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Journal of Urban Design and Mental Health 2016;1:3
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The future of applied neuroscience research in architecture education
Amelia Taylor-Hochberg
Archinect
Archinect
“I know it when I see it,” the crucial phrase used by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart to describe “hardcore” pornography in a landmark 1964 obscenity case, may very handily be applied in the disciplines of architecture and urban design. Operating in the necessarily messy environment of cities, architects and urban designers are trained to recognize and create environments that support functional, thriving human lives. For the most part, that education is geared toward the aesthetic and the sociological – observation, theoretical texts and case studies help inform students of what makes quality urbanism, so that they may become the trusted professionals who can say with authority, “I know it when I see it.” But a particular slice of the design academy craves a more scientific, evidence-based approach – and believe that the holy grail of quantitative rigor is just emerging, in the form of neuroscience.
Neuroscience for Architecture
My first exposure to this emerging collaboration between architecture and neuroscience came by way of the very unambiguously named Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture in San Diego, CA. Founded in 2003 as an offshoot of the local American Institute of Architects chapter, ANFA has since become a separate nonprofit composed mostly of neuroscientists, many based at the Salk Institute at the University of California, San Diego, who want to develop research that has some application to architecture and architects – that is, not only to apply research within the built environment, but to better understand the very design process by which architects conceive of it. The agenda is not necessarily more precise than that, and it encourages research to the same end through the awarding of the bi-annual Hay Research Grant, which supports up to two research projects to the tune of (accumulatively) $50,000 (full disclosure: the editor of this issue is a Hay Grant recipient).
Emerging research methods for the brain's response to the built environment
While any scientific pursuit need not be explicitly useful to still merit researching, ANFA’s approach to directing neuroscience research to architectural ends is affirmatively about improving human beings’ experience in the built environment. A former president of ANFA and director of the Salk Institute’s Vision Center Laboratory, Dr. Tom Albright, told me by email: “Using a variety of powerful experimental approaches, [neuroscientists] can begin to evaluate and optimize the built environment by exploring its influence on brain systems for perception, memory and emotion.” Those experiments often take the form of using machinery such as fMRIs (functional magnetic resonance imaging) and electroencephalography (EEG) to visualize what is happening in the brain. The neuroimaging made possible by fMRIs has allowed for an unprecedented level of access to what’s going on in our brains without actually going inside it, measured by changes in blood flow, but it is in no way a perfect mirror into the mind’s mechanisms. It’s nearly impossible to use on subjects in analogous real-world scenarios, and still very expensive. EEGs, on the other hand, while now relatively cheap and available in commercial models, rely on transdermal readings of electrical signals through the scalp, and is also difficult to apply outside of controlled experimental scenarios. Regardless, to ANFA, neuroscience represents a level of physiological precision previously unexplored by architecture research and experience, opening up the discipline to a higher degree of subtle evaluation. Before neuroscience, architecture had only spoons – now, it has knives.
ANFA’s purpose is rooted in a deference to, and frustration with, evidence-based design. Current methods of EBD that rely on social sciences and economic research are too subjective and soft, whereas neuroscience offers a harder evidentiary data set, offering a look at the neural mechanisms behind what might otherwise have simply been survey responses. “To gain some real understanding of behavior, it is essential to understand the neural mechanisms that detect, filter and select external information (multiple overlapping sensory channels) to generate percepts and to act on them,” explained Drs. Eduardo Macagno (former ANFA president) and Gilbert D. Cooke, FAIA (ANFA’s current president) via email. This presumption that the social sciences are entirely too blunt of a tool to really understand an individual’s experience in a space is definitely not without its opponents (more on that later). But in the words of Drs. Macagno and Cooke, ANFA hopes a “neuro-arch collaboration” could “define ‘evidence’ and how to obtain it in an objective and reproducible fashion, i.e., to endow architectural design with scientific rigor.” That is, to effectively turn “I know it when I see it” into “I know it because the neuroscience data say so,” once ANFA (and likeminded researchers) can figure out how to make the built environment as reliable of a controlled system as a neuroscience laboratory.
A certifcate program that links neuroscience and architecture
Alongside its operations as a non-profit, ANFA has also provoked the creation of a certificate program at UCSD’s NewSchool of Architecture & Design. Designed to make architecture students familiar with the language and methods of neuroscience – so that they can include objective research when pursuing their theses, for example – the “Certificate in Neuroscience for Architecture” isn’t a mandatory part of the architecture degree, but it’s the most clear, front-and-center integration of neuroscientific training in architecture schools to date. A science of architectural design could be used then not only to evaluate the built environment (completed or not), but to also scrutinize the mental mechanisms inherent to designing that environment, forming a holistic understanding of how our surroundings come to pass. Like a science of cooking that evaluates not just how something tastes, but the recipe that made it.
