Part 2
Lowenstein and Schkade in an essay on the difficulty of perceiving “hot” emotions in “cold” states and vice versa, in anticipating future emotion, suggest that emotions live in state dependent memory. Perhaps a tool of the architect, urban planner and landscape architect can be to anticipate the kinds of emotions a given environment is likely to nurture. The emotional quality an environment evokes for its users is as important to recognize and anticipate as its visual and utilitarian impact.
Robert M. Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, utilizes two very poignant icons to illustrate this experience we all tend to know and repress. The first is the highway traffic jam, with the isolated, miserable looking faces in each of the autos; the second is the constant drip-drip-drip of a faucet needing repair. We suppress these events from our consciousness, having more important things to do, more desirable experiences to consume. The water faucet example is reminiscent of old Chinese water torture sequences on television from the 50's and early 60's, where the subject eventually goes mad. Michael Douglas best represents the coming apart of a businessman stuck in traffic in the film Falling Down.
Evidence suggests such background stress lowers headroom and decreases tolerance. Caspi, Bolger and Eckenrode state: “micro-stressors, acting cumulatively, and in the relative absence of compensatory experiences, can be potent sources of stress”. The hinge here is “compensatory experiences”. In performance cognitive management, you might imagine doing intense creative work in the morning, something very synthesis based. The flow of ideas and associations may peak, but then the cognitive function fatigues, and needs to recycle. A relaxing and less cognitively busy environment can recuperate the cognitive function, refreshing the mind for the afternoon. This jibes well for me with the concept of calming the mind so that it can regenerate and prepare to perform in the next session.
Many artists and creative personalities have remarked that meditation offers such regeneration and centering. More of us might recognize the restorative potential of environments. Spend 20 minutes in an environment where you anticipate feelings of wellbeing, experience feelings of wellbeing, and leave remarking on how you enjoy the environment, and what do you get?
Imagine creating a diversity of urban environments that offer regenerative moments from mundane task sessions and heated decision-making events. I imagine myself at the City Library in downtown Salt Lake City, around the City/County Building and its great canopy of trees, Sugarhouse or Liberty Park where nature takes precedence over the built environment. Whether developing micro-environments or districts, having an idea of their impact on emotional wellbeing and cognitive refreshment—especially in a dense urban setting—seems valuable for sustainable living. What are your thoughts?
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Can the Urban Environment Reinforce Certain Psychological States?
Part 1 of a 2 part series.
The idea for this blog came from a conversation with landscape architect Stephen Storheim of Design Workshop in Salt Lake City, Utah. He recently mentioned the desire to have an urban landscape he could move through at lunchtime, from the office to a restaurant and back, that didn’t require negotiating auto traffic. This parallels a line of thought I have considered since 2005 originally titled Performance Stress Management, but that might better be generalized to performance cognitive management.
“Stress” carries lots of baggage, though fatigue and cognitive shutdown are stress related events. A better way of conceiving this is perhaps managing states of work and restorative consciousness that provide optimum results for creating, analyzing, rudimentary task work, wise judgment, decision-making and the like. What kinds of environments—or micro-environments—best suit the focus and concentration, or the recuperation and counterbalancing of such mental states?
Peruse the rich visual images of an architecture or landscape architecture magazine. How do you imagine yourself in these environments, and how do they make you feel? Often these images are without the connective tissue of busy streets, cacophonous noise, or the bombardment of motion to the visual senses. Christopher Day, in Places of the Soul: Architecture and Environmental Design as a Healing Art, makes special note of the distinction between a photograph—de-contextualized, framed representation—from architecture, a living environment with long term impact on emotional and psychological wellbeing. This is a clue tuning us to how urban environments impact the individual.
At the intersection of consumer expectations and the urban environment we are often told to face reality. We are often told to accept less than ideal aural, visual and emotionally impactful environments, environments that impact mental states and our wellbeing. Is this necessarily so? Granted, at the speed we tend to build and live, we often find in hindsight things we can’t just make go away. Overhead power lines outside the window of a local $199k condo, which otherwise looks very inviting, could have enormous consequences on one’s mental state. Given the significance of windows, views and view sheds, looking out onto power lines could be very dissatisfying.
