An Objective Angle
Architects and Others
Participants in our Ottawa session last May will remember that we started with an audience survey. While this was primarily meant to stimulate personal reflection, it offered some valuable insights into belief structures and preferences. In the development of this survey, preliminary versions were used with the Association of Ontario Land Economists and the Niagara Society of Architects. To explore contrasts between groups, the survey has also been used with people who are not involved in the building industry at all.
The data, including that collected at the Ottawa seminar, can be ascribed to three general groups: (a) architects, (b) others in the building industry, and (c) people not in the industry, perhaps best described as building users. To date there have been 75 respondents, and some interesting patterns are becoming clear.
For the survey, subject groups were presented with images of buildings from Europe and North America, and asked to rank them according to aesthetic appeal, on a sevenpoint scale, seven being the highest. Average scores for each group were calculated.
Architects assigned an average score for all buildings of 3.78. For the others in the building industry it was 4.14, and for the wider population (building users) it was 4.46. This suggests that architects will generally rank buildings lower than the other groups. This has been observed by Built Environment Open Forum directors in design juries, and on design-review committees, where architects tend to be tougher in their rankings than non-architects. Presumably architects are evaluating the buildings relative to what they themselves might have done for the same site and client.
All groups preferred buildings that are either historical, or appear to be historical. A baroque building in Stockholm was ranked highest by the architects and building users, and the seemingly historical office building in Stuttgart was ranked second. Others in the building industry reversed this order.
Among the buildings that are not historical in presentation, the highest esteemed building among the architects and people in the building industry has been the Jerwood Library at Trinity Hall Cambridge (UK), completed in 1998 and designed by Freeland, Rees, Roberts, Architects.
Among the user group, it was edged out by the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, completed in 2006, and designed by UNStudio (Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos). Interestingly, in contrast, the architect group placed the high-tech Mercedes museum well down in their rankings.
Other fascinating contrasts have appeared in the data. One example is the Kunsthaus Wien (Vienna Art House) in Vienna, designed by the Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1991). The architects and others in the building industry ranked this building fairly low, while the wider public scored it just behind the Jerwood Library. The rather exotic Kunsthaus, with a dramatic exterior pattern and colourful, freeform walls and floors, could be regarded in a number of ways – but would be difficult for anyone to ignore. Not unexpectedly, the responses show the greatest diversity of opinion of any of the buildings (highest standard deviation among the scores).
The Ottawa session went on to explore some of the reasons that people regarded the building as they did, and a lively discussion followed. But the main point of the presentation was to show that human response to buildings is not just guesswork. It can be studied and measured, leading to a more evidence-based architecture.
Duntroon House, Collingwood, Ontario.
Architect: Paul Roth
There is considerable academic research into the subject of how to create buildings that look good, or to put it more academically: How can we make buildings that will be regarded positively? The knowledge base goes back beyond the landmark work of Stephen and Rachel Kaplan in the 1980s, and subsequent research has generally supported their propositions. It’s unfortunate that very little of this research has found its way into architectural practice.
A residential building was recently drawn to my attention that a lot of people – both architects and non-architects – seem to like. The Duntroon house, near Collingwood, Ontario and designed by Paul Roth, Architect, includes a number of features that ongoing research by psychologists and neuroscientists have identified as favourably regarded by most people.
Repeated research has shown that architects do not perceive the built environment in the same way that other people do. This is not surprising – you wouldn’t expect your physician to interpret a skin rash in the same way as a non-physician, however well informed the non-physician might be. The difference lies in the years of education and experience that a doctor and an architect have acquired that cannot be replaced by intense internet surfing, or “the connoisseur effect.”1
How do the characteristics of the Duntroon house reflect what we know based on the academic research?
Prototypicality
Neuroscientists have shown that the fundamental assessment of a stimulus takes a fraction of a second. Hence, many of our judgments are effectively intuitive, and a rationale, if needed, is developed afterwards. Researchers tend to believe that this is the result of our ancestors’ survival instinct in coping with the dangerous environments in which they lived for most of human existence. The process involves digging through our memories to find objects or emotions that can help in the evaluation.
Most people will find it easy to relate the Duntroon house to other Ontario farmhouses they have seen: it has a pitched roof, gables, chimney and stone walls. However, those who are unfamiliar with Ontario farmhouses may not have the cultural and visual experience to make this association, so are less likely to esteem the building.
