7 ms·

Why Ugly Architecture Is Bad for Your Health

116 points by barry-cotter 3y ago

amelius 3y ago
Two questions: 1. When can we sue bad architects for the bad effects of their work on our health? 2. Can wearing VR goggles prevent these bad effects?
- topherclay 3y ago
  These ideas gave me a headache. Expect to hear from my lawyer.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
progbits 3y ago
> At the British University of Warwick, an extensive study was conducted in 2017. It established that beautiful urban architecture has the same positive impact on our physical and mental health as green parks. The linked study: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.170170 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.170170 > Here, we explore whether ratings of over 200 000 images of Great Britain from the online game Scenic-Or-Not, combined with hundreds of image features extracted using the Places Convolutional Neural Network, might help us understand what beautiful outdoor spaces are composed of. [...] We also find that a neural network can be trained to automatically identify scenic places, and that this network highlights both natural and built locations. Our findings demonstrate how online data combined with neural networks can provide a deeper understanding of what environments we might find beautiful Yeah it "established" nothing of that sort. This whole article is built on some extremely weak research.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
  > On the other hand, ugly architecture could have direct negative consequences. Arnold J. Wilkins, Professor of Psychology at the University of Essex, has found that looking at certain urban landscapes may actually give you a headache and cause migraines. If you look at the link: https://theconversation.com/looking-at-buildings-can-actually-give-people-headaches-heres-how-74565 https://theconversation.com/looking-at-buildings-can-actuall...? > There are two ways of measuring efficiency; the first is to build simple computer models of the way that nerve cells compute what we see. > For our own research, Olivier and I designed a computer program that measures how well images adhere to the rule of nature. After running the program, we found that departure from the rule of nature predicts how uncomfortable people find it to look at any given image – whether it’s an image of a building or a work of art. And then later: > That is, our brains use more oxygen when we look at scenes which depart from the rule. Since headaches tend to be associated with excess oxygen usage, this may explain why some designs give us headaches. This evidence also seems pretty weak
  - progbits 3y ago
    OK so basically making up shit that the author likes and occasionally linking to irrelevant (and bogus) study in the hope nobody will bother reading it. Flagged.
- mycologos 3y ago
  I think the blog post author just made a mistake and meant to cite [1]. That paper actually attempts to correlate "scenic-ness" and health. But it also says that "[v]isual inspection of photographs with the highest rating for scenicness reveals that they tend to contain landscapes with broad open areas and essentially no manmade structure", which is a pretty different claim than "beautiful urban architecture has the same positive impact on our physical and mental health as green parks" (the paper doesn't mention architecture at all). The whole post smells strongly of "I like a certain thing and will point to any flimsy published evidence in support of it". [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/srep16899 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep16899
nayuki 3y ago
Okay? The elephant in the room is that bad urban design is bad for your health: Car centrism, parking lots, stroads, endless sprawl, etc.
- sneak 3y ago
  Yeah, I'd much rather live in a walkable place with unpolluted air with a ton of ugly buildings, than a place with gorgeous buildings that needs ugly, polluting vehicles to get everywhere.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    But… those things are inversely correlated? Walkable cities tend to be dramatically more beautiful and ugly gigantic POS buildings are the ones surrounded by acres of parking lot and highway…? I agree I’d take your tradeoff if presented but I think the real world tradeoff is even sillier and more obvious than the one you propose.
    - tafda 3y ago
      Tokyo is the complete opposite of what you describe, “ugly” per the article but walkable and lively. No acres of parking lots either.
      - incrudible 3y ago
        A "walkable" city has everything you need within walking distance. A "beautiful" city is devoid of modernist architectural monstrosities. A "lively" city is full of people. I would argue there is no strong correlation here. A city can be walkable and ugly, lively and unwalkable, beautiful and unwalkable, beautiful but not lively...
        ghaff 3y ago
        And then there’s the public transit factor. I’m not sure how much of Tokyo is walkable by that definition unless you also factor in the subway.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
beebeepka 3y ago
Brutalism was no accident. I think cars, and almost everything related to them, are waaaay worse than ugly buildings for our physical and mental health but I am afraid I'll die alone on this hill. The vast majority would kill for a parking spot, let alone giving up their smelly, loud chunk of metal
- toshredsyousay 3y ago
  I don't think you are alone, or at the very least I will be buried on the hill nearby. But those with car-Stockholm-syndrome are still the politically dominant force (in the US at least).
