This is your brain on preservation

Nikos A. Salingaros Chicago Past Forward Conference

16 November 2017

Why do people go into Historic Preservation?

•  There is something irresistibly attractive to old buildings and urban settings

•  They appeal to us in a deep visceral way we cannot explain (until now!)

•  The same attraction is not felt in many 20th Century buildings and urban spaces, at least not by all people

A Louis Sullivan bank

Love becomes a profession

•  Happy is the person who works doing what he/she loves

•  Someone who gets nourishment out of being in older places and settings naturally would like to make a profession out of it

•  And work to save those healing places from destruction by insensitive people

Healing environments

•  The romance of feeling good in a place can now be explained scientifically

•  Some environments are “healing”

•  Those connect to our body and make it respond in a positive manner

•  By strengthening our neurological signal, environments promote healing

Hospital Maggiore Vecchio, Lodi

Two-pronged approach to research

•  (1) Interrelated theories: Biophilia, Design Patterns, organized complexity

•  A theoretical framework for knowing how to create healing environments

•  (2) Direct measurements of our body’s response to external stimuli

•  Neurological experiments reveal this

Experimental methods

•  fMRI studies see which areas of the brain activate for alarm or pleasure

•  Skin temperature and conductivity both rise during stress

•  Eye pupil contracts under unease; eye fixates only on attractive patterns

•  Heart rate and Adrenalin go up

The ceiling is going to crush you

The Stockholm Conference

•  “Neuroscience and Architecture”, 2017

•  Arranged by the Ax:son Johnson Foundation to start a new field

•  We propose a framework to measure human neurological responses to places, settings, surfaces, etc.

•  An international research program

Three of my articles in 2017

•  “How neuroscience can generate a healthier architecture”, Conscious Cities Journal.

•  “Why we need to ‘grasp’ our surroundings: object affordance and prehension in architecture”, J. of Arch. and Urbanism.

•  “Neuroscience and preservation: measuring the healing properties of places”, Preservation Leadership Forum.

Café Landtmann, Vienna

Mathematical principles

• We have guidelines and rules for generating healing environments

• Extracted from historical examples

• They are finally going to be validated directly by neuroscience experiments

• This validation is necessary

Timeless human creations

New ideas for preservation

•  Inform preservationists and the public on what types of environments are engaging for people

•  … because those are healthy for people! •  The debate shifts drastically — from

historical criteria, to neurological ones concerning our health and survival

Those “useless” design elements

•  Biophilia: color, curves, ornament, frames, fractal scaling, natural light, plants, symmetries, vertical axis of symmetry, organized detail, etc.

• All elements contained in historical buildings and human-scale spaces

• Essential for human wellbeing!

Example: fractal scaling

Some architects oppose life

•  For ideological reasons, architects are trained to eliminate life from buildings

•  The “ideal” design is industrial-sterile •  Older buildings with life are discarded

— left to be demolished and replaced

•  Also, preservation is co-opted to save buildings that have no living qualities

Older building without life

Architectural culture

•  Strives for unrestrained visual novelty, with a dash of sadism

• Focuses exclusively on image

•  Ignores life-enhancing qualities

• Totally disconnected from healing environments, and doesn’t care for therapeutic design rules

Newer building without life

We can build life today!

•  But don’t hire just any architect

•  Only a practitioner who knows Biophilia, Design Patterns, Christopher Alexander’s “Fifteen Fundamental Properties”, and organized complexity

•  Lessons (now systematized) come from older buildings we have to preserve

Two booklets of collected essays

Living cities

•  City morphology has been perverted

•  Designed only for fast car traffic

•  Zoning laws prohibit living fabric

•  This tragedy profits a small sector

•  Older urban spaces envelop the user •  Older façades nourish the pedestrian

Conclusion

•  We need older buildings for our health

•  To teach us to build healing qualities

•  People understand this intuitively

•  The profession has distanced itself so far that compromise seems impossible

•  Even when historical places are copied today, they lack living qualities