To the editors:
I suspect that readers from other disciplines may be puzzled by the commotion going on within the architecture profession. The fuss is typified by the dust-up between James Stevens Curl, whose eminence as an architectural historian is not in dispute, and defenders of the status quo. This conflict is representative of a larger debate about the problematic history of the profession. It is a debate that often provokes vitriolic arguments over what Curl alleges are its longstanding failures and fallacies.
In his review, Nikos Salingaros summarizes the situation perfectly when he writes that “a wholesale revision is necessary to bring architectural culture more in line with other evidence-based disciplines.” This is an urgent task because the architecture profession leads, whether by action or by abdication, the processes of human settlement. These processes profoundly affect our interactions with one another, our impact on the natural world, and our use, consumption, and depletion of resources. This controversy comes at a time of historically high rates of urbanization that could have a catastrophic effect on the human and natural world for generations to come. For these reasons, this debate is anything but a narrow intradisciplinary dispute.
It is not a situation without precedents. In her damning and highly influential 1961 critique, the urbanist Jane Jacobs noted that “the pseudoscience of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success.”[1] When “architecture” is switched for “planning” the congruence is obvious. I was recently visiting with a group of architect friends, one of whom joked that it is fortunate that architects are not held to the same standards as medical professionals, because many would be bankrupted or jailed for malpractice. The remark was met with uneasy laughter.
The most charitable thing that could be said about those of us currently working in the architectural professions is that we are like medieval doctors in the age of potions and bloodletting, awaiting the arrival of our germ theory. Our potions are art and metaphor, pressed into service to package up industrial products for sale, and we do not look too closely for toxic side effects. We do have our own technical research—our peer-reviewed papers on thermal properties of wall sections, and the like. But we have precious little real science on the effects of architecture on humans.
As Curl notes, this is in large measure the outcome of a particularly important and influential period in the development of modern architecture that was dominated by a remarkably small group of European architects. Three of them were apprenticed to the German industrial giant Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft, and witnessed firsthand the intoxicating possibilities of art-led architecture in service to industry. That this profitable regime could further be rationalized as the ideological fulfillment of working-class liberation, as well as the highest of university fine arts, was irresistibly alluring. Whether or not this was actually true, or in any way verifiable using scientific methods, was never the point. This is sadly still the case today. All the defensiveness simply evidences the growing desperation of a profession lacking scientific rigor, dominated by obsolete ideology, and unable to recognize mistakes and move on.
Michael Mehaffy
Nikos Salingaros replies:
Michael Mehaffy touches upon the negative influence of dominant architectural culture on science. He is in an excellent position to do so. Mehaffy has long argued against the damage that pseudoscience exerts in architecture and planning.2 He and I collaborated for many years with Christopher Alexander, the father of the pattern language movement, who was himself trained in mathematics and physics before turning to architecture.3 We, among several other likeminded researchers, have struggled to create a science out of architecture.
Most important for scientific readers, adaptive architecture actually has something to teach science. We cannot begin to investigate this crossover possibility until we get past the relatively recent pseudoscientific approach to architecture. Adaptive architecture encodes information through organization. In implementing pattern languages, computer scientists hugely benefited from input developed to handle architectural complexity. For millennia, humans have instinctively built up geometrical coherence through recursive methods.4 Sophisticated heuristic and intuitive methods that people developed for organizing complexity in design are inherent in evolved architectural solutions.
For the reasons already noted by James Stevens Curl in his book Making Dystopia, however, the mainstream design profession and its academic, economic, and media underprops either dismiss such efforts as irrelevant or reject them in unambiguously hostile terms—hostility to criticism being one trait of pseudoscience.5 An architectural status quo that makes a good living doing things a certain established way does not wish to be threatened.
