Green home
From Green Wiki
“The fact is a person is so far formed by his surroundings that his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his surroundings.”
Christopher Alexander
Can a building truly be designed to meet the psychological and emotional needs of its inhabitants? If so, what are those “true” needs, and how would a practicing architect working with a client in the real world ascertain the criteria for such a design?
When Christopher Alexander published A Pattern Language in 1977, a brave new conversation was begun in architecture. But in actuality, Alexander was merely proposing a “systems” approach to design professionals. Systems concepts were new to most architects, but not really new.
They were introduced in the modern era by Ludwig von Bertanlanffy’s General System Theory in the early 1950’s, but can be traced back to the 1600’s and the work of Leibniz and his precursors. Systems thinking – particularly as it relates to living systems like a human being or a society – looks at integrated wholes rather than parts.
Systems theory offers an alternate view (or complimentary view) to reductionist science. A systems approach thinks in terms of relationships. It is concerned with the patterns of behavior within a system, rather than its parts.
Since relationships cannot be weighed and measured, and every system has emergent properties that are greater than the sum of its parts, systems must be “mapped.” Further, since every coherent system contains other systems, and is itself contained by larger systems, relationships between systems must be considered.
A human being is an “open system,” an interdependent complex that ranges from large scale systems like the nervous system, the immune system, and the digestive system; down to the metabolism within a cell. All exhibit a property called homeostasis.
Homeostasis is the ability – innate from every cell to every whale - to maintain a stable, constant condition by employing interrelated internal regulation mechanisms.
The brain is an important regulator of all these systems, including the psychological system we call “the self.” In this view, the self might be considered a homeostatic mechanism that evolved to help us maintain balance in our complex social relationships.
Like all such living complex adaptive systems, human beings must contend with external eco-systems in order to survive. Many neuropsychologists now believe managing the interface between our internal experience of our body, and our perception of the external environment, is the primary purpose of our brains.
So how does this information relate to the practice of a design professional?
Our firm Sentient Architecture was confronted in the mid 1990’s by a systemic problem in residential architecture. The problem was simple. Clients tended to provide us with faulty criteria for their designs. We discovered that if we accepted what they asked for, and did not look deeper, we produced a high frequency of preliminary designs that failed to meet their needs…even though we carefully followed the priorities they had established.
That meant higher production costs for our firm as we would often have to redesign to meet the moving target of their instructions. Even worse, it led to disappointed clients, as they often expected us to “read their minds” to discover the relevant criteria they had missed themselves. The problem was simple, but not the solution. I began asking why that impediment was so persistent, and came to a profound realization.
The people who approached our firm looking for a “home” were not really looking for a building, though they thought they were. They were looking for an emotional experience!
The key to pleasing them was not finding the proper architectural style, floor plan, or window type. The key was coming to learn what existing psychological/environmental associations already existed in their brains, and applying that critical information to their designs!
Any analysis of the relationship between human beings and the built environment must eventually go to its source, the human brain and how it relates to the world around it. Cognitive psychologists John Bargh and Tanya Chartrand underlined this reality in 1999, when their research illuminated the fact that roughly 95% of our day to day choices are automatic and unconscious.
Said simply, they pointed out that the brains of human beings are built by nature and experience to make decisions based on “feelings” - emotional and intuitive forms of intelligence - and influenced by social cues. Those decisions are strongly determined by what we have experienced in the past – and are made without conscious awareness!
For the most part, this “automatic” decision making serves us well. We do not need to think to walk, eat, make love, or avoid an oncoming automobile…but this internal autopilot can also create a major blind side for planners who must collect personal preferences to inform a design.
Traditional architectural programming approaches the highly complex and emotionally volatile relationship between a client’s brain, and his or her home environment, by asking the client “what they think they need" and looks at a building primarily from two points of view. One is function, the other is art. In common practice, both exclude the holistic needs of the human beings who will inhabit that space.
In both residential and commercial architecture, clients always have conscious ideas about what they want, but often rely on unexamined assumptions, gossip, and reactive reasoning to make such decisions. As a result, there is often considerable variation between what they “think” they want, and what architectural features prove to satisfy their emotional and functional needs, business, personal or cultural values, life goals, aesthetic preferences and real circumstances.
They seldom understand the “automatic” genius in their “feelings,” and see no other alternative to the common “how to” approach that focuses on materials and methods.
A variety of disciplines seek to understand how the human brain relates to it environment, including many specializations that focus specifically on how objects and environments can be designed to fit human beings. Among them are the fields of ergonomics, environmental psychology, infomatics, neuro-ergononmics, design anthropology, behavioral ecology, and others - but academic and large scale architecture, and the majority of architecture critics have given little attention to these issues since the emergence of the modernist movement in the 1920's.
Nikos Salingaros, Wolfe, James Kunstler and others have bitterly criticized this fact, but to limited effect. Salingaros has offered a Theory of Architecture that stands in opposition to modernist and deconstructivist architecture, which he consider inhuman "anti-architecture" that is destructive to human beings.
Amongst practitioners, builder and designer, Christopher K. Travis, is one of few design professionals who has proposed any systematic solution to this issue, though many others not engaged in design practice has proposed ways that design criteria might be ascertained that can be designed to meet the emotional and psychological needs of human beings.
Among them are educator Claire Cooper Marcus and environmental psychologist, Toby Israel.
[edit] Related
- The Home Wikia has a category for eco-friendly articles.
