Unit 20 The Power of Architecture

Unit 20 The Power of Architecture

1 Introduction 2 interface

1.1 Read the text title and hypothesize what the text is about. Write down your hypothesis.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

 

1.2 What do you know concerning this issue? List your ideas in the table left column “I know”.

I know that…	I have learnt that…

 

1.3 If you know answers to these questions write them down in the space given after each question.

 

	Who said that buildings regulate the course of our lives?
	What problems does environmental psychology address?
	What factors can reduce feelings of crowding within buildings?
	In what way do hospital designers try to help patients recover?
	How can design be used to limit crime?
	What can poor housing lead to?
	Goo Why should good design pay off?

 

1.4 Circle in the list the words and expressions you know. Write down their translation in the table and calculate the percentage of your lexical competence.

 

	to succeed in			a ward
	a cubicle			to pore over
	cookie-cutter			a weak spot
	mortgage			robust
	urban decay			through-streets
	an adverse effect			a breeding ground
	a defensible space			blue chip
	sterile décor			bespoke offices

The Power of Architecture

“There is no doubt whatever about the influence of architecture and structure upon human character and action. We make our buildings and afterwards they make us. They regulate the course of our lives.”

Winston Churchill, addressing the English Architectural Association, 1924.

 

Architecture is art and it is not art; it is art and it is something more, or less, as the case may be. This is its paradox and its glory, and always has been. Architecture is not like a painting or a novel or a poem; its role is to provide shelter, and its reality in the physical world makes it unlike anything else that we commonly place in the realm of art. Unlike a symphony, a building must fulfill a certain practical function, giving us a place to work, or to live, or to shop or to worship or to be entertained. But a building is not at all like other things that we place in the realm of the practical but that may have aesthetic aspirations, such as an airplane, an automobile, or a cooking pot. For we expect a work of architecture, when it succeeds in its aesthetic aims, to be capable of creating a more profound set of feelings than a well-designed toaster.

 

Architecture certainly has the power to inspire, but it actually goes much deeper than that. Architecture has a profound influence on every aspect of our everyday lives. Our lifestyle, the patterns of our day, our relationships with the people around us, our success and satisfaction in our jobs are all shaped significantly by the physical environment.

 

If a person works in an isolating cubicle in a rat-maze office, commutes on traffic–snarled freeways, eats most meals at anonymous fast-food joints and lives in a cookie-cutter subdivision that does nothing to promote neighborliness, then he or she may well be depressed and unhappy. If that same person works in a well-designed office with carefully managed places for privacy/teaming/communication, walks a few minutes on pedestrian-friendly streets to work, shops at friendly local stores, eats at distinctive cafes run by personable entrepreneurs and lives in a place that, by its arrangement of spaces, encourages casual encounters with neighbors, then they will have a very different life.

 

Even if we are unconscious of the degree to which architecture is affecting our lives, we are still operating under its power. How much money we spend on gasoline, electricity, other utilities and mortgage is all a result of what kind of architectural environment we inhabit. How much time we spend commuting, hauling friends and family from place to place, doing yard work, cleaning and maintaining our houses are also all a result of what kind of architectural environment we inhabit.

The image of a building has the ability to inspire, but that is a very small fraction of the power of architecture. The skyline of a city has the ability to impress, but the city is defined far more by the way the streets, public spaces, buildings, offices, shops, entertainment spaces, residences, etc. work together to become an influential crucible for people’s lives.

Higher Thought

Now research has emerged that could help illuminate Salk’s observation that aspects of the physical environment can influence creativity. In 2007 Joan Meyers-Levy, a professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota, reported that the height of a room’s ceiling affects how people think. “Ceiling height affects the way you process information,” Meyers-Levy says.

 

Her work indicated that elevated ceilings make people feel physically less constrained, the higher ceilings encourage people to think more freely, which may lead them to make more abstract connections. The sense of confinement prompted by low ceilings, on the other hand, may inspire a more detailed, statistical outlook—which might be preferable under some circumstances. “It very much depends on what kind of task you’re doing,” Meyers-Levy explains. “If you’re in the operating room, maybe a low ceiling is better. You want the surgeon getting the details right.” Similarly, paying bills might be most efficiently accomplished in a room with low ceilings, whereas producing great works of art might be more likely in a studio with loftier ones. How high the ceiling actually is, is less important than how high it feels. “We think you can get these effects just by manipulating the perception of space,” she says, by using light-colored paint, for instance, or mirrors to make the room look more spacious.

