What do psychology and neuroscience tell us about what architects should promote or avoid in facade design, asks the RIBA, as Eleanor Young speaks to two experts.
RIBA writes:
When Thomas Heatherwick launched his ‘anti-boring’ campaign in 2023, rapidly followed by a BBC Radio 4 series, Building Soul, and his book, Humanise, it felt like another bit of architect-bashing, this time from this designer extraordinaire who has made it his business to go beyond sculptures and buses to design buildings – with an expressive gin distillery and Google’s UK headquarters among his achievements.
Yet two new academic studies using biomarkers and carefully controlled experiments to understand the impact of facades on the people around them have shown that architects have the opportunity to improve wellbeing with the outsides of their buildings. In the emerging fields of architectural psychology and architecture neuroimmunology, the impact of buildings is being unravelled with experiments in the lab and on the street. They are the missing link between the best architects’ professional instinct about the impact of buildings and understanding how visual stress and lack of arousal (boring design, as Heatherwick would have it) can contribute to negative public health outcomes.
I spoke to Colin Ellard, a psychologist at Canada’s University of Waterloo, and Cleo Valentine, a researcher and systems designer at the University of Cambridge who specialises in architectural neurophysiology and bioethics. (Valentine is also senior research and innovation lead at the UCL/RISE Centre for NeuroArchitecture and NeuroDesign, RISE Research Institutes of Sweden). Both have undertaken studies on facades, supported by Heatherwick Studio, adding specific facade focus to their wider work on the psychology and neuroscience of our built environment. They explain how architecture can strongly contribute to allostatic overload, so when we perceive a threat, the stress it creates releases cortisol and other stress hormones. This shifts our systems to the sympathetic nervous system – fight or flight. With regular or chronic stress this cascades through our systems, taking its toll on our body’s systems and, in response, produces an inflammatory response in the brain and body. This has been linked to a huge number of ailments, from cardiovascular and coeliac disease to allergies and arthritis.
Ellard adds that the psychological impact of not engaging with our surroundings – the absence of arousal – can lead to self-harming and addictive behaviours. This has been noted by the extended science of boredom (from James Danckert, among others).
