148–60; Harry Mallgrave, Architecture and Embodiment, 38–45.
154 Because of the human eye’s Pinker, How the Mind Works, summarizing David Marr, 213.
154 Scanning the Salk Institute Distinction between form and surface-based cues in Tversky, “Spatial Thought, Social Thought,” Spatial Dimensions, 20.
154 Geons, in the words of the vision scientist Irving Biederman, “Recognizing Depth-Rotated Objects: A Review of Recent Research and Theory,” Spatial Vision 13 (2001): 241–53; Biederman, “Recognition-by-Components: A Theory of Human Image Understanding,” Psychological Review 94, no. 2 (1987): 115–47; O. Amir, Irving Biederman, and K. J. Hayworth, “The Neural Basis for Shape Preferences,” Vision Research 51, no. 20 (2011): 2198–206.
155 Geonic shapes abide George Lakoff and Rafael Nuñez, Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Véronique Izard et al., “Flexible Intuitions of Euclidean Geometry in an Amazonian Indigene Group,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 24 (2011): 9782–787; Elizabeth Spelke, Sang Ah Lee, and Véronique Izard, “Beyond Core Knowledge: Natural Geometry,” Cognitive Science 34, no. 5 (2010): 863–84; Berthoz and Petit, Physiology and Phenomenology. Giacomo Rizzolatti writes that no three-dimensional-shape geometrical is perceived as simply an abstract organization; instead, they “incarnate the practical opportunities that the object offers to the organism which perceives it,” Anna Berti and Giacomo Rizzolatti, “Coding Near and Far Space,” in ed. Hans-Otto Karnath, A. David Milner, and Giuseppe Valler, The Cognitive and Neural Bases of Spatial Neglect (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 119–29.
155 Touching, even just seeing Berthoz and Petit, Physiology and Phenomenology, 1–6; put differently, pure sensation “devoid of interpretation” does not exist, 48.
158 This pathway suggests The following analysis is based in part on the description of visual cognition advanced in Melvyn A. Goodale and David Milner, Sight Unseen: An Exploration of Conscious and Unconscious Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
158 Our responses to surfaces On surface, see Jonathan S. Cant and Melvyn A. Goodale, “Attention to Form or Surface Properties Modulates Different Regions of Human Occipitotemporal Cortex,” Cerebral Cortex 17, no. 3 (2007): 713–31.
158 “Strange as it may seem” Neutra, Survival through Design, 25.
159 As Wright ushered Malnar and Vodvarka, Sensory Design, 129–52.
160 When a building’s surfaces Vittorio Gallese and Alessandro Gattara, “Embodied Simulation, Aesthetics, and Architecture,” in ed. Sarah Robinson and Juhani Pallasmaa, Mind in Architecture, 161–79. The authors write on p. 164: “Embodied simulation can illuminate the aesthetic aspects of architecture . . . by revealing the intimate intersubjective nature of any creative act: where the physical object, the product of symbolic expression, becomes the mediator of an intersubjective relationship between creator and beholder.”
160 “Viewing hand-formed pottery” Neutra, Survival Through Design, 74.
160 Canonical neurons and mirror neurons The information on mirror and canonical neurons in this and the following paragraphs: L. F. Aziz-Zadeh et al., “Lateralization in Motor Facilitation during Action Observation: A TMS Study,” Experimental Brain Research 144, no. 1 (2002): 127–31; Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 102–103; Erol Ahin and Selim T. Erdo An, “Towards Linking Affordances with Mirror/Canonical Neurons,” unpublished (pdf); Vittorio Gallese and Alessandro Gattara, “Embodied Simulation, Aesthetics, and Architecture” (161–80) and Harry Francis Mallgrave, “Know Thyself: Or What Designers Can Learn from the Contemporary Biological Sciences” (9–31) in ed. Robinson and Pallasmaa, Mind in Architecture; David Freedberg and Vittorio Gallese, “Motion, Emotion and Empathy in Esthetic Experience,” Trends in Cognitive Science 11, no. 5 (2007): 197–203; Giacomo Rizzolatti and Maddelena Fabbri Destro, “Mirror Neurons,” Scholarpedia 3, no. 1 (2008): 2055. See also Eric Kandel, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present (New York: Random House, 2012), 418–20.