Natural Focus

In addition to ceiling height, the view afforded by a building may influence intellect—in particular, an occupant’s ability to concentrate. Although gazing out a window suggests distraction, it turns out that views of natural settings, such as a garden, field or forest, actually improve focus. A study published in 2000 by environmental psychologist Nancy Wells, now at Cornell University demonstrated that college students with views of nature from their dorm rooms scored higher on measures of mental focus than did those who overlooked entirely man-made structures.

By this theory, the modern world can engender mental fatigue, whereas looking out at a natural setting is relatively effortless and can give the mind a much needed rest. A number of studies have shown that when people look at nature views, whether they’re real or projected on a screen, their ability to focus improves. The thing is humans have an innate tendency to respond positively toward nature. We evolved in an environment that predisposes us to function most effectively in green spaces.

 

Using nature to boost attention ought to pay off academically, according to a study that was led by C. Kenneth Tanner, head of the School Design & Planning Laboratory at the University of Georgia. In their analysis of more than 10,000 fifth-grade students in 71 Georgia elementary schools, Tanner and his colleagues found that students in classrooms with unrestricted views of at least 50 feet outside the window, including gardens, mountains and other natural elements, had higher scores on tests of vocabulary, language arts and math than did students without such expansive vistas or whose classrooms primarily overlooked roads, parking lots and other urban fixtures.

Seeing the Light

In addition to greenery, the natural world has something else to offer building occupants: light. Daylight synchronizes our sleep-wake cycle, enabling us to stay alert during the day and to sleep at night. Nevertheless, many institutional buildings are not designed to let in as much natural light as our mind and body need. A lack of light can be a particular problem for schoolchildren. The Swedish schoolchildren were studied in four different classrooms for a year. The research showed that the kids in classrooms with the least daylight had disrupted levels of cortisol, a hormone that is regulated by the body’s circadian rhythms.

 

Adequate sunlight has also been shown to improve student outcomes. In 1999 the Heschong Mahone Group, a consulting group based in California that specializes in building energy-efficient structures, collected scores on standardized tests of math and reading for more than 21,000 elementary school students in three school districts in three states: California, Washington and Colorado. The researchers rated the amount of daylight available in each of more than 2,000 classrooms on a scale of 0 to 5. In one school district students in the sunniest classrooms advanced 26 percent faster in reading and 20 percent faster in math in one year than did those with the least daylight in their classrooms. In the other two districts, ample light boosted scores between 7 and 18 percent.

 

Retirement homes can also be too dark to keep circadian clocks ticking away normally. On tests taken at six-month intervals over three and a half years, the residents of the more brightly lit buildings showed 5 percent less cognitive decline than occupants of the six darker buildings did. The additional lighting also reduced symptoms of depression by 19 percent. Providing bright daytime light, the researchers believe, could have helped restore their proper rhythms and thus have improved overall brain function.

 

Researchers recommend using blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and full-spectrum fluorescent lights in buildings during the day; both have enough blue light to trigger the circadian system and keep occupants awake and alert. After dark, buildings could switch to lamps and fixtures with longer-wavelength bulbs, which are less likely to emit light detected by the circadian system and interfere with sleep at night. “If you can give people a lighting scheme where they can differentiate between day and night, that would be an important architectural decision,” says Mariana Figueiro, program director of the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

A Room to Relax

Although bright light might boost cognition, recent work suggests it counteracts relaxation and openness—effects that might be more important than alertness in some settings. In a 2006 study counselors interviewed 80 university students individually in either a dim or a brightly lit counseling room. The students questioned in the dim room felt more relaxed, viewed the counselor more positively and shared more information about themselves than those counseled in the brighter room did. The findings suggest that dim light helps people to loosen up. If that is true, keeping the light low during dinner or at parties could foster relaxation and intimacy.

 

A room’s contents can be similarly soothing—or the opposite. Neuroscientist Moshe Bar of Harvard Medical School showed subjects photographs of various versions of neutral objects, such as sofas and watches. The examples of each item were identical except that some had curved or rounded edges, whereas others had sharp, squared-off perimeters. When asked to make snap judgments about these objects, subjects significantly preferred those with curves. Bar speculates that this preference exists because we associate sharp angles with danger. “Maybe sharp contours are coded in our brains as potential threats. Filling a living room or waiting room with furniture that has rounded or curved edges could help visitors unwind,” he says.

