To the editors:
The odd current state of affairs in architecture can be explained from various perspectives. An architectural historian’s view on the situation is articulated brilliantly by James Stevens Curl in his Making Dystopia. From a hard science point of view, Nikos Salingaros offers similarly insightful explanations in his numerous books and essays, all informed and supported by psychology and information theory.1 Both authors are distinguished scholars, and their research is taken seriously. They are also far from alone. Professionals from many fields have expressed hopes for brighter prospects in the development of architecture. Mainstream architectural discourse has increasingly been afflicted with catchwords such as “sustainability,” “adaptive,” “resilient,” “community,” “smart,” “natural,” and “livable.” There is also a widespread feeling, including among architects and politicians, that contemporary architecture cannot compete with historic antecedents in terms of beauty and harmony. As Salingaros points out in his review, this is the reason why tourists flock to world heritage cities and towns instead of newly constructed housing estates and suburbs.
Despite all the discussion, research, and accumulated knowledge, a mystery remains. Why are modern buildings so often dreadful?
Before offering my own views, I would like to present some personal recollections. The first involves my grandmother, who was from a tiny central European village. She recalled that during the 1970s, some of her neighbors had moved to an apartment in a prefabricated housing block. The remaining villagers envied them their freedom from the hard upkeep of house and field. Second, I have met European architectural conservationists who fearlessly oppose modernist constructions in protected neighborhoods, but, at the same time, are against so-called false historicism as they search for acceptable solutions. And finally, a few years ago, I visited the new home of a young couple who both held doctorates in the humanities. It was a traditional terraced house, straight out of a catalogue. Every facade on the street was painted a warm color—yellow, ochre, or red—except for theirs, which was green. When I inquired as to the reason their facade was a different color, the happy owners explained that they had wanted to be different from the rest.
As can be seen from these examples, people often tend to give precedence to the symbolic meanings of architecture. How else to explain why villagers—whether in England during the 1840s, Czechoslovakia in the 1970s, or India in the 2010s—were proud to resettle from cottages and farms into slums or tiny rental flats in chaotic and polluted cities? Why else would an architectural conservationist protect supposed true monuments against new, monument-like architecture? It seems that the villagers were struggling for personal dignity, while the conservationists were struggling for truth.
On a small scale, the expression of personal history in a piece of architecture might be considered a mere anecdote. On a large scale, such an approach might result in catastrophe. A single green facade in an otherwise consistently colored streetscape causes little harm. Yet the addition of a single minimalist box construction would spoil the street entirely. Even worse, the appearance of a glass high-rise, a symbol of commercial or ideological success, would completely obliterate the traditional character of the neighborhood. In the past, an architectural language was a tool for harmonizing heterogeneous architectural ambitions. A cathedral, for example, could be built alongside a hamlet and the new structure still fitted in alongside the existing buildings. The harmony and cohesion of the built environment as a whole was not disrupted. This does not mean that the architectural vocabulary must be identical; what matters is morphology and syntax. Consider the skyscrapers in Chicago, New York City, or Detroit built during the 1920s. Their art deco style makes them an organic part of an urban environment that was mostly comprised of low-rise buildings.
It seems paradoxical that beauty and harmony started to disappear from architectural goals just as professional education was formalized. In the traditional approach, beauty and harmony have been seen as interdependent since ancient times. Harmony facilitates a positive relationship between the inner self and the outer world, as well as between particular elements inside and outside a construction. Only a very small number of contemporary architectural authorities—Peter Eisenman is one example—openly express the view that disharmony rules the world and that architects are obligated to reflect this disturbing revelation in their work. It could be the case that architectural studies, as is the case with modern art, attract applicants with similar inner demons much more often than other fields. Yet in my own experience they do not prevail in praxis. What really matters is the lack of demand for beautiful architecture among the broader public audience and the disconnection from traditional wisdom among do-it-yourself builders. The modern vernacular is usually as haphazard as the modernist professional fabrication. After a century of experiments, modern people may have simply become oblivious to architectural debate. Any lingering public interest in a beautiful built environment is confined to brief excursions during holidays and sightseeing trips. Perhaps the subtle finesse of traditional architecture has gradually become inaccessible to preoccupied commuters and drivers oblivious to their surroundings. By preferring primitivism in architecture, the human brain may well be trying to prevent overheating. The amount of visual information the brain can process is limited, and our senses are easily overwhelmed by many other forms of organized complexity. Notable examples include the bewildering variety and range of consumer products and virtual reality.2 Creating harmony may simply be too arduous a task for most contemporary architectural graduates, as well as for their teachers.
