Can neuroscience help architects design buildings that make us feel better?
Buildings do more than just shelter us: they inform how we feel on a psychological and physical level. Researchers in the field of neuro-architecture are developing new ways of creating stress-free urban environments.
Anyone who erects a building today must be prepared to face a backlash. The Roche towers, which rise unadorned into the Basel sky as the tallest buildings in Switzerland, were mocked in 2014 by culture editor Till Briegleb in Art magazine. He suggested that the architects responsible for the towers, Herzog & de Meuron, so obviously despise the idyllic nature of their surroundings that they feel compelled to drive a brutal wedge into it.
Andres Janser, then curator at the Museum für Gestaltung in Zürich, saw things differently. He considers the first building, completed in 2015, to be “successful overall”. In 2022 a second taller tower was completed next to the first.
Dimensions of wellbeing
Opinions differ on what constitutes successful architecture. A relatively young field of research, “neuro-architecture”, is attempting to determine how we should build in order for people to feel comfortable about the structures that surround them. According to a 2023 review analysing all studies published up to that point, its aim is to positively influence our dimensions of wellbeing: body, mind, emotions and behaviour. One of the initiators of neuro-architecture was American virologist and biomedical scientist Jonas Salk, who discovered the polio vaccine. When he visited the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi in Umbria in the 1950s, he said that he could feel the ancient structure’s creative and stimulating atmosphere. After returning to the US, he founded the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California.
The architect commissioned to design the institute was instructed to ensure that it would inspire the scientists working there in their research. At the time, however, there were no generally accepted criteria for architecture that fosters wellbeing. Those designing buildings had to rely on intuition if they wished to evoke positive emotions.
To provide the young discipline with a platform, US architects founded the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture in 2002. It now counts almost 400 members worldwide. Through conferences and academic exchange, it promotes and disseminates knowledge that connects neuroscience with the growing understanding of human responses to buildings.
Natural forms
This is also the aim of researchers Simone Kühn and Nour Tawil from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. Kühn is a professor and the director of the Research Center for Environmental Neuroscience, while Tawil is an architect and research associate in Kühn’s group. Together with other researchers, they are investigating how the environment affects individuals. They work under the assumption that the complexity of our surroundings influences our brain and our behaviour to a greater degree than previously thought.
In their experiments, Kühn and Tawil use images of houses that are generated by a specially trained artificial-intelligence system. Thanks to this technology, they can alter and combine individual characteristics of buildings and thus determine how important these features are in terms of their impact. Among other things, they measure people’s eye movements in order to observe the often unconscious guidance of attention.
Using such methods, the researchers can test which characteristics are relevant for human perception and evaluation. The façade images were generated by a machine-learning model that consists of two neural networks and was trained on photographs of real façades and their corresponding human evaluations.
One façade characteristic that appears to have a particularly strong psychological effect is the quality of naturalness. When materials, light and complexity signal a connection to nature, this benefits the human psyche, according to the biophilia hypothesis. To create such an impression, however, vegetation (such as ivy or climbing vines) is not strictly necessary. The building itself can also appear natural.
In nature, rounded forms – waves, clouds, hills and trees – occur far more frequently than sharp edges and angles. It therefore comes as little surprise that curves appear to be more appealing to people than sharp angles. A lot of modern architecture features curves: the Shell-Haus in Berlin, with its strikingly undulating façade, opened in 1932.
The researchers tested the differing effects of angular and rounded furniture and window frames. The results showed that angles were rated almost equally as attractive and unattractive, whereas curves were clearly more appealing. This aligns with other research findings that suggest that people generally prefer curves to angles and sharp edges in objects and abstract shapes.
This preference for curves was particularly pronounced among female participants. However, this might not necessarily be a specific response to the curves themselves, since women generally seem to respond more strongly to external stimuli. “I sometimes wonder whether women are generally more open to their surroundings,” says Kühn. For example, a walk in nature has a far stronger effect on women than on men.
Kühn and Tawil were surprised, however, that participants did not necessarily perceive faces in houses. As social beings, humans tend to interpret many structures as having “faces”. Yet even façades that clearly resembled human faces didn’t appear significantly more attractive to people in these experiments than those that did not.
It’s not about imposing rules
At present, the researchers are still finding it difficult to translate their findings into direct advice for builders. “I think that, in a few years, we will be able to provide concrete recommendations,” says Kühn. However, such insights should not be misunderstood as prescriptions.
Andréa de Paiva, the founder of architecture platform Neuro AU, shares this view. “Neuroarchitecture is not about imposing specific rules that architects must follow,” she says. “It is up to them to decide what, when and how they draw on these insights.”
Architects build according to their own visions and this is rarely questioned within the profession. The buildings most admired within industry circles are not necessarily those in which future residents might feel most at ease. For Kühn, creating a stress-free, cosy and comforting environment need not always be the declared goal. Nevertheless, she says, “I believe that it’s a problem that there is little exchange between experts who can measure human responses and those who design our surroundings.”
If architects choose to build differently despite such dialogue, at least it would be a conscious decision. A story from the 1960s and 1970s illustrates how building plans can be revised when modern architecture meets strong resistance. At that time, a huge development project was planned in Hamburg. The Alsterzentrum was expected to house 20,000 residents. There were plans to demolish the St Georg district almost entirely, leaving only two churches standing. In its place, a crescent-shaped ring of high-rise buildings up to 200 metres tall was to be constructed. The pyramid-like structures tapering upward bear a striking resemblance to today’s Roche towers in Basel. Only after critical voices grew louder were the plans for the Alsterzentrum abandoned in 1973. Perhaps even then, some people could not imagine how anyone was supposed to feel good in such a soulless giant.
About the story: Christian Weymayr’s essay was first published in Neue Zürcher Zeitung in German. It appears here with the newspaper’s permission and was translated by Monocle.