 

Furniture choices and seating plans can also influence human interaction. A better plan to encourage interaction, researchers found, is organizing furniture in small groupings throughout the room. The psychologists from Germany and Sweden examined seating in a different setting. Over eight weeks and more than 50 lessons, the researchers rotated a class of fourth-grade students between two seating arrangements: rows of desks and a semi circle of desks around the teacher. The semicircle configuration increased student participation, boosting the number of questions pupils asked. Other studies suggest that putting desks in rows encourages students to work independently and improves classroom behavior.

 

Carpeting can also grease the social wheels. In hospitals, carpet increases the amount of time patients’ friends and families spend visiting, according to a 2000 study led by health care design expert Debra Harris. Such social support may ultimately speed healing. Of course, carpeting is much harder to clean than traditional hospital flooring—and may present a health hazard in some settings—so it may not be appropriate for places such as an emergency room, where there is high patient turnover and plenty of mess. But rooms, buildings or wards that are home to long-term patients, such as assisted-living facilities, may benefit from carpets.

Principle five: efficiency

The principle of efficiency promotes a balance between the consumption of resources such as energy, time and fiscal resources, with planned achievements in comfort, safety, security, access, tenure, productivity and hygiene. It encourages optimum sharing of public land, roads, facilities, services and infrastructural networks, reducing per household costs, while increasing affordability, productivity, access and civic viability.

 

A major concern of this principle is transport. While recognizing the convenience of personal vehicles, it attempts to place costs (such as energy consumption, large paved areas, parking, accidents, negative balance of trade, pollution and related morbidity) on the users of private vehicles. Good planning practice promotes clean, comfortable, safe and speedy, public transport, which operates at dependable intervals along major origin and destination paths. Such a system is cheaper, safer, less polluting and consumes less energy.

 

The same principle applies to public infrastructure. Compact, high-density communities result in more efficient urban systems, delivering services at less cost per unit to each citizen. There is an appropriate balance to be found somewhere on the line between wasteful low-density individual systems and over-capitalized mega systems. Costly, individual septic tanks and water bores servicing individual households in low-density fragmented layouts, cause pollution of subterranean aquifer systems. The bores dramatically lower ground water levels. Alternatively, large-scale, citywide sewerage systems and regional water supply systems are capital intensive and prone to management and maintenance dysfunction. Operating costs, user fees and cost recovery expenses are high. There is a balance wherein medium-scale systems, covering compact communities, utilize modern technology, without the pitfalls of large-scale infrastructure systems. This principle of urbanism promotes the middle path with regard to public infrastructure, facilities, services and amenities.

Principle six: human scale

According to PIU proponents, the trend towards urban sprawl can be overcome by developing pedestrian circulation networks along streets and open spaces that link local destinations. Shops, amenities, vegetable markets and basic social services should be clustered around public transport stops and at a walkable distance from work places, public institutions, and residential areas. Public spaces should be integrated into residential, work, entertainment and commercial areas.

 

Danish architect Jan Gehl, one of the world's preeminent urban planners, says that innovative architecture, such as a revolving tower in Dubai or the Guggenheim Museum, might be interesting, intriguing but it is not people friendly. His concepts of human-scale design and the importance he places on public spaces have led city planners the world over to rethink the way they design. Jan Gehl urges architects and urban planners to consider not only the buildings, but the space between buildings.

An abiding axiom of urban planning, urban design and city planning has been the promotion of people friendly places, pedestrian walkways and public domains where people can meet freely. These can be parks, gardens, glass-covered gallerias, courtyards, street side cafes, river- and hill-side stroll ways, and a variety of semi-covered spaces. Human scale can be achieved by using arcades and pavilions as buffers to large masses; by intermixing open spaces and built masses sensitively; by using anthropometric proportions and natural materials.

Rostock (Germany) has been nicely renovated and now is a very pleasant place to live. The historical building style uses bricks very effectively – and many of the modern buildings in the town center are also brick-built and blend in with the traditional buildings, as you can see in the case of the building on the left.

Intelligent Urbanism insists on safety, hygiene, durability and utility in the design and construction of buildings. Where large numbers of people gather in schools, hospitals, and other public facilities that may become emergency shelters in disasters, special care must be exercised. A suitable Building Code is the proposed instrument to achieve these aims.