The modernist pioneers established a bad precedent by showing scientific illiteracy. For example, the Fibonacci sequence of numbers correlates with many natural structures and has applications to design.6 Architect and urbanist Le Corbusier made extraordinary but totally unsupported claims about a system of design dimensions mimicking the Fibonacci sequence, which he called the Modulor.7 His confused scheme is enshrined into architectural mythology. Architect and author Anthony Antoniades interviewed Le Corbusier’s apprentices in Paris, who told him that “Le Corbusier had no idea of mathematics, contrary to what he professed.”8
Le Corbusier visited Princeton University to solicit an endorsement from Albert Einstein for his Modulor idea, but interrupted him when Einstein tried to check this trivial number sequence.9 Researchers now argue that Le Corbusier was a psychologically disturbed individual,10 casting doubt on his image as a serious thinker. His awkward and strange buildings are supposedly based on the Modulor scheme, yet this claim is unsupported by measurements.
Starting in the 1920s, celebrated modernist architects declared ex cathedra that their work possessed psychological and physiological healing properties.11 This clever marketing scheme was based on eighteenth-century pseudoscience lacking medical understanding. Those self-serving claims, with no data to support them, attributed redemptive qualities to the Bauhaus design style. Wishful thinking and concocted fictitious qualities of canonical industrial-modernist buildings soon became dogma. Architectural mythology confidently repeats this bogus design narrative, oblivious to the strongly negative responses that many of those buildings elicit from our bodies.12
The media tend to focus nowadays on some contemporary architects who allegedly strive to improve humanity by embracing interdisciplinary research. Their message is hopeful and promising, and employs scientific language. But little has changed. Closer examination reveals an application of advanced technology, not to better our everyday experience, but to create a frightening system of top-down control and surveillance.13 The persons directing those projects arrogantly ignore accumulated knowledge and pretend to be reinventing the wheel. Science is misused to implement dystopia, while we are fed hype.
Of course, architects since time immemorial have employed science to guarantee a building’s stability, but what is ignored in the past several decades is how the structure might affect users. The question is, how do circulation, details, dimensions, light, spaces, surfaces, and visual impact help to improve human wellbeing and create a healing environment? This question has a scientific answer. This derived knowledge underpins the theory of architecture. Investigations reveal incontrovertible evidence of which environments, natural or artificial, are salutogenic and therapeutic.14 Nature views and direct sunlight aside, healing environments do not follow the geometry of industrial modernism.15
An explanatory theory of architecture draws upon complexity theory, mathematics, and science.16 This descriptive and mathematical framework—developed by Alexander, Mehaffy, myself, and others—anticipates the effects that built structures will have on users before they are erected. It therefore has predictive value, which is a crucial test of a theory’s validity. Experiments substantiate architecture’s theoretical foundations. This accumulated knowledge is not taught in our schools, however. Architects stubbornly ignore the theory of architecture while clinging to pseudoscience.
Those of us investigating the effects of buildings on people have learned to mistrust architectural texts claiming to present theory. Their content is mostly personal opinion that has never been tested, does not meet the criteria for a theory of anything, and often makes no sense. This weakness has long been recognized even by architectural culture insiders such as Sylvia Lavin, but it made no difference to architecture education:
There are architects who embrace a cacophony of jargon appropriated from other disciplines hoping it will pass as theory when really it is just nonsense. … Architects not only excuse and explain away their misreadings of theoretical texts, but celebrate them.17
Our society enthusiastically believes what architects and architectural critics say. Media celebrity generates cultural authority, which prioritizes architects over scientists.18 Popular culture consequently privileges a famous architect—a person who somehow receives a commission to design a signature building—above a scientist who can use experiment and logic-based theory to disprove or verify questions that could affect life on earth.19
The architectural discipline is not presently set up to encourage empirical curiosity, identify logical fallacies, or debunk questionable claims through independent experimental replication and testing. The building industry employs architects who exploit pseudoscience to gain commissions by convincing clients and the public through exaggerated marketing hype.20 People believe idolized architects who use archispeak technobabble—scientific terms applied without logic or meaning—to justify their work after it is built.21 Tectonic problems are left up to the structural engineers to solve.
