In 1966, an English urban planner named Maurice Broady coined a new term for the architectural lexicon: architectural determinism. The term was used to describe the theory of falsely claiming that design solutions will predictably and positively change behavior.
Leon Battista Alberti, an Italian Renaissance architect, argued in the 1400s that balanced classical forms would force aggressive invaders to lay down their arms and become civilians. American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed one of America’s most famous buildings, Fallingwater, similarly believed that proper architecture would rid the United States of corruption and return people to healthy pursuits.
English writer and thinker Ebenezer Howard believed that companies would be more productive if their workers lived in village-like garden communities. Swiss-born French architect Le Corbusier made claims that his Villa Savoye in France would heal the sick, and when the opposite happened, he was saved from prosecution by the outbreak of World War II.
It took a long list of failures over the millennia for postmodern theorists to begin to criticise architectural fantasy with malicious vengeance. The culmination of this trend was the demolition of the notoriously dangerous and dysfunctional Pruitt-Igoe urban housing complex in St Louis, USA. Pruitt-Igoe was designed by architects George Hellmuth, Minoru Yamasaki and Joseph Leinweber to provide “community gathering and safe play spaces”. But it was seen as a hotspot for crime and poverty in the 1960s and was demolished in the 1970s.
The loss of faith in the power of architecture has been distressing. The well-intentioned promises of architects once gave clients hope. Without this promise, the profession was left helpless against the better structural knowledge of engineers, the cumulative constraints imposed by generations of planners, the calculations and CAD (computer-aided design) skills of project managers in transforming a client’s design. But wasn’t architectural determinism rejected too soon?
Consider some of the ways in which architecture can manipulate your own experience. The American writer Charles Montgomery points out that some environments predictably affect our mood. The truth is that, whether by design or accident, our environment affects us. In 2008, researchers in the UK found that a ten-minute walk along a high street in South London significantly increased psychotic symptoms.
Architecture has a lot of potential in this respect. The ease with which architecture can embrace sublime aesthetics makes it a great tool for inspiring awe. It is difficult to prove the psychological effects of architecture, but this difficulty does not diminish the value of a building that inspires awe. Each type of building has different functions, and each has the imperative to use the building in a way that helps create an optimum sense of mood, desire, coherence, security or meaning.
To restore architecture’s appeal, a new interest in how it changes us needs to be encouraged. Clients must learn to trust architects again, and research funding bodies must take action to encourage research into how buildings affect our mood, health and behaviour.