 

PIU proponents state that those who design buildings must be professionally qualified architects; those who build buildings must be qualified civil engineers; and, those who supervise and control construction must be qualified construction managers. Proponents maintain that there must be recognized Professional Accrediting Boards, or Professional Bodies, to see that urban development employs adequate technical competence. Finally, there must be legislation creating Statutory Local Authorities. Intelligent Urbanism insists that cities, local authorities, regional development commissions and planning agencies be professionally managed.

 

Intelligent Urbanism views plans, urban designs and housing configurations as expressions of the people for whom they are planned. The process must be a transparent one, which makes those privileged to act as guardians of the people’s will. Intelligent Urbanism sees urban planning and city governance as the most salient expressions of civility. Intelligent Urbanism is not just planning for the present; it is also planning for the distant future. Intelligent Urbanism is not Utopian, but futuristic in its need to forecast the scenarios to come.

 

Unit 20 The Power of Architecture

1 Introduction 2 interface

1.1 Read the text title and hypothesize what the text is about. Write down your hypothesis.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

 

1.2 What do you know concerning this issue? List your ideas in the table left column “I know”.

I know that…	I have learnt that…

 

1.3 If you know answers to these questions write them down in the space given after each question.

 

	Who said that buildings regulate the course of our lives?
	What problems does environmental psychology address?
	What factors can reduce feelings of crowding within buildings?
	In what way do hospital designers try to help patients recover?
	How can design be used to limit crime?
	What can poor housing lead to?
	Goo Why should good design pay off?

 

1.4 Circle in the list the words and expressions you know. Write down their translation in the table and calculate the percentage of your lexical competence.

 

	to succeed in			a ward
	a cubicle			to pore over
	cookie-cutter			a weak spot
	mortgage			robust
	urban decay			through-streets
	an adverse effect			a breeding ground
	a defensible space			blue chip
	sterile décor			bespoke offices

The Power of Architecture

“There is no doubt whatever about the influence of architecture and structure upon human character and action. We make our buildings and afterwards they make us. They regulate the course of our lives.”

Winston Churchill, addressing the English Architectural Association, 1924.

 

Architecture is art and it is not art; it is art and it is something more, or less, as the case may be. This is its paradox and its glory, and always has been. Architecture is not like a painting or a novel or a poem; its role is to provide shelter, and its reality in the physical world makes it unlike anything else that we commonly place in the realm of art. Unlike a symphony, a building must fulfill a certain practical function, giving us a place to work, or to live, or to shop or to worship or to be entertained. But a building is not at all like other things that we place in the realm of the practical but that may have aesthetic aspirations, such as an airplane, an automobile, or a cooking pot. For we expect a work of architecture, when it succeeds in its aesthetic aims, to be capable of creating a more profound set of feelings than a well-designed toaster.

 

Architecture certainly has the power to inspire, but it actually goes much deeper than that. Architecture has a profound influence on every aspect of our everyday lives. Our lifestyle, the patterns of our day, our relationships with the people around us, our success and satisfaction in our jobs are all shaped significantly by the physical environment.

 

If a person works in an isolating cubicle in a rat-maze office, commutes on traffic–snarled freeways, eats most meals at anonymous fast-food joints and lives in a cookie-cutter subdivision that does nothing to promote neighborliness, then he or she may well be depressed and unhappy. If that same person works in a well-designed office with carefully managed places for privacy/teaming/communication, walks a few minutes on pedestrian-friendly streets to work, shops at friendly local stores, eats at distinctive cafes run by personable entrepreneurs and lives in a place that, by its arrangement of spaces, encourages casual encounters with neighbors, then they will have a very different life.

 

Even if we are unconscious of the degree to which architecture is affecting our lives, we are still operating under its power. How much money we spend on gasoline, electricity, other utilities and mortgage is all a result of what kind of architectural environment we inhabit. How much time we spend commuting, hauling friends and family from place to place, doing yard work, cleaning and maintaining our houses are also all a result of what kind of architectural environment we inhabit.

The image of a building has the ability to inspire, but that is a very small fraction of the power of architecture. The skyline of a city has the ability to impress, but the city is defined far more by the way the streets, public spaces, buildings, offices, shops, entertainment spaces, residences, etc. work together to become an influential crucible for people’s lives.