Architecture affects all of us. We can't avoid it.
No matter where you are in the world, you inhabit buildings.
A semester's worth of research and three podcasts later, I have found that architecture affects us through a multi-step process. Starting with our perception, to our cognition, to our emotions, and ending with our behavior.
Thinking about thinking?
Cognition is an umbrella term for all of our internal mental processes, but in this context, consider cognition simply as how we think and remember things. As the next step in the process of how architecture affects us, after our sensations are organized through perception, we think about it.
Those leather couches in Ross?
Maybe you think the couches look like the fancy hotel you walked into in Chicago, or maybe the couches remind you of the comfy leather chair you have back home. Whichever way we think of things, our mind makes a connection based on our memory so it seems familiar.
In architecture, we typically design spaces based on their function and relate the space to how the function has been represented in the past. Consider hospitals, prisons, and hotels. Thinking about these spaces makes us think of their specific characteristics.
These three processes combine to make up our behavior — our physical, measurable reaction to architecture.
Behavior has a lot to do with motivation. We are internally motivated by our thoughts and emotions to actually physically express something. To put it most simply, we do things. Behavior is the result of the combination of the processes described above. After we see and perceive the architecture around us, think about it and assign it to familiar memories in our mind's hard drive that are associated with specific emotions, our internal drama moves outward and we display our behavior. We have to - where else is all the energy from our brain's neuron activity supposed to go?
Feelings of anxiousness, stress, or success can result in physical behaviors such as being distracted and constantly looking around, bouncing you knee up and down, or concentrating on a task for a long time.
Sometimes our behavior causes us want to interact with people, while other times we will prefer to avoid people at all costs. In some cases, architecture makes people want to share it with other people!
How do you unconsciously perceive the world around you?
As we go through our day, we experience many different sensations. Our perception of these sensory details is how we experience these sensations. As we see, hear, touch, smell, and taste the environment around us, our brain stores these experiences to memory.
Architects are knowledgeable of these perception processes. As we continue to perceive the same sensations, we begin to anticipate the sensation. Or in other words, our past experience with specific visual or tactile details causes us to perceive the information before we experience the physical sensation. In architecture, the design of the space may be intended to bring about those perceptions in the people who inhabit the space.
So when we walk into the Ross Business School, where our sense of touch recognizes the leather of the couches and our sense of sight sees the decorative glass curtain walls, we are perceiving the space based on our past experience with these characteristics. For instance, we associate the frosted glass walls to ice sheets, and the leather couches to luxury lobbies.
Feelings? Absolutely terrifying. And guess what? We have over 34,000 of them!
But they do occur, reportedly about 12 at a time, through a lengthy unconscious process as well. It is extremely difficult to internally search and describe this abstract idea as it is happening to us - a term called metacognition that involves thinking about thinking - but it is a rather important thing to do.
Just think, here we are with University Finals Week falling upon us, we are all scurrying to grab a seat in one of the study spots on campus, all ignorant that we could be choosing to study in an environment that negatively impacts our feelings and energy. Why even study in the first place if your environment is working against you?
This is why it is important to take a second to think about how the characteristics of the space around you makes you feel. We all have different preferences and perceptions, so the architectural characteristics could make all of us feel a different way. Which, therefore, advances the importance of taking a moment to take a pic of one or two of the 34,000 emotions we have the capacity to feel.