Quantitative neuroscience rigor: an architectural red herring?
But to some, the quantitative rigor that neuroscience promises its architectural evangelists is a bit of a red herring. Dan Montello, a geographer and environmental psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, co-runs the “Architecture and Mind Research Focus Group” along with architectural historian Volker M. Welter and psychologist Mary Hegarty. The group, which is still in its first academic year, is concerned with the intersection of architecture and scientific studies of human spatial cognition, including neuroscience but in no way preferencing it. With Montello’s training as an environmental psychologist and a geographer, he actively supports the idea of architects learning behavioral science methodologies to improve design, but neuroscience giving that extra edge? “No. That’s silly,” he emphatically told me over the phone.
Montello’s concern is partially with neuroscience overestimating its benefits, and misdirecting the designer’s focus onto promises of quantitative rigor over empathic resonance. This criticism makes intuitive sense – that architects stay within the finicky, “soft” realm of social science is necessary because that’s where architecture lives, and how it is experienced. Distilling the built environment down to a series of voltages passing through the brain, as stimuli translated into perception, is ultimately not the data architects should be concerned with. Criticisms lie not just in the disciplinary focus of architecture, but in the ethics of professional practice. It’s easy to imagine neuroscience data being used as a snake oil to soothe whatever ails the client, aligning design with stacks of data culled from “cutting edge” research that is even more intimidatingly esoteric than the architect’s own design language.
Both the ANFA representatives I spoke with and Prof. Montello referred to the same mantra, “architecture is about people, not buildings,” to justify their positions of just what level of scientific inquiry is appropriate when it comes to architecture. Both are concerned with proper appropriation of scientific methods and research, and with encouraging students to imbue their work with more scientific rigor. But besides the NewSchool, the only place in U.S. architecture academia I found actually trying neuroscience on for size was Columbia University’s Cloud Lab, and their goal seems to be to play first, refine research methods later.
Play first, research later
Started by architects Mark Collins and Toru Hasegawa in 2010, the Cloud Lab at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation is all about how emerging technologies and computing innovations are affecting cities – so with the advent of commercial-grade EEG headsets for mobile use, so came neuroscience research into the Lab. Scientific institutions move too slowly and their equipment is prohibitively expensive, leaving architects to get their foot in the door at the commercial level. While the Lab’s projects readily accept a “garbage in, garbage out” (in co-founder Collins’ words) standard of data collection for the experiments they run, Collins’ insists that getting these emerging technologies into the hands of architects is what’s most important, so when the built environment inevitably fluctuates to suit the technology’s new landscape, architects have a stake in that shift. Cloud Lab has had students run around Brooklyn with EEG headsets to map areas of “meditation” and “attention,” according to spectral analysis of the EEG’s readings. Another study involved created custom three-dimensional cognitive maps from the brain waves of EEG-wearing subjects in Lincoln Center. While Cloud Lab makes an efforts to collaborate with experts on these experiments, the point is really to familiarize and empower architects with the technology. By Collins account: “Wouldn’t it be terrible if architects weren’t a part of that discussion of how space and the environment are going to evolve and behave, and were sort of left out because we didn’t become familiar with these [brain computer imaging] technologies?”
Neuroscientific technologies: a day-to-day reality for future architects?
Aside from Cloud Lab’s assumption that neuroscientific technologies will become a day-to-day reality in the future built environment, Collins does also believe neuroscience offers a uniquely nuanced and defensible rubric for it. Seeing the brain at work as it navigates space could give architects a more reliable spectrum of experience for how architecture is used, and eventually translate those observations into “performative” rather than “prescriptive” codes – a standard for building that defers to, in Collins’ words, “how difficult it appears to a person, for instance, to navigate it, that would start to become a little bit more inclusive of people’s different subjectivities.” Ultimately, this could lead to environments that are more responsive to an individual’s needs and preferences, or even optimized to challenge their users: “Do we want to make space as dumbed down as possible so that there are fewer difficulties? Do we want to individually assess people and find the sort of Goldilocks amount of difficulty?”
