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LAST UPDATE | 6 Jul
LAST WEEK, JACK Chambers, Minister for Public Expenditure, stated that the government will prioritise “cost and efficiency over design standards and aesthetics” when it comes to future infrastructure spending.
On the face of it, if you’ve been exposed to the huge budgetary overruns that big infrastructure projects have had recently, pragmatically, that is soothing.
However, on closer inspection, it begs the question of capital infrastructure designers, planners and managers — why are they not better at their job of managing projects and budgets, and why should their shortcomings be at the expense of the quality of the built environment we have to live amongst for decades going forward?
Good design is pragmatic and answers to the needs of its environment, but it should also answer design standards and aesthetic needs as a basic requirement, not an optional add-on. What we build matters, not just as a fluffy, feel-good measurement. It impacts on behaviour, social cohesion, crime rates, emotional wellbeing and resilience and the health of people who interact with these surroundings.
Neuroarchitecture is a growing field of social psychological research that is interdisciplinary in nature and explores how the built environment affects human brain function and behaviour. It combines neuroscience, environmental psychology, and architecture to provide evidence-based architectural design principles for better buildings that positively influence well-being, cognition and emotions.
Focusing only on cost is simply not good practice; functionality and aesthetics need to walk side by side for a successful society. Building with design standards and aesthetics as primary principles isn’t just a-nice-to-do, it’s science!
In Philadelphia, Wharton University conducted research into the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s (PHS) ‘Philadelphia LandCare Programme’, which backs up the science. The programme is an initiative that works with local businesses and communities to transform the tens of thousands of abandoned parcels of land in Philadelphia into attractive, well-manicured micro-parks through a process called “greening”.
The research showed that as well as property values going up 4.3% in the first year (a figure not pervasive to result in gentrification, works actually helped these neighbourhoods reclaim value lost through disinvestment), these improvements resulted in 29% less gun violence, 22% fewer burglaries and a 30% drop in issues like illegal dumping. What a place looks like, and more importantly, feels like, changes behaviour.
The antithesis to good, aesthetic-led designs is hostile architecture. Hostile architecture, also known as defensive architecture or exclusionary design, is an urban design strategy in which public spaces and structures are used to prevent certain activities or restrict certain people from using those spaces. Hostile buildings result in hostile behaviour.
Hostile architecture demonstrates how the environment can significantly influence behaviour and well-being. The design or culture of the space can create a sense of unease, exclusion, and even fear, leading to negative consequences for individuals and communities. Therefore, we can credibly hypothesise that building without including design standards and aesthetics would have negative effects on the surrounding population.
Design standards and aesthetics are not just what buildings look like; it’s understanding how we use and respond to them that’s important. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities (2002), writer and activist Jane Jacobs posited that the issue with modern developments that were primarily focused on a pleasing aesthetic as the primary purpose of design, ignored the functioning order of design and how the environment was used. That design needed to be built not just to look good, but to be engaged with. Buildings needed to be humanised.
On Thomas Heatherwick’s Humanise Campaign website, the bold statement ‘Boring buildings starve your soul’ fills the homepage. He expands in his book Humanise, “Boring is worse than nothing. Boring is a state of psychological deprivation. Just as the body will suffer when it’s deprived of food, the brain begins to suffer when it’s deprived of sensory information. Boredom is the starvation of the mind.”
The architect says the Humanise campaign is about “making [cities] more joyful and engaging through the design of buildings. We need to be asking, how do buildings make us feel? What is their impact on our emotions? Do they create the conditions where people feel safe, happy and included?”
The Global Head of the Humanise campaign Abigail Scott Paul told VML that it “is about sensitising people, including those responsible for designing and commissioning buildings, to the negative impacts of boring buildings on our health and wellbeing,” adding that “studies are beginning to show that being surrounded by boring buildings that lack visual complexity increases cortisol levels, causing higher levels of stress.”
Colin Ellard is a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo in Canada and director of its Urban Realities Laboratory, where he works at the intersection of urban design and experimental psychology. He also partners with architects, museums and other NGOs on projects to enrich public debate about the built environment.
His study from 2012 with two groups, one along a long, blank façade of a megastructure in NYC versus a small but lively strip of restaurants and stores with lots of open doors and windows, a happy hubbub of eating and drinking and a pleasantly meandering mob of pedestrians demonstrated that “dull, flat building facades increase stress.”
The art and design around us are impacting our moods, our decisions and our lives. Ireland’s cities have long been neglected, suffering from dereliction and a lack of green spaces, while choked up by heavy traffic.
Creating the built environment for society without taking aesthetics into account isn’t just negligent and problematic, it’s a sign of failure, an inability to lead and something that will negatively impact Irish citizens and visitors for generations to come.
As Andre Leon Talley famously said, “It’s a famine of beauty, honey. My eyes are starving for beauty.”
Ireland needs to eat.
Andrea Horan is the founder of Dublin nail bar Tropical Popical, The Hunreal Issues, co-founder of No More Hotels, and co-presenter of podcasts Don’t Stop Repealin‘ and United Ireland.
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