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    I think there's a pretty large middle ground of society that could be reached, iff a credible and full plan for migrating from one modality to the other were presented. I have probably 30 years of ambulatory life ahead of me. My kids have twice that or a little more. A plan that makes life worse for the next 20 or 50 years until we get to the other side where it's better is a non-starter. A vague, hand-wavy plan of "eliminate stroads; reduce parking" and no more steps is a non-starter. I'm not sure if it's practically possible to switch an existing city from a car-centric mode to a pedestrian-centric mode inside of 10 years, but if we could evaluate and debate a credible plan to do that, we might make more progress than is currently happening.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      And there are going to be compromises in any case. Lots of residents will want to own cars to go to surrounding areas not all of which are ever going to be easily reachable by public transit and vice versa.
    - bobthepanda 3y ago
      It is mostly a communication issue. Seattle took relatively minor steps that have had a huge impact on building more housing: - eliminate parking requirements. Developers are still allowed to build as much parking as they want, but they are no longer required to. The impact on existing residents can be blunted by making the street parking timed and zoned unless you have an exemption permit, which is granted to all existing residents and doesn’t expire, but decreased over time to new ones. - mandate separating parking from rent. Renters only pay for parking if they use it. In practice, people will debate if having a car is worth it every time they change a lease. - employers over 100 employees are required to have commute management plans, and are incentivized/required to achieve lower single-person car commutes. Notably, how they do it doesn’t really matter, but it can help mitigate a large portion of car dependency which is the suburbanization of jobs into areas only accessible by car. The last one I actually think is the most important, and it’s also the easiest because it doesn’t impact residents and if anything mitigates the most common complaints about new jobs.
Blackthorn 3y ago
Mildly related, I remember watching an anime some time ago where the plot was that hostile architecture made its residents go crazy and start murdering each other. I sent it to my architect sister and we had a good chuckle.
- pteraspidomorph 3y ago
  Can you remember what the anime was? That sounds like fun.
  - mdpye 3y ago
    I'm not aware of an anime adaptation, but it does sound a bit like J G Ballard's High-rise.
  - throwaway129228 3y ago
    Sounds like it might be the 5th Kara No Kyoukai movie. https://myanimelist.net/anime/4282/Kara_no_Kyoukai_Movie_5__Mujun_Rasen https://myanimelist.net/anime/4282/Kara_no_Kyoukai_Movie_5__...
    - Blackthorn 3y ago
      Yep, that's the one.
loandbehold 3y ago
Being poor is bad for your health and also leads to living in ugly environments.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- alexalx666 3y ago
  So that's what really shows an effectiveness of city management, that you don't have to be rich to have good quality of living
downWidOutaFite 3y ago
I was hoping the headline was about software architecture because I blame the codebase I work on for my stress and depression.
- expertentipp 3y ago
  Did you try restarting Eclipse?
- buffalobuffalo 3y ago
  Same. I was about to send this to a coworker I'm arguing with about design patterns. It was disappointing to open it and see buildings.
sbuk 3y ago
"Who is running AU? The Architectural Uprising is a global movement that includes people of all backgrounds, ages, genders, and political views. All united by a passion for beautiful architecture and an aesthetically pleasing living environment." Given this, I'd treat this site, not just the article, with several metric tonnes of salt. It's like, just their opinion, man, to (mis)quote the dude...
- jtr1 3y ago
  Why?
  - sbuk 3y ago
    It's a bad and lazy question, but I'll respond nonetheless. "All united by a passion for beautiful architecture and an aesthetically pleasing living environment." is entirely subjective. Presenting opinions on what constitutes 'aesthetically pleasing' as fact is neither productive nor useful. Trying to link this with empirical research so cumbersomely is foolhardy, patronising to the reader and not compelling.
thomasfl 3y ago
I am leading the Norwegian Architectural Uprising. It is hard to proof anything in environmental psychology. I just want people to be more critical to what property developers and the state is building.
- SenAnder 3y ago
  On the other hand it didn't require any sort of scientific proof or popular uprising for ugly modern architecture to displace other styles.
  - thomasfl 3y ago
    Good point. There is no scientifically proven arguments for building modernist architecture. It is really easy to find a lot fallacy in arguments modernist architecture. For instance is it common argue that it should be easy for people in the future to be able to see what age a building has been built. Th guilt by association fallacy is also very commonly used in Europe. Hitler's architect liked columns and pilasters, if you like columns and pilaster, then you must sympathize with Hitler.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
wuqtas 3y ago
worth a read... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedensreich_Hundertwasser https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedensreich_Hundertwasser
carapace 3y ago
Christopher Alexander "Nature of Order", "Pattern Language", "Notes on the Synthesis of Form" It's impossible to summarize his work (the above are his most famous books, in reverse chronological order) but the essence of his idea is that space itself is the "luminous ground of being" and our architecture can conduce or block the essential selfness... I'm doing a terrible job of describing it... sorry.

