''We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us,” said Winston Churchill.
Our surroundings can make us healthier and less likely to drop litter, enhance our beauty, decrease our perception of pain and enable us to solve puzzles more quickly.
But We like spaces that flirt with us: complex and mysterious settings. We prefer streets that curve out of sight, leading us on with a tantalising hint of what lies beyond. We like environments that excite our curiosity, but also satiate it.
An environment is “legible” if it’s easy to survey and form a cognitive map of. Prospect – the ability to see the distance – is part of this.
The landscapes we love most balance legibility with mystery, coherence with complexity. Natural scenes are marked by fractal geometry, with a specific recipe of order and complexity. These fractal patterns hold the key to understanding wellbeing in buildings, from the detailing of window frames to the cascading domes of Hindu temples and the configuration of London’s streets.
In the past, buildings evolved in a more organic way – using natural materials such as wood and stone. Places grew slowly. Roads followed the contour of the land.
But much of this has been lost in the colossal scale and fast pace of 21st-century life. Many of our everyday spaces fail to support wellbeing, community and creativity.
So how can we shape the world we want to be defined by?
As Alastair Parvin, co-founder of WikiHouse, an open-source platform for designing and constructing affordable homes, says: “What most people call bad design isn’t bad design. It’s really good design for a totally different set of economic outcomes, which is producing real estate.”
To built something better suited to human needs, you need to give people the tools to construct their own spaces. When people are involved in doing so they develop a quality known as “collective efficacy”. And communities with high collective efficacy are less violent.
So let's give a peace a chance...
Source: How architecture shapes our cities - and our lives
Our surroundings can make us healthier and less likely to drop litter, enhance our beauty, decrease our perception of pain and enable us to solve puzzles more quickly.
But We like spaces that flirt with us: complex and mysterious settings. We prefer streets that curve out of sight, leading us on with a tantalising hint of what lies beyond. We like environments that excite our curiosity, but also satiate it.
An environment is “legible” if it’s easy to survey and form a cognitive map of. Prospect – the ability to see the distance – is part of this.
The landscapes we love most balance legibility with mystery, coherence with complexity. Natural scenes are marked by fractal geometry, with a specific recipe of order and complexity. These fractal patterns hold the key to understanding wellbeing in buildings, from the detailing of window frames to the cascading domes of Hindu temples and the configuration of London’s streets.
In the past, buildings evolved in a more organic way – using natural materials such as wood and stone. Places grew slowly. Roads followed the contour of the land.
But much of this has been lost in the colossal scale and fast pace of 21st-century life. Many of our everyday spaces fail to support wellbeing, community and creativity.
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| Jake Gyllenhaal stars in Demolition |
So how can we shape the world we want to be defined by?
As Alastair Parvin, co-founder of WikiHouse, an open-source platform for designing and constructing affordable homes, says: “What most people call bad design isn’t bad design. It’s really good design for a totally different set of economic outcomes, which is producing real estate.”
To built something better suited to human needs, you need to give people the tools to construct their own spaces. When people are involved in doing so they develop a quality known as “collective efficacy”. And communities with high collective efficacy are less violent.
So let's give a peace a chance...
Source: How architecture shapes our cities - and our lives
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