As technologies become cheaper and data more accessible, there’s no doubt that architects will continue tinkering with neuroscience as a means to better understand how exactly humans perceive and interpret space. Schools with architecture and neuroscience programs can continue encouraging collaboration and cross-disciplinary research, without yet knowing whether an applied neuroscience for architecture can be codified, or even should. With any luck, neuroscience can become like any other discipline employed by the architect – a tool to be used with respect for both the known and unknown.
Neuroscience for Architecture
My first exposure to this emerging collaboration between architecture and neuroscience came by way of the very unambiguously named Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture in San Diego, CA. Founded in 2003 as an offshoot of the local American Institute of Architects chapter, ANFA has since become a separate nonprofit composed mostly of neuroscientists, many based at the Salk Institute at the University of California, San Diego, who want to develop research that has some application to architecture and architects – that is, not only to apply research within the built environment, but to better understand the very design process by which architects conceive of it. The agenda is not necessarily more precise than that, and it encourages research to the same end through the awarding of the bi-annual Hay Research Grant, which supports up to two research projects to the tune of (accumulatively) $50,000 (full disclosure: the editor of this issue is a Hay Grant recipient).
Emerging research methods for the brain's response to the built environment
While any scientific pursuit need not be explicitly useful to still merit researching, ANFA’s approach to directing neuroscience research to architectural ends is affirmatively about improving human beings’ experience in the built environment. A former president of ANFA and director of the Salk Institute’s Vision Center Laboratory, Dr. Tom Albright, told me by email: “Using a variety of powerful experimental approaches, [neuroscientists] can begin to evaluate and optimize the built environment by exploring its influence on brain systems for perception, memory and emotion.” Those experiments often take the form of using machinery such as fMRIs (functional magnetic resonance imaging) and electroencephalography (EEG) to visualize what is happening in the brain. The neuroimaging made possible by fMRIs has allowed for an unprecedented level of access to what’s going on in our brains without actually going inside it, measured by changes in blood flow, but it is in no way a perfect mirror into the mind’s mechanisms. It’s nearly impossible to use on subjects in analogous real-world scenarios, and still very expensive. EEGs, on the other hand, while now relatively cheap and available in commercial models, rely on transdermal readings of electrical signals through the scalp, and is also difficult to apply outside of controlled experimental scenarios. Regardless, to ANFA, neuroscience represents a level of physiological precision previously unexplored by architecture research and experience, opening up the discipline to a higher degree of subtle evaluation. Before neuroscience, architecture had only spoons – now, it has knives.
ANFA’s purpose is rooted in a deference to, and frustration with, evidence-based design. Current methods of EBD that rely on social sciences and economic research are too subjective and soft, whereas neuroscience offers a harder evidentiary data set, offering a look at the neural mechanisms behind what might otherwise have simply been survey responses. “To gain some real understanding of behavior, it is essential to understand the neural mechanisms that detect, filter and select external information (multiple overlapping sensory channels) to generate percepts and to act on them,” explained Drs. Eduardo Macagno (former ANFA president) and Gilbert D. Cooke, FAIA (ANFA’s current president) via email. This presumption that the social sciences are entirely too blunt of a tool to really understand an individual’s experience in a space is definitely not without its opponents (more on that later). But in the words of Drs. Macagno and Cooke, ANFA hopes a “neuro-arch collaboration” could “define ‘evidence’ and how to obtain it in an objective and reproducible fashion, i.e., to endow architectural design with scientific rigor.” That is, to effectively turn “I know it when I see it” into “I know it because the neuroscience data say so,” once ANFA (and likeminded researchers) can figure out how to make the built environment as reliable of a controlled system as a neuroscience laboratory.
A certifcate program that links neuroscience and architecture
Alongside its operations as a non-profit, ANFA has also provoked the creation of a certificate program at UCSD’s NewSchool of Architecture & Design. Designed to make architecture students familiar with the language and methods of neuroscience – so that they can include objective research when pursuing their theses, for example – the “Certificate in Neuroscience for Architecture” isn’t a mandatory part of the architecture degree, but it’s the most clear, front-and-center integration of neuroscientific training in architecture schools to date. A science of architectural design could be used then not only to evaluate the built environment (completed or not), but to also scrutinize the mental mechanisms inherent to designing that environment, forming a holistic understanding of how our surroundings come to pass. Like a science of cooking that evaluates not just how something tastes, but the recipe that made it.
Quantitative neuroscience rigor: an architectural red herring?
