Architecture of Good Behavior

Reviews / Votes

Joy Knoblauch connects psyche and form to examine a growing tendency to govern behavior through the environment. The result is an original contribution to the history of institutional architecture in postwar America with significant implications for our understanding of the power of architecture in an expanded field of government and expertise. -- Kenny Cupers, University of Basel Important for those whose work focuses on trajectories of care and the interaction of the built environment and human well-being, as well as for scholars of environmental behaviorism and evidence-based designers and researchers from all disciplines who operate at the boundaries between human health and design. . . . All readers will benefit from the way this history illuminates ingrained racism and assumptions about governability that persist within architecture today. * Journal of Architectural Education * Joy Knoblauch's detailed and carefully reasoned book on post-World War II federal construction programs takes a penetrating and critically important look at the relationship between design and psychology. At stake is not just the history of community hospitals, prisons, and housing projects, but the changing attitudes to expertise in the new world of psycho-bureaucracy. -- Mark Jarzombek, author of The Psychologizing of Modernity: Art, Architecture, and History An interesting preface to the age of neuroscience in architecture. . . . Knoblauch has ably explained its start. * American Conservative *