162 For example, when a person Lawrence E. Williams and John A. Bargh, “Experiencing Physical Warmth Promotes Interpersonal Warmth,” Science 322, no. 5901 (2008): 606–7; Brian P. Meier et al., “Embodiment in Social Psychology,” Topics in Cognitive Science (2012): 705–16. On the embodied metaphors underlying such associations, see Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 45–46.
162 A student will be Joshua M. Ackerman, Christopher C. Nocera, and John A. Bargh, “Incidental Haptic Sensations Influence Social Judgments and Decisions,” Science 328, no. 5986 (2010): 1712–715.
162 Meet a new person Siri Carpenter, “Body of Thought: Fleeting Sensations and Body Movements Hold Sway Over What We Feel and How We Think,” Scientific American Mind, January 1, 2011: 38–45, 85.
163 As humans grow Pinker, Mind, 299–362.
165 In our human Johnson, Meaning of the Body, 160–61; Tversky, “Spatial Thought, Social Thought,” 17–39.
165 “taking a line for a walk” Paul Klee, Pedagogical Sketches (New York: Faber and Faber, 1968); E. S. Cross, A. F. Hamilton, and S. T. Grafton, “Building a Motor Simulation de Novo: Observation of Dance by Dancers,” NeuroImage 31, no. 3 (2006): 1257–67.
168 “A building is a struggle” Kahn, quoted in H. F. S. Cooper, “The Architect Speaks,” Yale Daily News, November 6, 1953, 2.
174 in his Town Library in Viipuri On Aalto’s humanizing “rationalism” see my “Aalto’s Embodied Rationalism,” previously cited.
177 such as Christopher Alexander Such positions can be found in Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language; Alexander, The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe, Books I–IV (Berkeley, CA: Center for Environmental Structure, 2002); Andreas Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (New York: North Point Press, 2000).
CHAPTER 5: PEOPLE EMBEDDED IN SOCIAL WORLDS
196 notion of action settings Roger Barker, Ecological Psychology: Concepts and Methods for Studying the Environment of Human Behavior (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1968). On Barker, see also Ariel Sabar, The Outsider: The Life and Times of Roger Barker (Amazon, 2014); Phil Schoggen, Behavior Settings: A Revision and Extension of Roger G. Barker’s “Ecological Psychology” (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989). Barker, coming out of the behaviorial psychology of the early postwar era, used the term “behavior setting.” Because of behaviorism’s deterministic connotations (or meanings!), I prefer the term “action setting,” to emphasize the agency of humans, who make choices within the environmental settings they encounter.
197 “variability in behavior” Barker, Ecological Psychology, 4.
198 So the Midwest Psychological Field Station An excellent up-to-date account of how human evolution relied on the establishment of homes in settlements is by neuroanthropologist John S. Allen: Home: How Habitat Made Us Human (New York: Basic Books, 2015), especially 13–116. On the psychologically deranging effects of solitary confinement, see pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/criminal-justice/locked-up-in-america/what-does-solitary-confinement-do-to-your-mind/; Mark Binelli, “Inside America’s Toughest Federal Prison,” The New York Times Magazine, March 29, 2015: 26–41, 56, 59.
199 territory becomes a place Maria Lewicka, “Place Attachment: How Far Have We Come in the Last 40 Years?” Journal of Environmental Psychology 31, no. 3 (2011): 218.
200 And unless a person U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Community Planning and Development, The 2013 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress.
200 place where you Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); 167.
201 As we’ve seen Lewicka, “Place Attachment,” 207–30; Gifford, Environmental Psychology, 236–38; Irving Altman and Martin M. Chemers, Culture and Environment (Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole, 1980); Judith Six-smith, “The Meaning of Home: An Exploratory Study of Environmental Experience,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 6, no. 4 (1986): 281–98; D. G. Hayward, “Home as an Environmental and Psychological Concept,” Landscape (1975): 2–9; S. G. Smith, “The Essential Qualities of a Home,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 14, no. 1 (1994): 31–46.