Skepticism alone will not be sufficient as a corrective. There are ways to cultivate and reshape architectural education, both among students and their potential clients. In their work, Curl and Salingaros have recommended several exemplary schools, associations, and authorities. Plenty of cities and towns have been reinvigorated by a sensitive masterplan and the incorporation of carefully thought-out landmarks.3 In architectural language, the clash between old-fashioned and progressive views might be mitigated by so-called adaptive modernism, which emulates interwar-period examples such as art deco or Nordic classicism.4 The achievements of nature conservation are also important to note. When people interconnect their love for the world with knowledge-based planning, entire habitats can be revitalized, regardless of the existing level of disruption. One hundred years ago, Sir Patrick Geddes coined the term conservative surgery when speaking of urban planning.5 Recasting architects as physicians should represent a sufficiently challenging mission to be included in the curriculum for architectural schools.
Martin Horáček
Nikos Salingaros replies:
Martin Horáček asks, “Why are modern buildings so often dreadful?” It is a good question, and one that I believe can be answered scientifically.
To use the word “dreadful” means that a building provokes a negative impression that is beyond only slightly unattractive. It implies that the observer has a strongly negative visceral response to the details, geometry, and overall composition of the building. We can actually measure visual interest, which influences our responses as well as bodily states, using lightweight portable and wearable sensors. Perhaps for the first time in history, it is relatively straightforward to determine if a building is dreadful or not based on evidence.
Measuring a building’s attractiveness becomes a biological exercise. A building is attractive when it signals positive physiological characteristics to our organism so that we unconsciously wish to approach it.6 The contrary—an avoidant response—results when a building’s appearance represents distress to our neurology. The body’s automatic response goes on alert, since those negative visual signals are the same ones used to interpret and react to threats.7 We are thus able to sidestep a long history of art-historical aesthetic debates on attractiveness that never reached any conclusion.
An unbiased computer program such as 3M’s Visual Attention Software can provide an enormous amount of useful information.8 The software requires no experimental apparatus whatsoever, but accurately predicts where the eye will look. Scanning an image of a building’s façade, the software will record where an observer’s eye is most likely to fixate in the first few seconds. On sight, the human brain makes rapid decisions that determine whether to approach or move away from an object. The software also generates a cumulative heat map that shows where the eye repeatedly gazes on a building. The heat map indicates those regions of a façade likely to attract attention.
Eye-tracking experiments can be conducted in two ways. The first is directly through eye-tracking glasses that measure exactly where the wearer looks.9 This lightweight apparatus replaces the older bulky and heavy machines which required a subject to sit in a laboratory and look at a picture or drawing.10 The ease of simply wearing a pair of eyeglasses containing embedded sensors makes it possible to conduct eye-tracking experiments at a building’s physical site. The second method relies on a data bank of eye-tracking experiments that have been programmed into software.
The human body reacts to three-dimensional solid geometries and spaces in an unconscious manner. This factor is more difficult to ascertain using sensors, but it has just as strong an impact as a visual signal. Humans sense whether they fit into a space and if their bodies are accommodated or not. The shape of the enclosing envelope molds tangible space. The term affordance of space denotes the possible ways that the human body at rest or in movement can use that space.11 Relevant factors include the geometry of the walls, windows, doors, the shape of the ceiling, and the transitions among all of these.
