This is your brain on preservation Nikos A. Salingaros Chicago Past Forward Conference 16 November 2017
This is your brain on preservation
Nikos A. Salingaros Chicago Past Forward Conference
16 November 2017
Why do people go into Historic Preservation?
• There is something irresistibly attractive to old buildings and urban settings
• They appeal to us in a deep visceral way we cannot explain (until now!)
• The same attraction is not felt in many 20th Century buildings and urban spaces, at least not by all people
A Louis Sullivan bank
Love becomes a profession
• Happy is the person who works doing what he/she loves
• Someone who gets nourishment out of being in older places and settings naturally would like to make a profession out of it
• And work to save those healing places from destruction by insensitive people
Healing environments
• The romance of feeling good in a place can now be explained scientifically
• Some environments are “healing”
• Those connect to our body and make it respond in a positive manner
• By strengthening our neurological signal, environments promote healing
Hospital Maggiore Vecchio, Lodi
Two-pronged approach to research
• (1) Interrelated theories: Biophilia, Design Patterns, organized complexity
• A theoretical framework for knowing how to create healing environments
• (2) Direct measurements of our body’s response to external stimuli
• Neurological experiments reveal this
Experimental methods
• fMRI studies see which areas of the brain activate for alarm or pleasure
• Skin temperature and conductivity both rise during stress
• Eye pupil contracts under unease; eye fixates only on attractive patterns
• Heart rate and Adrenalin go up
The ceiling is going to crush you
The Stockholm Conference
• “Neuroscience and Architecture”, 2017
• Arranged by the Ax:son Johnson Foundation to start a new field
• We propose a framework to measure human neurological responses to places, settings, surfaces, etc.
• An international research program
Three of my articles in 2017
• “How neuroscience can generate a healthier architecture”, Conscious Cities Journal.
• “Why we need to ‘grasp’ our surroundings: object affordance and prehension in architecture”, J. of Arch. and Urbanism.
• “Neuroscience and preservation: measuring the healing properties of places”, Preservation Leadership Forum.
Café Landtmann, Vienna
Mathematical principles
• We have guidelines and rules for generating healing environments
• Extracted from historical examples
• They are finally going to be validated directly by neuroscience experiments
• This validation is necessary
Timeless human creations
New ideas for preservation
• Inform preservationists and the public on what types of environments are engaging for people
• … because those are healthy for people! • The debate shifts drastically — from
historical criteria, to neurological ones concerning our health and survival
Those “useless” design elements
• Biophilia: color, curves, ornament, frames, fractal scaling, natural light, plants, symmetries, vertical axis of symmetry, organized detail, etc.
• All elements contained in historical buildings and human-scale spaces
• Essential for human wellbeing!
Example: fractal scaling
Some architects oppose life
• For ideological reasons, architects are trained to eliminate life from buildings
• The “ideal” design is industrial-sterile • Older buildings with life are discarded
— left to be demolished and replaced
• Also, preservation is co-opted to save buildings that have no living qualities
Older building without life
Architectural culture
• Strives for unrestrained visual novelty, with a dash of sadism
• Focuses exclusively on image
• Ignores life-enhancing qualities
• Totally disconnected from healing environments, and doesn’t care for therapeutic design rules
Newer building without life
We can build life today!
• But don’t hire just any architect
• Only a practitioner who knows Biophilia, Design Patterns, Christopher Alexander’s “Fifteen Fundamental Properties”, and organized complexity
• Lessons (now systematized) come from older buildings we have to preserve
Two booklets of collected essays
Living cities
• City morphology has been perverted
• Designed only for fast car traffic
• Zoning laws prohibit living fabric
• This tragedy profits a small sector
• Older urban spaces envelop the user • Older façades nourish the pedestrian
Conclusion
• We need older buildings for our health
• To teach us to build healing qualities
• People understand this intuitively
• The profession has distanced itself so far that compromise seems impossible
• Even when historical places are copied today, they lack living qualities