The Architect's Brain

Introduction

My intentions in writing this book are twofold: first to look at the remarkable strides currently being made in neuroscience, and second to begin the lengthy process of discerning what this new knowledge might have to say to architects and many others involved in fields of design.

In the first regard, one can scarcely be disappointed. Even a cursory glance at what has taken place in scientific laboratories over the last decade – from leaps of knowledge along a neurobiological front to sophisticated imaging devices recording the activities of the working brain – reveals that we are living in the midst of monumental discoveries. For, in gaining an increasingly detailed understanding of the human brain, we are not only achieving major insights into the nature of what has historically been called the “mind” but also exploring such piquant issues as memory, consciousness, feelings, thinking, and creativity. This understanding is radically reshaping the image of who we are and where we come from, biologically speaking, and at the same time it is allowing us for the first time to ponder answers to some questions that have been posed over thousands of years of metaphysical speculation.

Certainly one of the more pivotal insights of our day, one that is particularly germane to our digital age, is that we are not machines, or more specifically, our brains are not computers. In fact, the nonlinear way in which the brain gathers and actively structures information could not be more different from the manufactured logic of a computer. The brain, to put it in more graphic terms, is a living, throbbing organ, one that over millennia (with its ever increasing consumption of the body’s fuel) has gone to extreme lengths to guard our essential well-being and enhance the propagation of the species. Taking into account its totality – from the thin mantle of gray matter scrunched along the inside cavity of the cranial vault to the nerve cells in our feet – the brain is a fully embodied entity. It is a physical entity but at the same time its whole is greater than the sum of it electrical and chemical events.

Such an understanding is not only reconfiguring the image of ourselves but also casting a distinctly archaic air on that long-standing distinction between body and mind. The brain comes equipped with approximately 100 billion neurons and with a DNA complex of 30,000 genes, which were fully sequenced only in 2006. Oddly, though, the brain arrives at birth with only about half of its nerve cells, or neurons, wired together, and this again is a fact of great importance. If indeed it is we who do much of the neural wiring through the postnatal experiences with which we invest this palpitating entity then we should assume the same responsibility for the brain’s development. We, in fact, have the power to alter much of our neural circuitry (for better or worse and within limits of course) until the day we die. As architects this means one thing: we can always become better designers by adding to the complexity of our synaptic maps, and thereby create a better or more interesting environment in which the human species can thrive.

Moving beyond such generalities, however, the issue of what the recent advances of neuroscience says to architects becomes more difficult. Historically, one of the problems has been that, until the last decade or so, few instruments of science were trained on healthy brains. Today the problem has become the opposite; with the proliferation of the new imagining devices beginning in the late 1980s, we now have a prodigious amount of experimental literature being gathered on a daily basis, so much so that it is difficult to see the proverbial forest from the trees. With the still accelerating pace of investigation, we have also seen a broadening of areas to which this research is being applied. In 1999, for instance, the London microneurologist Semir Zeki, who had devoted more than 30 years to mapping the brain’s visual processing, shifted the direction of his research by proposing a field of “neuroaesthetics” to explore the brain’s interaction with art.1 Parallel with his efforts, the art historian John Onians, who too has long been interested in the biological foundation of artistic perception, has proposed a “neuroarthistory,” following the lead of one of his mentors, Ernst Gombrich.2 Another researcher at University College London, Hugo Spiers, has recently collaborated with an architect and held workshops at London’s Architectural Association.3 In the spring of 2008 the artist Olafur Eliasson joined others in Berlin in forming the Association of Neuroesthetics, which promises to serve as “a Platform for Art and Neuroscience.”4 Meanwhile, in San Diego, a group of architects and scientists, led by the architect John P. Eberhard, have founded the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA), with the explicit mission of promoting and advancing “knowledge that links research to a growing understanding of human responses to the built environment.”5 Such interdisciplinary alliances will no doubt continue to multiply and expand their range of interests over the next few decades.

The question, then, is where these collaborations may lead. The interests of Zeki, Onians, and Eliasson are grounded in aesthetics and therefore ponder such questions as the neurological basis for experiencing art, while the ANFA proposes experimental research that can be applied directly to design. In this last respect, one is reminded of the promises of some of the behavioral sciences of the 1960s, when the studies of anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists held out the prospect of working models that could improve the human condition. There is, however, one crucial difference to be found in these activities in the 2000s, which is that we now have quite different tools and a growing bounty of biological knowledge at our command. These new instruments are giving us a more insightful and, in some cases, a quite specific picture of how we engage the world.

Having said this, I want to stress that my approach is slightly different. My interest lies principally with the creative process itself, that is, with the elusive issues of ambiguity and metaphoric thinking that seem to lie at our very core. And what I see neuroscience offering designers today, quite simply, is a sketch of the enormous intricacy of our intellectual and sensory-emotive existence. I say this with no trepidation, even if it also means that this research will not as yet offer us any neat or easy answers and, in fact, will rather quickly be overtaken by its own progress. If, today, we are for the first time taking images of the working brain in all of its complexity, we are still a few years away from constructing the final genetic and epigenetic models of this involved process. For this reason, this newly forming terrain of investigation should be of especial importance to younger designers, whose careers will no doubt unfold within the continuing advancement of such knowledge.

Nevertheless, the portrait that is emerging of the seemingly infinite diversity or multiformity of human existence is not a strikingly new figure. Scientists, psychologists, religious leaders, philosophers, and artists of every bent have been telling us the same thing since the beginning of recorded time. And architects, if I might borrow an analogy from Zeki, have always been neuroscientists – in the sense that the human brain is the wellspring of every creative endeavor, and the outcome of every good design is whether the architect enriches or diminishes the private world of the individual experiencing it.

To provide some historical background on this matter, I have, in Part One of the study, attached a series of short essays, mostly about architects who earlier considered the issue of how we view and ponder the built world. They depict insights that, when seen within the present context, stand out as exceptional for their time. The sketches are purposely piecemeal and incomplete, and the idea that there is something like a “humanist brain” or a “picturesque brain” will strike some as odd. My point in employing such a strategy is not to defend the thesis in a strict sense (although there is increasing evidence with our new understanding of plasticity that this is in fact the case), but rather to suggest how “old” some of these newer ideas of today can be judged to be. While not intending to narrow the arc of architectural design or invention, I offer these intellectual moments – from Leon Battista Alberti to Juhani Pallasmaa – because some of these ideas are indeed finding affinities, if not validation, in today’s research.

Similarly, the neurological chapters of the second part of the study, which can be read separately from these essays, are little more than gestures offered tentatively, as the work of the next few years will no doubt shed much more light on them. What is already becoming clear today, however, is that the model of the human brain that is emerging is not a reductive or mechanistic one. The labyrinthine character of this sinuous organ is not only deeper or more profound in its involved metabolisms than we previously imagined but it is also open-ended in its future possibilities, or the course that humanity and human culture will eventually take. Therefore our knowledge of its workings will never suggest a theoretical program for architecture, a new “-ism” to be captured as the latest fad. I say this in full view of the course of architectural theory over the past 40 years – the short-lived parabolic trajectories of the postmodern and poststructural movements and their evolution into digital and green design.