202 As children John Zeisel, Inquiry by Design, 356.
202 The stories and narratives Kaveli M. Korpela, “Place Attachment,” Oxford Handbook of Environmental and Conservation Psychology, 148–63; Gifford, Environmental Psychology, 271–74; Zeisel, Inquiry, 147–150; Setha M. Low, “Cross-Cultural Place Attachment: A Preliminary Typology,” in ed. Y. Yoshitake et al., Current Issues in Environment-Behavior Research (Tokyo: University of Tokyo, 1990).
202 The four walls plus roof Rhoda Kellogg, Analyzing Children’s Art (New York: Mayfield, 1970); Kellogg collected 2,951 drawings of “home” by children from around the world.
203 People’s schemas of domestic Sally Augustin, Place Advantage, 69–88.
203 The strength of our affiliation Lewicka, “Place Attachment,” 218–24, writes, “We still know very little about the processes through which people become attached to places,” and correctly notes that studies of place in environmental psychology have so overemphasized social processes that the physical attributes contributing to place attachment have been largely ignored: there is “a sad lack of theory that would connect people’s emotional bonds with the physical side of places.” By contrast, see Joanne Vining and Melinda S. Merrick, “Environmental Epiphanies: Theoretical Foundations and Practical Applications,” Oxford Handbook of Environmental and Conservation Psychology, 485–508. The story of McDowell is told in Montgomery, Happy City, 106–45.
205 “situationally normative” Barker, Ecological Psychology, 34–35. The same is true for affordances: An atlas of the geography of the world can be a source of quiet entertainment and learning—but it can also be a decorative object on a coffee table, or a platform for writing or a cup of coffee, or a doorstop: Gibson, Ecological Approach, 37–38.
CHAPTER 6: DESIGNING FOR HUMANS
221 Recognizing and identifying Sternberg, Healing Spaces, 25–52; Chatterjee and Vartanian, “Neuroaesthetics,” discuss differences between the human “liking” and “wanting” systems: liking is associated with opiates and cannabinoids, wanting with dopamine.
221 Presumably, the functional Thomas Albright, “Neuroscience for Architecture,” in ed. Robinson and Palasmaa, Mind in Architecture, 197–217.
223 The physics of materials Sternberg, Healing Spaces, 25–52. On the other hand, the resonance of these mathematical figures with our visual system remains much in debate. See, for example, in Colin Ellard, Places of the Heart, a skeptical account of the putative human preference for fractal geometries (Ellard argues that our visual systems are far more attuned to contours in rapid gist identification). Similarly, on the prevalence of the golden ratio in nature and in architecture, and people’s preferences for it, there remains vigorous debate. Adrian Bejan hypothesizes that people’s gravitation to the golden ratio may be no more complex than that, at a large scale, a rectangle proportioned through the golden ratio fits most comfortably into the human cone of vision: “The Golden Ratio Predicted: Vision, Cognition, and Locomotion as a Single Design in Nature,” International Journal of Design and Nature and Ecodynamics 4, no. 2 (2009): 97–104.
229 “Good symmetry” Kandel, Insight, 379; Ramachandran, Tell-Tale Brain, 200, 234–37; on our innate attraction to symmetry discussed in this and the following paragraphs, see, among others, Randy Thornhill and Steven Gangestad, “Facial Attractiveness,” Trends in Cognitive Science 3, no. 2 (1999): 452–60; Karen Dobkins, “Visual Environments for Infants and Children,” presentation at ANFA Conference 2012, Salk Institute, La Jolla, California.
233 That is why generations Jan Gehl, Lotte Johansen Kaefer, and Solvejg Reigstad, “Close Encounters with Buildings,” Urban Design International 11 (2006): 29–47, quoted in Colin Ellard’s wonderful chapter, “Boring Places,” Places of the Heart, 107–24.