116 points by barry-cotter 3y ago

Two questions: 1. When can we sue bad architects for the bad effects of their work on our health? 2. Can wearing VR goggles prevent these bad effects?

topherclay 3y ago
These ideas gave me a headache. Expect to hear from my lawyer.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

progbits 3y ago

> At the British University of Warwick, an extensive study was conducted in 2017. It established that beautiful urban architecture has the same positive impact on our physical and mental health as green parks. The linked study: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.170170 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.170170 > Here, we explore whether ratings of over 200 000 images of Great Britain from the online game Scenic-Or-Not, combined with hundreds of image features extracted using the Places Convolutional Neural Network, might help us understand what beautiful outdoor spaces are composed of. [...] We also find that a neural network can be trained to automatically identify scenic places, and that this network highlights both natural and built locations. Our findings demonstrate how online data combined with neural networks can provide a deeper understanding of what environments we might find beautiful Yeah it "established" nothing of that sort. This whole article is built on some extremely weak research.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
> On the other hand, ugly architecture could have direct negative consequences. Arnold J. Wilkins, Professor of Psychology at the University of Essex, has found that looking at certain urban landscapes may actually give you a headache and cause migraines. If you look at the link: https://theconversation.com/looking-at-buildings-can-actually-give-people-headaches-heres-how-74565 https://theconversation.com/looking-at-buildings-can-actuall...? > There are two ways of measuring efficiency; the first is to build simple computer models of the way that nerve cells compute what we see. > For our own research, Olivier and I designed a computer program that measures how well images adhere to the rule of nature. After running the program, we found that departure from the rule of nature predicts how uncomfortable people find it to look at any given image – whether it’s an image of a building or a work of art. And then later: > That is, our brains use more oxygen when we look at scenes which depart from the rule. Since headaches tend to be associated with excess oxygen usage, this may explain why some designs give us headaches. This evidence also seems pretty weak
- progbits 3y ago
  OK so basically making up shit that the author likes and occasionally linking to irrelevant (and bogus) study in the hope nobody will bother reading it. Flagged.
mycologos 3y ago
I think the blog post author just made a mistake and meant to cite [1]. That paper actually attempts to correlate "scenic-ness" and health. But it also says that "[v]isual inspection of photographs with the highest rating for scenicness reveals that they tend to contain landscapes with broad open areas and essentially no manmade structure", which is a pretty different claim than "beautiful urban architecture has the same positive impact on our physical and mental health as green parks" (the paper doesn't mention architecture at all). The whole post smells strongly of "I like a certain thing and will point to any flimsy published evidence in support of it". [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/srep16899 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep16899

nayuki 3y ago

Okay? The elephant in the room is that bad urban design is bad for your health: Car centrism, parking lots, stroads, endless sprawl, etc.

sneak 3y ago
Yeah, I'd much rather live in a walkable place with unpolluted air with a ton of ugly buildings, than a place with gorgeous buildings that needs ugly, polluting vehicles to get everywhere.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  But… those things are inversely correlated? Walkable cities tend to be dramatically more beautiful and ugly gigantic POS buildings are the ones surrounded by acres of parking lot and highway…? I agree I’d take your tradeoff if presented but I think the real world tradeoff is even sillier and more obvious than the one you propose.
  - tafda 3y ago
    Tokyo is the complete opposite of what you describe, “ugly” per the article but walkable and lively. No acres of parking lots either.
    - incrudible 3y ago
      A "walkable" city has everything you need within walking distance. A "beautiful" city is devoid of modernist architectural monstrosities. A "lively" city is full of people. I would argue there is no strong correlation here. A city can be walkable and ugly, lively and unwalkable, beautiful and unwalkable, beautiful but not lively...
      - ghaff 3y ago
        And then there’s the public transit factor. I’m not sure how much of Tokyo is walkable by that definition unless you also factor in the subway.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

beebeepka 3y ago

Brutalism was no accident. I think cars, and almost everything related to them, are waaaay worse than ugly buildings for our physical and mental health but I am afraid I'll die alone on this hill. The vast majority would kill for a parking spot, let alone giving up their smelly, loud chunk of metal

