Venetian Letter

I grew up in my grandmother Ramona’s house. She was a happy and outgoing person. The house was always full of people. In the morning, it was filled with neighbors who took a few minutes on their way to work to have coffee with her, and in the afternoon, the house was filled with friends, children, grandchildren, and nephews. It was a house full of energy and memories of the past.

At the age of 75, my grandmother began to confuse the names of the people who visited her, and it was then that her children realized it was due to dementia. My father, Gildardo, who lived next door to my grandmother, cared for her. He helped her keep track of her medications, stock the refrigerator with food, and ensured she always had what she needed.

My grandmother’s home was a significant part of her life. It was a place where she felt safe and comfortable. It was also a place where she could connect with her memories. She had many pictures and belongings from her life on display. These things helped her remember her past, family, and friends.

This article was originally published in the Architecture Snob magazine, issue December 2022.

Today, we spend about eighty to ninety percent of our time inside buildings. We now also know that our brains and bodies are affected by contact with architecture, and the interest in understanding the environment’s impact on human wellbeing is growing.

There are many new studies on this topic released every year, and architectural studios are employing the services of human experience researchers and consultants.

This article was originally published in Polish language, in the IARP magazine (Chamber of Architects of the Republic of Poland), issue Z:A 86.

In the first part of this article, we talked about the pioneering individuals and institutions that create new knowledge between architecture and neuroscience. We have also described the brain systems important for understanding the experience of architecture.

In this second part, we will look at how architects can use this knowledge to design spaces that enable human flourishing.

Previously, we saw that although some aspects of experiencing architecture are an individual matter, the activation of many structures and brain circuits is universal to most people.

Evolutionary psychology explains this is because humans and their predecessors spent millions of years in the same natural conditions (so-called “environment of evolutionary adaptation”).

Today, we use the same brains, mostly unchanged in the last two hundred thousand years, to experience man-made architecture.

This article was originally published in Polish language, in the IARP magazine (Chamber of Architects of the Republic of Poland), issue Z:A 86.

The twentieth century was a time of progress in structural engineering. It resulted in taller, more solid, and technologically innovative buildings. However, recent decades have seen an increased interest in the human experience of space.

Today, people spend about eighty to ninety percent of their lives indoors. This fact makes it crucial to investigate the relationship between the experience of architecture and its impact on human health and well-being.

Until recently, the study of the effects of architecture on humans was the domain of environmental psychology. But in the past few years, we have gotten new tools to study the neural mechanisms underlying the perception of art and architecture.

I started as a psychology student at a university in Wales. I enjoyed the course a lot, but I had no idea where it would lead me. I have always been drawn to topics not yet categorized into specific subfields, to phenomena not yet explained.

At that time, what interested me most were seemingly random questions. Things like why the Vietnam War veterans addicted to heroin stopped quickly after returning to the US. Or why working in a cozy café might be more productive for some than at a tranquil library.

In my third year, when we started designing our own research, I came across the term “environmental psychology.” And it turned out that this field perfectly captured all the questions I found intriguing but couldn’t categorize. Discovering that it had a name allowed me to dive deeper. 

We now know that the way we design places can influence how attached people will get to them. Multiple factors take part in this. For example, the meaning of the place for a specific person, the level of emotional connection, and the quality of what we call “cognitive maps”.

These maps are built in our mind through physical exploration of an environment and the activation of “place cells” within the hippocampal formation, located in the medial temporal lobe of the brain. Cognitive maps are both the basis for our understanding of spatial relationships and drive our ability to navigate our environment.