Yet, one might ignore the negative feelings and thoughts likely to recur and reinforce each time one looked out the window, or thought about the view, because they enjoyed other aspects of the condo and are paying $199k. Imagine leaving such a condo having triggered that subconscious sense of dissatisfaction on your way out the door to work. In a city that has the potential for sunny, blue sky days, how does smog and yellow haze impact your perceptions and background thoughts on the way into the office?
The idea for this blog came from a conversation with landscape architect Stephen Storheim of Design Workshop in Salt Lake City, Utah. He recently mentioned the desire to have an urban landscape he could move through at lunchtime, from the office to a restaurant and back, that didn’t require negotiating auto traffic. This parallels a line of thought I have considered since 2005 originally titled Performance Stress Management, but that might better be generalized to performance cognitive management.
“Stress” carries lots of baggage, though fatigue and cognitive shutdown are stress related events. A better way of conceiving this is perhaps managing states of work and restorative consciousness that provide optimum results for creating, analyzing, rudimentary task work, wise judgment, decision-making and the like. What kinds of environments—or micro-environments—best suit the focus and concentration, or the recuperation and counterbalancing of such mental states?
Peruse the rich visual images of an architecture or landscape architecture magazine. How do you imagine yourself in these environments, and how do they make you feel? Often these images are without the connective tissue of busy streets, cacophonous noise, or the bombardment of motion to the visual senses. Christopher Day, in Places of the Soul: Architecture and Environmental Design as a Healing Art, makes special note of the distinction between a photograph—de-contextualized, framed representation—from architecture, a living environment with long term impact on emotional and psychological wellbeing. This is a clue tuning us to how urban environments impact the individual.
At the intersection of consumer expectations and the urban environment we are often told to face reality. We are often told to accept less than ideal aural, visual and emotionally impactful environments, environments that impact mental states and our wellbeing. Is this necessarily so? Granted, at the speed we tend to build and live, we often find in hindsight things we can’t just make go away. Overhead power lines outside the window of a local $199k condo, which otherwise looks very inviting, could have enormous consequences on one’s mental state. Given the significance of windows, views and view sheds, looking out onto power lines could be very dissatisfying.
Yet, one might ignore the negative feelings and thoughts likely to recur and reinforce each time one looked out the window, or thought about the view, because they enjoyed other aspects of the condo and are paying $199k. Imagine leaving such a condo having triggered that subconscious sense of dissatisfaction on your way out the door to work. In a city that has the potential for sunny, blue sky days, how does smog and yellow haze impact your perceptions and background thoughts on the way into the office?
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
What is stress and calm in the Urban Environment?
Stress and calm in any environment—home, car, work, play, city, suburb, country—is on one hand based on individual perceptions and immediate experience. We can’t just write off stress as a perceptual: “I think I’m stressing; I think I’ll relax”. Once discomfort, looking, listening, and thinking accrue, stress hormones and neurochemistry take over. Once triggering occurs, even an environmental shift can take 20 minutes or more to dissipate the effects.
On the other hand, some situations commonly induce a degree of stress or calm for many of us. Bumper to bumper traffic, a sudden computer crash, and crowding are likely examples. We might pass the time relaxing, or utilize a resilient side of our personality, but many of us will eventually react with thoughts and feelings that lead to stress. Conversely, natural settings—beaches with waves, sunsets on patios and porches, satisfying parks like Sugarhouse and Liberty in Salt Lake City—can put us at ease, stress tolerant to issues that may later arise.
Urban planners, architects and landscape architects benefit from tuning into their own dynamics of stress and calm, a tool allowing insight as to what may or may not work. Diversity courses and experiences inform on cultural, ethnic, and geographical differences. Schmidt et al. suggests a predominantly white culture is more likely to be concerned with psychological aspects of stress in reacting to crowding—predictability, control, and behavioral freedom—while Blacks and Hispanics from Riverside and San Bernardino, Cal. were more attentive to physical aspects of an environment when reacting with stressful behaviors and perceptions. Sensitivity to diverse cultures and “congenial environments” probably seems basic to the urban planning and creation field, but gaining specific insight, whether through peer reviewed research or commissioned participatory action research is critical. We have entered an era where smart urban planning must be concerned with congenial density.