Legibility
In order for the brain to quickly identify suitable prototypes, the building must be legible – “easy to read.” If it is difficult to understand, it is unlikely to be related to a prototype and the building will likely be rejected. The brain is an amazing instrument, but energy-conserving, or possibly just plain lazy. If something takes too much effort to evaluate, the brain may feel that the assortment of information emanating from the stimulus is just not worth dealing with, given the meagre benefit. The result is that the viewer may ignore the building, or worse, just classify it as ugly.
With a modest interpretation of some of the thoughts of Kaplan and Kaplan (and others), a building’s legibility might comprise:
• A limited palette of materials, patterns and colours (such as neutral and earth tones, stone, wood and glass)
• Simplicity of detailing
• Forms that are simple, similar to one another and easy to understand
• Edges and lines that are well defined
• Strong textures
With respect to the forms in the Duntroon house, there is some complexity, but for those familiar with Ontario homes, it is countered by the equally familiar domestic elements.
Symmetry
There is considerable evidence that symmetries, for most people, contribute to an overall positive response. In particular, many researchers have found that an innate preference for “reflectional” or mirror symmetry appears within the first year of life and is found in almost all people to some extent. This is not the only form of symmetry, but in the building world, it is common. Overall symmetry does not appear in this building, but it is present in several elements, in particular the gables and chimneys. If you look at prerenaissance European buildings, you find that certain elements, such as gatehouses and towers, were often symmetrical, but the buildings overall were not.
Pitched Roof
It has been demonstrated experimentally that roof form can be a dominant factor in how people assess buildings, and that pitched roofs are favoured by many, at least in European-derived cultures. This does not imply that every smaller-scale building should have a pitched roof, but that a designer needs a good reason to reject it. Some types of buildings have been subject to extensive market research: look at fast-food restaurants, and notice how many of them contrive to look as if they have a pitched roof, even though the basic form of the building dictates otherwise.
Novelty and Originality
A degree of novelty often generates a positive response. This house reflects the basic forms of an Ontario farmhouse, but the atypical large glazed areas and turned chimney add interest.
Novelty is a fascinating ingredient in design. It is rather like seasoning in a recipe: a little enhances the flavour, but a lot can overpower it. Hekkert2 et al. noted that “...typicality (operationalized as ‘goodness of example’) and novelty are jointly and equally effective in explaining the aesthetic preference of consumer products, but that they suppress each other’s effect.” Their experiments showed that “[P]eople prefer novel designs as long as the novelty does not affect typicality. Preferred are products with an optimal combination of both aspects.”
Natural Setting
While Paul Roth was not responsible for the gorgeous natural setting, we know that people respond positively to natural elements. They hold the viewers’ interest, and have a positive effect on various aspects of human emotion. It is not surprising that this attitude has been exploited commercially. It has been found that having natural features in a shopping mall improves perceptions of such seemingly unrelated factors as willingness to pay for parking, product value, product quality, merchant responsiveness and price acceptance. Evidently, people will travel a greater distance to shop at a place with trees.
It should be noted as well that the work of Landmark Landscape Designs also adds much to the positive effect.
We also know that visual images will often evoke the same responses as viewing the original object. For example, looking at the photographs accompanying this article will evoke essentially the same set of feelings as actually seeing the house. Experiments demonstrating the validity of photographic testing were undertaken in the early 1970s, and the results repeatedly verified. So, it stands to reason that ornamentation that simulates natural elements can elicit the same responses as the real thing. “Natural” ornamentation, has been used extensively, from ancient Egyptian temples to such buildings as Louis Sullivan’s works in Chicago, and the Simpsons/Bay building in Toronto.
Unity/Harmony/Elegance/Balance/Order/...
These are difficult qualities to define, although many attempts have been made over the centuries. The basic question is: How well does a scene hang together?
St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), in Summa Theologica, suggested that beauty results from wholeness (or perfection), harmony, and clarity. Jane Jacobs offered the opinion that visual order is important – by avoiding conflicting impressions, complex urban environments are less likely to be seen as confusing and disordered. Wine connoisseur Hugh Johnson, explained his favourite wines are those that “stand out for their boldness, freshness, sweetness of savour. Ideally a balance of all these.” A foodie friend of mine expressed the opinion that the elements of a particular meal were wonderful, but that they did not fit together: the chef was young and he would learn.
