I spent October 2019 in Montreal on a self-directed residency. I went with the question: how does the built environment affect how we think, feel and behave? I wanted to explore the idea that cities and people are systems that continually interact with each other. It was a stimulating month of walking, looking, absorbing, reflecting and taking photos. However, back in my studio in Ottawa, I found I was not seeing in my images what I had felt and perceived in Montreal.
I then came upon Sarah Williams Goldhagen’s book: Welcome to Your World, How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives. ‘I began coming across scattered writings - in social theory, cognitive linguistics, various branches of psychology, and cognitive neuroscience - that intimated a new account of how people actually perceive, think about, and ultimately experience their environments, which of course includes the built world...a newly developing paradigm, variously called “embodied” or “grounded” or “situated” cognition, was emerging from the confluence of work in many disciplines, some of them in the sciences. This paradigm holds that much of what and how people think is a function of our living in the kinds of bodies we do. It reveals that most - much more than we previously knew - of human thought is neither logical nor linear, but associative and nonconscious. This still-emerging paradigm provides the foundation for a model and analysis of how we live simultaneously in this world, inside our own bodies with our feet on the ground; with other people; and in the worlds inside our heads, which are rife with simulations of the worlds we continuously imagine and reshape for ourselves. Human cognition, decision-making, and action are some admixture of all three.’
These ideas resonated with me and illuminated the series, Passages, that came out of the residency. This book is compelling, important - and highly readable.
Some favourite passages from the book:
“We respond to our environments not only visually but with our many sensory faculties - hearing, and smelling, and especially touching, and more - working in concert with one another. These surroundings affect us much more viscerally and profoundly that we could possibly be aware of, because most of our cognitions, including those about where we are, happen outside our conscious awareness. ...when we navigate and inhabit our environments, what and how we consciously think is inexorably bound up with our nonconscious simulations and cognitions, and with what and how we feel. Most surprisingly, our emotions, our imagined bodily actions, and especially the memories that we develop of them are embedded in our very experiences of built environments, and loom large in how we form our identities.”
“What the new paradigm of embodied or situated cognition reveals is that the built environment and its design matters far, far more than anybody, even architects, even thought that it did…..It holds a mirror up to show the worlds that we have made and clearly illustrates ways to remake our worlds to be less soul-deadening and more enlivening to human bodies and minds, communities, and polities.”
“Emphasizing how design shapes everyday experience, [Winston] Churchill declared that ‘we shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us.’”
“...contrary to what had been assumed for centuries, we now know that all our lives, our minds are changing and quite literally being shaped by our experiences in the physical environments in which we live.”
“...it turns out that, more often than not, it takes just as many resources to build a bad building - or landscape or townscape - as a good one.”
“In the wake of the cognitive revolution, we must recognize the reality that aesthetic experience, including our aesthetic experience of the built environment, concerns more than pleasure, so much more that the conventional distinction between architecture as the province of the elite, and building as the province of the masses, must once and for all be eradicated. From our perspective - the perspective of how human beings experience spaces, of how built environments affect our well being - such a distinction is incomprehensible and pernicious. The more we learn about how people actually experience the environments in which they live their lives, the more obvious it becomes that a well-designed built environment falls not on a continuum stretching from high art to vernacular building, but on a very different sort of continuum: somewhere between a crucial need and a basic human right.”
Links:
This is Your Brain on Architecture
Assessing Architecture Through Neuroscience and Psychology