In Communicating Nature, Julia Corbett discusses the impact of early experiences with natural environments in conceptualizing and relating to nature as adults. Numerous studies have focused on Nature Deficit Disorder, as well as nature’s impact on the average individual in terms of natural calming properties. Flower beds and occasional saplings that garnish the downtown exteriors as conceived through the 80’s didn’t cut it. Recognition of the positive impacts of nature in built environments seems to parallel the fashionable arrival of atriums. Beautiful as opposed to token and neglected atriums substantially affect utility and experience.
A 2006 Urban Land article discussed recent California police station innovations, emphasizing plazas, green building, windows, an inviting design, and especially a departure from previous generations of police stations designed and located specifically to intimidate. Though background stress is difficult to assess and quantify, the majority of suburbanites knew instinctively when they fled to the suburbs in the ‘60’s, and downtown areas of major cities were hunkering down in the face of race riots and civil unrest, that some sources of background stress would be unmanageable. Race riots and civil unrest are themselves upshots of unmanageable stressors of inequity and substandard living.
Consider the 1939 Sears Art Deco department store in my hometown Houston, Texas. In the mid 60’s, Sears armed itself with an ‘intimidating’ exoskeleton, masking its beautiful urban design with boxiness and windowlessness. What are your thoughts?
On the other hand, some situations commonly induce a degree of stress or calm for many of us. Bumper to bumper traffic, a sudden computer crash, and crowding are likely examples. We might pass the time relaxing, or utilize a resilient side of our personality, but many of us will eventually react with thoughts and feelings that lead to stress. Conversely, natural settings—beaches with waves, sunsets on patios and porches, satisfying parks like Sugarhouse and Liberty in Salt Lake City—can put us at ease, stress tolerant to issues that may later arise.
Urban planners, architects and landscape architects benefit from tuning into their own dynamics of stress and calm, a tool allowing insight as to what may or may not work. Diversity courses and experiences inform on cultural, ethnic, and geographical differences. Schmidt et al. suggests a predominantly white culture is more likely to be concerned with psychological aspects of stress in reacting to crowding—predictability, control, and behavioral freedom—while Blacks and Hispanics from Riverside and San Bernardino, Cal. were more attentive to physical aspects of an environment when reacting with stressful behaviors and perceptions. Sensitivity to diverse cultures and “congenial environments” probably seems basic to the urban planning and creation field, but gaining specific insight, whether through peer reviewed research or commissioned participatory action research is critical. We have entered an era where smart urban planning must be concerned with congenial density.
In Communicating Nature, Julia Corbett discusses the impact of early experiences with natural environments in conceptualizing and relating to nature as adults. Numerous studies have focused on Nature Deficit Disorder, as well as nature’s impact on the average individual in terms of natural calming properties. Flower beds and occasional saplings that garnish the downtown exteriors as conceived through the 80’s didn’t cut it. Recognition of the positive impacts of nature in built environments seems to parallel the fashionable arrival of atriums. Beautiful as opposed to token and neglected atriums substantially affect utility and experience.
A 2006 Urban Land article discussed recent California police station innovations, emphasizing plazas, green building, windows, an inviting design, and especially a departure from previous generations of police stations designed and located specifically to intimidate. Though background stress is difficult to assess and quantify, the majority of suburbanites knew instinctively when they fled to the suburbs in the ‘60’s, and downtown areas of major cities were hunkering down in the face of race riots and civil unrest, that some sources of background stress would be unmanageable. Race riots and civil unrest are themselves upshots of unmanageable stressors of inequity and substandard living.
Consider the 1939 Sears Art Deco department store in my hometown Houston, Texas. In the mid 60’s, Sears armed itself with an ‘intimidating’ exoskeleton, masking its beautiful urban design with boxiness and windowlessness. What are your thoughts?
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