233 This is also why modernism was vilified in the public eye: not because there was anything inherently wrong with the various aesthetic languages its practitioners proposed, but because one version of it, techno-rationalism, was more widely adopted and very often the resulting designs were poorly conceived and very badly executed. For a more complex and forgiving view of modernism, see Sarah Williams Goldhagen, “Something to Talk About: Modernism, Discourse, Style,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 64, no. 2 (2005): 144–67.
236 Another way to conceptualize Chatterjee and Vartanian, “Neuroaesthetics,” Trends in Cognitive Science; Ramachandran, Tell-Tale Brain, 231–33; Semir Zeki, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Dzbic, Perdue, and Ellard, “Influence of Visual Perception on Responses in Real-World Environments,” video (on YouTube), Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture conference, 2012.
242 complexity to this patterned object through defamiliarization On defamiliarization, see also Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Louis Kahn’s Situated Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001) 199–215.
246 Change can be designed These factors are somewhat (but not entirely) analogous to what Simon Unwin calls the “modifiers” of architecture in Analyzing Architecture, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2009), 43–56.
259 They corral us Hans-Georg Gadamer, in Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, 1975), writes that a person’s engagement with a work of literature begins when we are “pulled up short” by the text because it “does not yield any meaning” or violates our expectations, 270. Years later, Semir Zeki discussed the neurological underpinnings of such engagement in his Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain, writing that ambiguity in art activates our creative imagination, 25–28.
CHAPTER 7: FROM BLINDSIGHT TO INSIGHT
273 Two quick examples Bargh, “Embodiment in Social Psychology,” 11; Augustin, Place Advantage, 10.
274 a whole new literature For an example, see Marc Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (New York: Verso, 2009).
275 One large part In 1994, the Carnegie Task Force reported that children who grow up in experientially impoverished environments reliably suffer permanent cognitive setbacks in comparison with those raised in enriched environments: quoted in Michael Mehaffy and Nikos Salingaros, “Science for Designers: Intelligence and the Information Environment,” Metropolis, February 25, 2012: metropolismag.com/Point-of-View/February-2012/Science-for-Designers-Intelligence-and-the-Information-Environment/. Mehaffy and Salingaros’s series in Metropolis covers many issues of interest, including fractals and biophilia.
276 A good starting point Martha Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
281 “having decent, ample housing” Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities, loc. 466 Kindle edition.
281 Built environments that accord Gerd Kempermann, H. Georg Kuhn, and Fred Gage, “More Hippocampal Neurons in Adult Mice Living in an Enriched Environment,” Nature 386, no. 6624 (April 1997): 493–95; Alessandro Sale et al., “Enriched Environment and Acceleration of Visual System Development,” Neuropharmacology 47, no. 5 (2004): 649–60; Matthew Dooley and Brian Dooley, ANFA lecture, anfarch.org/activities/Conference2012Videos.shtml; Rusty Gage, ANFA lecture, an farch.org/activities/Conference2012Videos.shtml; Kevin Barton, ANFA lecture, anfarch.org/activities/Conference2012Videos.shtml. On cognitive deficits resulting from early childhood development in deprived environments, see James Heckman, Rodrigo Pinto, and Peter Savelyev, “Understanding the Mechanisms Through Which an Influential Early Childhood Program Boosted Adult Outcomes,” American Economic Review 103, 6 (2013): 2052–86.
285 but as far as we know Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind, 67–94.
290 We cannot but move around Linda B. Smith, “Action Alters Shape Categories,” Cognitive Science 29 (2005): 665–79; Linda B. Smith, “Cognition as a Dynamic System: Principles from Embodiment,” Developmental Review 25 (2005): 278–98; Linda B. Smith and Esther Thelen, “Development as a Dynamic System,” Trends in Cognitive Science 7, no. 8 (2003): 343–48: All these articles demonstrate that shape perception is a dynamic process that requires actual manipulation as well as simulated movement.