toshredsyousay 3y ago
I don't think you are alone, or at the very least I will be buried on the hill nearby. But those with car-Stockholm-syndrome are still the politically dominant force (in the US at least).
- sokoloff 3y ago
  I think there's a pretty large middle ground of society that could be reached, iff a credible and full plan for migrating from one modality to the other were presented. I have probably 30 years of ambulatory life ahead of me. My kids have twice that or a little more. A plan that makes life worse for the next 20 or 50 years until we get to the other side where it's better is a non-starter. A vague, hand-wavy plan of "eliminate stroads; reduce parking" and no more steps is a non-starter. I'm not sure if it's practically possible to switch an existing city from a car-centric mode to a pedestrian-centric mode inside of 10 years, but if we could evaluate and debate a credible plan to do that, we might make more progress than is currently happening.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    And there are going to be compromises in any case. Lots of residents will want to own cars to go to surrounding areas not all of which are ever going to be easily reachable by public transit and vice versa.
  - bobthepanda 3y ago
    It is mostly a communication issue. Seattle took relatively minor steps that have had a huge impact on building more housing: - eliminate parking requirements. Developers are still allowed to build as much parking as they want, but they are no longer required to. The impact on existing residents can be blunted by making the street parking timed and zoned unless you have an exemption permit, which is granted to all existing residents and doesn’t expire, but decreased over time to new ones. - mandate separating parking from rent. Renters only pay for parking if they use it. In practice, people will debate if having a car is worth it every time they change a lease. - employers over 100 employees are required to have commute management plans, and are incentivized/required to achieve lower single-person car commutes. Notably, how they do it doesn’t really matter, but it can help mitigate a large portion of car dependency which is the suburbanization of jobs into areas only accessible by car. The last one I actually think is the most important, and it’s also the easiest because it doesn’t impact residents and if anything mitigates the most common complaints about new jobs.

Blackthorn 3y ago

Mildly related, I remember watching an anime some time ago where the plot was that hostile architecture made its residents go crazy and start murdering each other. I sent it to my architect sister and we had a good chuckle.

pteraspidomorph 3y ago
Can you remember what the anime was? That sounds like fun.
- mdpye 3y ago
  I'm not aware of an anime adaptation, but it does sound a bit like J G Ballard's High-rise.
- throwaway129228 3y ago
  Sounds like it might be the 5th Kara No Kyoukai movie. https://myanimelist.net/anime/4282/Kara_no_Kyoukai_Movie_5__Mujun_Rasen https://myanimelist.net/anime/4282/Kara_no_Kyoukai_Movie_5__...
  - Blackthorn 3y ago
    Yep, that's the one.

loandbehold 3y ago

Being poor is bad for your health and also leads to living in ugly environments.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
alexalx666 3y ago
So that's what really shows an effectiveness of city management, that you don't have to be rich to have good quality of living

downWidOutaFite 3y ago

I was hoping the headline was about software architecture because I blame the codebase I work on for my stress and depression.

expertentipp 3y ago
Did you try restarting Eclipse?
buffalobuffalo 3y ago
Same. I was about to send this to a coworker I'm arguing with about design patterns. It was disappointing to open it and see buildings.

sbuk 3y ago

"Who is running AU? The Architectural Uprising is a global movement that includes people of all backgrounds, ages, genders, and political views. All united by a passion for beautiful architecture and an aesthetically pleasing living environment." Given this, I'd treat this site, not just the article, with several metric tonnes of salt. It's like, just their opinion, man, to (mis)quote the dude...

jtr1 3y ago
Why?
- sbuk 3y ago
  It's a bad and lazy question, but I'll respond nonetheless. "All united by a passion for beautiful architecture and an aesthetically pleasing living environment." is entirely subjective. Presenting opinions on what constitutes 'aesthetically pleasing' as fact is neither productive nor useful. Trying to link this with empirical research so cumbersomely is foolhardy, patronising to the reader and not compelling.

thomasfl 3y ago

I am leading the Norwegian Architectural Uprising. It is hard to proof anything in environmental psychology. I just want people to be more critical to what property developers and the state is building.

SenAnder 3y ago
On the other hand it didn't require any sort of scientific proof or popular uprising for ugly modern architecture to displace other styles.
- thomasfl 3y ago
  Good point. There is no scientifically proven arguments for building modernist architecture. It is really easy to find a lot fallacy in arguments modernist architecture. For instance is it common argue that it should be easy for people in the future to be able to see what age a building has been built. Th guilt by association fallacy is also very commonly used in Europe. Hitler's architect liked columns and pilasters, if you like columns and pilaster, then you must sympathize with Hitler.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

wuqtas 3y ago

worth a read... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedensreich_Hundertwasser https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedensreich_Hundertwasser

carapace 3y ago

Christopher Alexander "Nature of Order", "Pattern Language", "Notes on the Synthesis of Form" It's impossible to summarize his work (the above are his most famous books, in reverse chronological order) but the essence of his idea is that space itself is the "luminous ground of being" and our architecture can conduce or block the essential selfness... I'm doing a terrible job of describing it... sorry.