Expressed in a different way, there is a “feeling of rightness” that, for a number of reasons, “originates deep in our cognitive architecture.” Numbers of studies have shown that harmony is preferred to chaos by most people. People seek patterns; if things are illegible, do not align with any of their mental prototypes, or do not fit together, they will tend to quickly reject the whole.
There are numbers of lessons to be learned from the consideration of the Duntroon house. The first is that every designer has some obligation to consider the group of people that will be encountering a building or space, and not to worry too much about the response of other designers. Psychologists and neuroscientists have shown us sets of guidelines, that are likely to evoke a positive reaction. It remains for the designer to manipulate the variables to achieve an outcome that is capable of generating some level of delight in the onlookers.
Furthering the Debate
John Cleese, in his 2014 book So, Anyway, recounts the strange reaction of an audience at a rehearsal/preview of a London comedy show: “We were not getting the laughs we were accustomed to. [...] Then some of the audience started laughing at things no one had ever previously laughed at. [...] [W]e were bewildered.” What the performers found was that the tickets had been sold primarily to a conference of psychiatrists. Apparently psychiatrists have a sense of humour that is fundamentally different from that of a less-biased population sample. People’s behaviour is frequently surprising.
In a recent article in The Globe and Mail entitled “alt-right vs. the avant-garde” (July 10, 2017), Russell Smith ranted about modernist architecture and its theoretical links with some sort of exclusive, almost subversive, movement of left-wing liberal intellectuals, who create buildings they like, and ignore the preferences of what might be termed the “plain, honest working-class” right. But is that really the case? Without evidence, it is just talk and supposition.
Frequently architectural debate turns into this sort of confrontation between connoisseurs of design and the wider population. While it is obvious that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” there is also a considerable body of research that reveals how and why people (including architects) respond to buildings, streetscapes and natural environments. In other words, normal response to design aesthetics is entirely predictable. Unfortunately, this research usually appears in academic psychology or neuroscience journals, so it rarely finds it way into architectural discussion.
An excellent example of this connoisseur-public discrepancy is the Art Museum in Graz, Austria. The building is largely the work of Sir Peter Cook, one of the great architectural theorists of the 20th century, whose lectures I enthusiastically attended as an undergraduate. In my research, I have included an image of this museum in a collection of images that I show to subjects. The overall responses in the U.K. and Canada have confirmed that the wider public does not respond well to this building. What is more interesting is that, in workshop sessions, architects and other building professionals (who might be seen as proxies for the nasty avant-garde intellectuals) ranked it even lower – in fact, placing it last among all the buildings being assessed.
Much research supports John Cleese’s experience that experts in specific fields – which, along with psychiatrists, might include foodies, professional musicians and architects – tend to evaluate things differently than the wider population. This appears to provide further evidence that generalized assumptions about group preferences are always inappropriate and often wrong.
With regard to the Graz Art Museum, the difference in opinion between connoisseurs and everyone else is not really relevant. The main point is that somehow a building has been designed that manages to evoke a positive response from hardly anyone. This reveals a chronic problem in the profession: architectural visual design is rarely based on research findings. The evidence is available, and if the appropriate investigation had taken place in this case, the near-universal distaste for this building could have been predicted. Without sensible evidence-based debate, it is difficult to improve the quality of the design of our buildings and cities.
References
Paul Hekkert, Dirk Snelders and Piet C. W van Wieringen. “Most advanced, yet acceptable: Typicality and novelty as joint predictors of aesthetic preference in industrial design,” in British Journal of Psychology, 94, 2003, pp. 111-124.
“The connoisseur effect” occurs when consumers become more knowledgeable about a subject and start adding more attributes to their evaluation, making their assessments more complex. Wine, for example can be assessed on a number of dimensions, from the utilitarian (intoxication), to the sublime. Most people evaluate wine according to colour: red, white and rosé. But connoisseurs have a vocabulary to describe the subtle nuances of taste and aroma. I particularly like the word “petrol” as a flavour descriptor (contrary to non-connoisseur expectations, a whiff of gasoline in wine is not necessarily a bad thing). Similarly, people in the building industry are knowledgeable about buildings, so it should not be surprising that they take longer and use a more complex set of attributes to evaluate buildings than members of the wider population.