What is known as proprioception or kinesthetic awareness—how the body senses its parts and maps their positional interrelationship—plays a dominant role in situating ourselves in our surroundings and relating to them. The brain runs virtual scenarios of movement to see whether those could lead to physical harm.12 This innate physical sense helps us decide how to position our body and control the trajectory of our movements.13
Proprioception works together with another sense: object affordance or prehension, which scans the immediate vicinity for potential handles to grasp.14 In an environment with appropriately placed handles of inviting and graspable shape and size, a person will feel reassured. Whatever task the person has to perform there will be less stressful. Those could be railings, door and window handles, architectural moldings, furniture, and even painted or relief strips or ornaments.
All of the above scientific tools can be applied to determine which buildings are attractive and which are not. In the unattractive category, additional work is required to determine whether something fails to draw attention simply because it is bland and neutral, or whether it actively repels the gaze because it generates anxiety and distress. For that, separate biological tools are required, all of which are readily available. Nowadays, portable sensors exist that determine degrees of bodily stress.15 Medical technology can measure skin temperature, skin conductance, pupil dilation, heart rate, brain activity, facial expressions, hormonal levels, and other physiological indicators.
Getting back to Horáček’s question, preliminary measurements confirm that many buildings created according to the modernist aesthetic can indeed be considered dreadful.16 In contrast, more traditional design typologies are measured as being better adapted to the human body, since they are received with positive physiological effect.17 In practical terms, this means that both historic and vernacular buildings will in general be overwhelmingly attractive, and this attractive urge is felt unconsciously.
The answer to Horáček’s question, therefore, is that modern buildings are so often dreadful because their design apparently violates several essential physiological needs.
From this conclusion, it may seem that buildings turn out dreadful accidentally, because the designer is perhaps distracted and not paying proper attention. Nevertheless, architects have access to all the research tools I documented above, but they so far seem totally uninterested. The biological criteria I have listed play no role in the design of new environments. This prompts me to reformulate Horáček’s question so as to emphasize a crucial point: Why does modernist design so often deliberately generate dreadful buildings?
James Stevens Curl’s book Making Dystopia suggests that modernist design imposes buildings and urban spaces as abstract images that do not coincide with human biology. This regrettable situation generates built environments with few adaptive human qualities for all of us to live in. Yet the problem reaches far deeper than an aesthetic confrontation of design styles, which is how contemporary architects inevitably interpret any challenge to their work. Our culture of spectacle puts the scientific method itself on the line.
When architects try to understand the ideas outlined here, they apply the formalistic tools they learned in school, which are useless for achieving adaptive environments. One cannot spend a lifetime intentionally isolating oneself from beauty that connects directly to biological life, and then expect to be able to suddenly relate to it. It is not surprising that architects trained during the past several decades employ the abstract terminology of detachment to describe beauty—a pointless exercise. They have been taught a false certainty: that what they value represents wonderful design. It does not, because it detaches humans from their own biology, starting from Bauhaus modernism up to the latest prizewinning iconic buildings.
A wave of uncontrolled building activity is occurring around the world, and all the while economic growth is used to justify destroying world heritage. Nothing is allowed to stand in the way of massive new construction, even when that activity erases historic building cultures and replaces them with unattractive and unsustainable environments.18 Scientific evidence contradicting the official industry narrative—which eulogizes new structures favored by the global elite—is silenced by a massive public relations campaign that generates a false reality.19 We are promised a wonderful technological utopia. What we get is something else entirely.
Alas, nothing is really resolved. Instead, an incredibly vicious debate opens up. Even the prestige of science is not enough to restrain the unstoppable momentum of a trillion-dollar global building industry, which is backed by the academic authority of almost all the architecture schools around the world.
Horáček’s question, as restated above, can be answered in general with the following observation: A design toolkit will consistently produce dreadful buildings if its algorithms deliberately go against human nature.
We need to take seriously the early twentieth-century design movements’ declared desire to break utterly with the past so as to start again from zero. Horáček mentions the very human desire to be different, by having a green house among red and yellow ones. But if taken beyond a physiological threshold, different can become harmful. There is no indication whatsoever that architects from the early twentieth century up to the present time paid any attention to this, or any other constraint.