A big disappointment is that scientists never condemn the dominant role that pseudoscience and technobabble play in shaping our environment.22 This manipulative situation is well known in consumer product advertising and political propaganda. Scientists abrogate their responsibility to debunk misinformation in architecture and planning—and there is really nobody else who can correct this. They do not realize that science itself is ultimately at risk. This reluctance may be due to disciplinary protocols: do not criticize a subject or industry in which you have insufficient expertise. And so, the decline of science through the popularization of nonadaptive architecture proceeds unnoticed.
The functioning of an “architecture-industrial complex” affects the survival of both science and society.23 Our youngsters grow accustomed to inhuman built environments, thinking of their fashionable qualities in a pseudoscientific context, which makes it nearly impossible for them to learn, or even recognize, science. We are, in effect, sacrificing our future generations, as well as the biological nourishment we need from the immediate environment. The negative effects on the moldable, developing minds of children are especially alarming.
The design of educational spaces remains hostage to a malign form of cult dogmatism. Architects of school buildings impose abstract solutions, and astonishingly, are ignorant of discovered evidence-based design patterns that optimize learning environments.24 Despite research findings that condemn industrial-modernist spaces as possibly damaging children’s intellectual development, school administrators approve trendy incoherent or minimalist designs.25 This alarming practice is not openly discussed. No educator, legislator, or parent asks whether those geometries might generate anxiety or depression.
The skyscraper—in our times, usually built of glass and steel—is established as a gigantic source of profits for the architecture-industrial complex. This trend continues despite mounting evidence of associations “between high-rise living, childhood behavioral problems, and slower development.”26 Turning a blind eye to such damning ramifications, the American Institute of Architects used its membership dues to fund a short film challenge entitled I Look Up, in which applicants feature how wonderful contemporary architecture and skyscrapers in particular are for everybody.27 This public-relations effort got some talented young filmmakers involved, but was convincing only to architecture school inmates.
A civilization that inflicts damage on its own children, for whatever reason, is committing suicide. Here, the driving forces are corporate greed allied with an ideologically motivated cult of nonadaptive design. Those actions are supported by the media colluding with big money interests—arguably more irresponsible than deliberate—made possible by societal ignorance. Warnings over the years of what is happening are drowned out by justifications based on pseudoscience. Just like in previous instances of societal collapse, people continue to listen to false authorities.28
Science develops from discovery, tests to confirm those discoveries, and then documentation of those discoveries for future reference. Present-day architectural culture sticks to its own mythology and turns its back on all three principles of the scientific method. It never abandons its initial convictions, despite all empirical evidence.29 A telling sign that architecture has become unscientific is its rejection of pattern languages, along with all the evolved and tested adaptive design solutions that discovered patterns document. The vehemence by which architects dismiss design patterns, which will prevent the creation of possibly inhuman environments, reveals the acuteness of their rupture from evidence-based reality.30
The ensuing confusion has deplorable consequences for science. A schizophrenic approach now handicaps collaborative teams investigating how the built environment affects human health and psychology. Neuroscientists naively allow architects to calibrate the experiment so as to privilege the latter’s preferred nonadaptive building typologies. Such poorly designed investigation is not objective. Channeled toward confirming architectural icons, a hidden selection bias, expectations subvert the scientific goals of discovery and refutation.31 Research funding is thus squandered on useless experiments that produce ambiguous and inconclusive results.
What is worse, architectural culture openly attacks science whenever it threatens to displace accepted design dogma. The cult does everything possible to prevent its creations from being seen as nonadaptive and wasteful flights of fancy. Whether through the suppression of experimental results, or ad hominem hostility toward scientists and others who question inhuman architectural practices, the overall effect is to foster an anti-scientific climate. All the while, the media promote handpicked scientific results—usually taken out of context—that appear to boost current design practice. Preserving “approved” architectural images through any means whatsoever undermines science.