But to some, the quantitative rigor that neuroscience promises its architectural evangelists is a bit of a red herring. Dan Montello, a geographer and environmental psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, co-runs the “Architecture and Mind Research Focus Group” along with architectural historian Volker M. Welter and psychologist Mary Hegarty. The group, which is still in its first academic year, is concerned with the intersection of architecture and scientific studies of human spatial cognition, including neuroscience but in no way preferencing it. With Montello’s training as an environmental psychologist and a geographer, he actively supports the idea of architects learning behavioral science methodologies to improve design, but neuroscience giving that extra edge? “No. That’s silly,” he emphatically told me over the phone.
Montello’s concern is partially with neuroscience overestimating its benefits, and misdirecting the designer’s focus onto promises of quantitative rigor over empathic resonance. This criticism makes intuitive sense – that architects stay within the finicky, “soft” realm of social science is necessary because that’s where architecture lives, and how it is experienced. Distilling the built environment down to a series of voltages passing through the brain, as stimuli translated into perception, is ultimately not the data architects should be concerned with. Criticisms lie not just in the disciplinary focus of architecture, but in the ethics of professional practice. It’s easy to imagine neuroscience data being used as a snake oil to soothe whatever ails the client, aligning design with stacks of data culled from “cutting edge” research that is even more intimidatingly esoteric than the architect’s own design language.
Both the ANFA representatives I spoke with and Prof. Montello referred to the same mantra, “architecture is about people, not buildings,” to justify their positions of just what level of scientific inquiry is appropriate when it comes to architecture. Both are concerned with proper appropriation of scientific methods and research, and with encouraging students to imbue their work with more scientific rigor. But besides the NewSchool, the only place in U.S. architecture academia I found actually trying neuroscience on for size was Columbia University’s Cloud Lab, and their goal seems to be to play first, refine research methods later.
Play first, research later
Started by architects Mark Collins and Toru Hasegawa in 2010, the Cloud Lab at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation is all about how emerging technologies and computing innovations are affecting cities – so with the advent of commercial-grade EEG headsets for mobile use, so came neuroscience research into the Lab. Scientific institutions move too slowly and their equipment is prohibitively expensive, leaving architects to get their foot in the door at the commercial level. While the Lab’s projects readily accept a “garbage in, garbage out” (in co-founder Collins’ words) standard of data collection for the experiments they run, Collins’ insists that getting these emerging technologies into the hands of architects is what’s most important, so when the built environment inevitably fluctuates to suit the technology’s new landscape, architects have a stake in that shift. Cloud Lab has had students run around Brooklyn with EEG headsets to map areas of “meditation” and “attention,” according to spectral analysis of the EEG’s readings. Another study involved created custom three-dimensional cognitive maps from the brain waves of EEG-wearing subjects in Lincoln Center. While Cloud Lab makes an efforts to collaborate with experts on these experiments, the point is really to familiarize and empower architects with the technology. By Collins account: “Wouldn’t it be terrible if architects weren’t a part of that discussion of how space and the environment are going to evolve and behave, and were sort of left out because we didn’t become familiar with these [brain computer imaging] technologies?”
Neuroscientific technologies: a day-to-day reality for future architects?
Aside from Cloud Lab’s assumption that neuroscientific technologies will become a day-to-day reality in the future built environment, Collins does also believe neuroscience offers a uniquely nuanced and defensible rubric for it. Seeing the brain at work as it navigates space could give architects a more reliable spectrum of experience for how architecture is used, and eventually translate those observations into “performative” rather than “prescriptive” codes – a standard for building that defers to, in Collins’ words, “how difficult it appears to a person, for instance, to navigate it, that would start to become a little bit more inclusive of people’s different subjectivities.” Ultimately, this could lead to environments that are more responsive to an individual’s needs and preferences, or even optimized to challenge their users: “Do we want to make space as dumbed down as possible so that there are fewer difficulties? Do we want to individually assess people and find the sort of Goldilocks amount of difficulty?”
As technologies become cheaper and data more accessible, there’s no doubt that architects will continue tinkering with neuroscience as a means to better understand how exactly humans perceive and interpret space. Schools with architecture and neuroscience programs can continue encouraging collaboration and cross-disciplinary research, without yet knowing whether an applied neuroscience for architecture can be codified, or even should. With any luck, neuroscience can become like any other discipline employed by the architect – a tool to be used with respect for both the known and unknown.
About the author
Amelia Taylor-Hochberg is a writer, editor and podcaster for Archinect in Los Angeles. Contact her @Amlorberg