Is American Architecture Making Us Ill?

The psychological impact of architecture—both the awe-inspiring and headache-inducing—deserves much closer attention.

Boston City Hall and the historic Fanueil Hall (R) on May 16, 2004. Stan Honda/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

Renzo Piano, a world-renowned architect, once called his profession a “dangerous” one.

In his own words: “If a writer makes a bad book, eh, people don’t read it. But if you make bad architecture, you impose ugliness on a place for a hundred years.”

The key word here is “impose.” Bad architecture is imposed on us. The vast majority of citizens don’t have a say. That needs to change.

One wonders what the Italian artist makes of the United States, a place where ugly feats of architecture reign supreme. In one ranking of the 10 ugliest buildings in the world based on comments on X, formerly Twitter, six of them are located in the United States. They include the J. Edgar Hoover Building, located in the capital, Boston City Hall in Massachusetts, the Verizon Building on Pearl Street in New York City, the Watergate Complex in D.C., Denver International Airport in Colorado, and Trump Tower in Las Vegas.

Of course, some will say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder—which, by extension, means ugliness is also in the eye of the beholder.

However, only a truly disingenuous person could look around the country and say, with complete certainty, that it isn’t flooded with an array of ugly constructions.

Unattractive buildings aren’t just a strain on the eyes. They’re a strain on the human psyche. The psychological effect of architecture—both the awe-inspiring and headache-inducing—deserves much closer attention.

After all, cleverly, humanely designed buildings have been shown to reduce stress, improve focus, and lift mood. Which raises the question: What are clumsily, inhumanely designed buildings doing to us?

In short, nothing good.

To address the problem, we must first get to the root of the problem, which appears to be located in architects’ heads.

As Robert Gifford, a psychologist who has spent decades researching the ways in which the broader environment affects the human mind, has shown, architects and laypersons observe (and experience) buildings in profoundly different ways. In one of his studies, Mr. Gifford noted that architects didn’t just “disagree with laypersons about the aesthetic qualities of buildings,” they were also “unable to predict how laypersons would assess buildings, even when they were explicitly asked to do so.”

This ties in with construal level theory (CLT), which helps explain the connection between psychological distance and the degree to which an individual’s thoughts are shaped. The more psychological distance between a person and an event or object, the more abstract their thought tends to be. Ten people dying in a remote part of Africa is, on a psychological level, very different from 10 people dying in your immediate community, for example.

Apply CLT to architecture, and you quickly see how psychological distance could be fueling America’s obsession with the creation of ugly objects. An architect, sitting in an office many miles away from where his or her design will be erected, is coming at it from a purely objective, mathematical level. A great degree of psychological distance is almost certainly guaranteed. Mr. Gifford found that architects don’t merely hold contrasting aesthetic views with non-architects; they appear to lack the ability to discern the disparity between their own aesthetic inclinations and those of individuals who aren’t architects.

When designing buildings, especially buildings that will be viewed, passed by, and used by a large number of American people, shouldn’t citizens have a say?

This is a critically important question to ask.

The Roman architect Vitruvius believed that a truly respectable structure should possess three qualities: stability, utility, and beauty.

This should be considered the holy trinity of architecture. It’s not enough for a building to sit on a solid foundation and serve a specific purpose; it should also be aesthetically pleasing—or, at the very least, not a complete eyesore. Buildings, Vitruvius suggested, “should delight people and raise their spirits.” This is especially true for public buildings.

The American designer David Staczek has discussed the many ways in which poorly designed offices and other shared spaces can promote procrastination and even contempt. Have you ever driven by a truly ugly building and found your mood sour? Of course you have. Constructive contempt is a legal term. Perhaps it’s time to make construction contempt an architectural one.

As Mr. Staczek pointed out, similar to the ways in which we avoid certain routes that are littered with potholes or lines of traffic, we tend to avoid poorly designed spaces, such as dark alleys, basement offices, or certain conference rooms. Visually stressful landscapes become psychologically harmful ones. Offices with low ceilings, poor ventilation, and too few windows, for example, affect worker productivity and mood. Unpleasant environments create unpleasant people. Ugly architecture brings out our ugly side.

Jonathan Pageau, a Canadian artist and public speaker, has repeatedly associated the demise in architectural beauty with the rise in secularism. It makes sense. As society moves further and further away from the divine, it’s possible that we are becoming more likely to construct—and accept the construction of—the truly undivine.

Whatever the cause may be, it’s time to view construction in a different light. As the country becomes more and more divided, a push to “raise the spirits” of the masses is something all readers, regardless of their political leanings, can surely get behind.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.