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> At the British University of Warwick, an extensive study was conducted in 2017. It established that beautiful urban architecture has the same positive impact

> 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

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