Why Architecture Education Needs to Embrace Evidence-Based Design, Now
Justin B. Hollander, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University. Ann Sussman, AIA, is an architect, artist, and coauthor with Dr. Hollander of the award-winning Cognitive Architecture: Designing for How We Respond to the Built Environment.
The places we live, work, and play in, the buildings and human settlements that surround us, are designed by architects who have largely lost their way. The entire architecture profession is adrift amidst the tumult of today's innovations, both in the world's continued industrialization and stratospheric advances in technology.
Indeed, the Organization of Economic and Cooperation and Development (OECD) noting these seismic shifts, labelled the 19th century as the Age of Engineering, the 20th, as the Age of Chemistry and Physics, and our time, the 21st century, the new Age of Biology. While the practice of architecture has adapted in response to some innovation, from new building materials to Computer-Aided Design (CAD), its core pedagogical theories remain parked in the past, neglecting recent significant insights the biological sciences have delivered about the human condition and how we function.
These new discoveries make a longstanding debate about the purpose of architecture and the best way to build, moot. We now have incontrovertible biological evidence that the built environment affects humans, both mentally and physically. We can track it. We can deliver hard data and measure down to cortisol levels how different built environments engender biochemical changes in our bodies and can harm human health, both mentally and physically. This means we can no longer teach future architects that the abstract parti is the unique central organizing feature of design; we need to put people and biology and human functions at the center of their thinking, just like top tech and auto designers already do. We need to disabuse architectural design educators of the false premise in their core thinking, that the mind is a "blank slate." This is not the case: Humans enter the world hardwired to respond to specific patterns in very specific ways; carmakers and advertisers and computer scientists all know this, it's time for architects to learn biological reality, too.
Some of these tools to understand psychological and neurological responses to our buildings have been of interest to environmental psychologists for decades. Indeed, the environmental design field has pressed this imperative since John Zeisel's important Inquiry by Design in 2006. Zeisel, and many others since, have argued that applied psychology methods can be used to understand how people respond to different designs before a building is built, thereby empowering the architect to make improvements. This research-based design approach has been largely dismissed by the architectural education community. We argue that the reason is that at the heart of much of the environmental design literature are studies that are subjective in nature, hard to replicate, or with limited internal validity. However, these limitations no longer hold us back. The explosion of scientific and tech innovation has produced a battery of new biometric tools for uncovering the thoughts, feelings, and emotional responses people have to built conditions. This evidence can no longer be ignored by architectural educators. And when given the opportunity, we've found students clamor for it.
Many educators still challenge the very notion of quantifying the experience of being in a building or street. These critics demand that the discipline of architecture is supposed to make people think and, sometimes, be scared, or in awe, and that environmental psychologists are trying to dull the design professions down to create banal environments.
This is extraneous; the client, an emotional animal that thinks, is hardwired to lookout for her safety and security at all times without any conscious effort. And our emotional experience, to approach or avoid a building in the environment is always determined without intellectual input initially anyway, our brain design precluding any other arrangement.
In today's America, where we are in the midst of a public health epidemic regarding mental health, where obesity rates have skyrocketed, reaching 40 percent, we need to do everything we can to improve building practices and our built environments, making them more healthful and happy. As a country, ranking 31st in longevity, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), we simply can't afford not to. Too many lives depend on it. Architects today face a unique opportunity to reshape the environment so it's a better fit with our biological nature. They are in an unprecedented position to use evidence-based design and build what people want to, unconsciously, see and be in. With new biometric tools, they can more easily do postoccupancy evaluations, asking people where they feel at their best, ensuring that new projects are rooted in successful precedent—for real.
We need to integrate new biological frameworks into architectural education. The fact is, not following or understanding innate human imperatives, hurts us all. No one disagrees that two decades into this century we are at a disruptive time. Yet we also see our unique place in history as a fantastic moment of opportunity. "Evidence-based" design is not just reserved for medicine; it applies to architecture and creating healthful built environments for us all.
So, the question becomes: Are we ready to seize the moment?
And if not now, what are we waiting for?