The new type of supposed beauty in architecture introduced by the modern movement was certainly novel, since countless generations of humans had avoided it instinctively because of alarm coming from sensory feedback. Ugliness was intuitively recognized in the past as having a harmful effect upon the body and mind. Yet today much of the world lives in cramped and depressing spaces, and uses awkward and uncomfortable utensils, even when those people can afford the most wonderful, life-enhancing artifacts and environments.
Those who are prisoners of a reduced world of abstract images do not realize they can connect to the nourishing world of biological beauty. Architectural culture ignores many aspects of what makes us living, sentient beings, while it generates its own mythology for public consumption.20 When buildings are validated purely as intellectual and visual abstractions, neurological responses are numbed.21 A manufactured, artificial reality that does not correspond to physical reality disconnects the body from its neural system. This forces even self-builders to follow certain default images of style.
I have to admit that there are long-term deleterious effects on society as a whole. After a century of building activity that followed a very narrow spectrum of design typologies, one can reach a particular conclusion: Modern buildings are so often dreadful because almost all of the population has been acclimatized to accept their design, despite it contradicting human physiology.
Reducing complex human sensory experience to a one-dimensional shadow of itself has consequences. An industrial geometry masquerading as efficient, liberating technology creates an artificial environment in which we function free from corporeal binds. Even intelligent individuals are too numbed to ask how that limits them. People are evidently habituated to a severely restricted humanity for themselves; or they have been convinced that they are getting some other benefits in exchange for giving up what their neural system craves; or it does not bother them because they suffer from mental illness.
Ann Sussman argues that the strong correlation between autism and post-traumatic stress disorder on the one hand, and the defining characteristics of modernist design on the other, cannot be a coincidence. Historical evidence points to the modernist masters as suffering from serious mental disturbances and wishing to impose those limitations on the rest of the population.22 As can be imagined, this thesis is not well received by dominant architectural culture, but the objections this culture has raised so far are weak and unconvincing.23 It is curious that academics treat such an explosive issue with deafening silence.
Let me therefore return to Horáček’s original question one more time with an additional answer: Modern buildings are so often dreadful to mentally healthy individuals because the style’s original founders possibly suffered from mental disturbances or injuries, which played a dominant role in defining the style.
It is inconceivable—too devastating in an existential sense—for individuals stuck inside narrow aesthetic limits to question the basis for their learned convictions. It is far easier to continue to accept illusory criteria for beauty as being about generating architecture that is good for us in some vague moral sense, and to consider dissenters as ignorant louts. It is a way to protect someone from the painful experience of cognitive dissonance.24 Thus, when defending their position against criticism, architects do not engage analytically, but simply fall back on formal arguments. That is the best they can do.
In conclusion, Horáček’s letter has an apt title: “Architects as Physicians.” Unfortunately, architects are not trained in principles that resemble the ethical training of medical professionals. The world would be a far more agreeable place if that ever became accepted practice. But for now, architectural commissions are obtained through an appeal to fashion, while abstractions and intellectual arguments are used to justify designs. That state of affairs does not lead to environments that are ideally adapted to human life. As author and urbanist Michael Mehaffy has noted:
I was recently with a group of architect friends who joked that architects should all be grateful they are not medical professionals—for if so, many would be bankrupted or jailed for malpractice. The pseudoscience, the failure to follow evidence-based norms, the ex-cathedra theory, the century-old ideologies, the metaphoric thinking uncontaminated by anything like a true science of settlements—they are all remarkable, I think, and remarkably troubling.25
If architects were trained to have any medical background, they would immediately jump on the opportunity to carry out a retrospective diagnosis of modernism’s founding fathers. If, as suspected, those individuals suffered from possible mental disorders, this finding could force us to reevaluate the modernist design style. I wish medical doctors and psychiatrists took up this challenge of discovering the hidden causes for why the built environment looks and feels like it does. Afterward, we could begin the process of re-humanization.
