This may explain why I, and many other people, aren't so fond of Modernist-style buildings. We're instinctively reacting with fear.
(See my previous posting about the Mid-Century Modern home tour this weekend. Link is here.)
I stumbled on this piece from Fast Company about how surroundings shape our minds and bodies. Among its interesting tidbits: People instinctively prefer objects with rounded edges (think of arches, for instance) over sharp-edged objects (think of most 20th-century buildings, such as the Westin hotel in Charlotte, shown above, with the NASCAR Hall of Fame in the foreground). The theory is that it has to do with hard-wired fear of sharp objects.
Memo to architects designing libraries: High-ceilings in rooms encourage you to think more freely and abstractly.
And memo to minimalists: Clutter increases the "memorability" of a place. As the article says, "A generous scattering of objects generates a fondness for the place." (But I'm pretty sure that doesn't include dirty socks or last night's grease-splotched pizza box.)
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15 comments:
What is the point of this article?
To eliminate points, Chris. :-)
to make the case for developers to further their rule over Charlotte...make that "new Urbanist" developers
I like it modern architecture.
Memo to architects designing libraries: High-ceilings in rooms encourage you to think more freely and abstractly. Da Vinci, who thought as freely and abstractly as anyone who ever lived, disagreed with this. He thought that artists should work in small rooms because they tend to discipline the mind. Whether a disciplined intellect is required to produce modern art is a question perhaps best left unexplored.
I'm not so afraid of the pointless articles!
My big room is blue and has a very high ceiling. It's called outdoors.
Here's a serious link.
http://www.contemporary.ab.ca/ke/content/pdf/evolutionary_psychology.pdf
"Brains are hard-wired to avoid sharp angles because we read them as dangerous."
There can't be a city of a million people without many sharp angles because we require so many things to be plumb and level. We could have fewer sharp angles, though, if we had fewer and smaller buildings, and then we'd be less afraid.
Mary, has some backwoods thinking....
Mary,
Excellent subject. For all the posters here, try these two books: The Geography of Nowhere, by James Howard Kunstler, and a great book, A Better Place to Live, by Philip Langdon.
Langdon's book in particular makes the case that the way we build our living environments has a great impact on how we develop as individuals.
For example, (real) urban planners have known for centuries that people prefer easily navigable street grids. People prefer to go "straight as the crow flies". But the automobile disrupted this pattern. It in fact destroyed it. Most of our post WWII suburbs were designed with winding streets that often end in a dead-in cul-de-sac. The car took people off the street (many places don't have sidewalks) and allowed them to travel the greater distances over the convoluted routes. The end result is that you have a generation or two of people who have grown up literally not knowing "where they live".
It is difficult to get connected to "a place" when you are traveling down the street at 40 mph. Social psychologists have studied adults who grew up in suburbs and found they are far less attached to those areas than people who grew up places where they could walk to nearby stores and other activities.
How we build and maintain our living space does matter. Again, I highly recommend Langdon's book.
This reminds me of my long unanswered question: why do so many houses have front porches that people do not use? I think it's a subtle misunderstanding by architects of the human factors which make a front porch attractive to sit on. Beyond that I am unsure. I think they need to be partially screened or have a low ceiling. Other people tell me I'm wrong about those.
Jumper, the reason front porches are still around is because of vestigialism. Humans are born with appendices but don’t need them. Houses are created with front porches for the same reason. They are just remnants of a day and age when human beings interacted their neighbors and needed less material things to be entertained.
Automobiles and television made front porches obsolete. Until the mid 20th century, most households had only one adult who was employed, and consequently only one car. Kids had few manufactured games and played outdoors. Therefore if the homebodies wanted to go to a movie, get a few groceries or clothes, or visit the soda shoppe – and assuming they lived in a village or city large or small – they just walked up the street, into town and back. Meanwhile, other adults and children along the route usually gravitated to the front porch for “excitement” during the day or evening. Television sets were rare and rather crude. But those large radio sets could be positioned in the living rooms near the screen door leading to the porch. One could be entertained by Stella Dallas or The Shadow and at the same time also see their neighbors, maybe even invite them up onto the porch for a conversation.
As America matured, we discovered that we could have more cars if we put both household adults to work. We learned that not only could we afford a color TV, we could sit, eat and watch one in our living room, which soon became a family room. We modern humans then quickly progressed to the age of home entertainment centers, electronic games up the wazoo, cell phones, Twitter and Face Book.
So, who needs to sit on their front porch and watch for neighbors, when no one today has time to be civil? Developers need to wise up. Why are they even using windows in dwellings? Who bothers to watch what is going on in the neighborhood?
WOW, There are some people on this blog with a lot of time on their hands.
I live up high at Avenue condominiums and almost my entire home is windows and I love it. Thirteen floor to ceiling windows all in a row overlooking Center City. My balcony is my front porch.
Go modern architecture !!
Um, Mary--the Nascar Hall of Fame is an oval. It's also pretty modern.
That said, can you honestly say you prefer faux historicism in buildings like the new theater at CPCC? The horrendous dryvit fake arches and pediments of Epicentre? The ridiculousness of hollow Doric columns supporting a portico that serves no purpose along with a brick "triumphant arch"(Morrocroft Village at SouthPark)? For me, no thanks. Give me glass and steel and light. Give me creativity and open-mindedness. I've seen too much of faux bunglaows, red brick monstrosities, and stucco-covered styrofoam.
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