Sander Schuur:  As an architect who has worked in Rotterdam, New York, Amsterdam, and now Sweden, I realized that we're facing a lot of similar challenges, but with different approaches from different cultures. That's why I started an organization called Stockholm New York City or sthlmnyc to learn from each other in different cultures and make it easier to understand how design impacts human well-being. I was asked by the Heinz Endowment to build an international platform focusing on environmental health equity - which is the equal right for everybody for a healthy living environment – and the built environment.  

Jeffrey Murray:  I’m a principal at CannonDesign, currently based in Pittsburgh after working in cities across the U.S. Since encountering Alvar Aalto’s writings early in my career, I’ve been driven by understanding how architecture shapes psychological experience. I’m excited now with this project to help connect communities in Pittsburgh, Stockholm and beyond to learn from one another and explore more human-centered built environments. 

Anjan Chatterjee:  I’m a neurologist and cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, studying how the brain gives rise to the human mind—across attention, spatial cognition, language, consciousness, and increasingly aesthetics. For about 25 years I’ve explored how people experience beauty and design, helping grow a once-nascent field, now driven largely by new generations of scholars interested in the science of aesthetics. 

Over the years I've worked in different domains: asking questions of attention, spatial cognition, language, consciousness and aesthetics. In the late 90s there was almost nothing written about aesthetics. But the zeitgeist started to change around 10-12 years ago, and students became more interested. I started the Penn Center for Neuroesthetics in 2018 and this area became the focus of our work. Broadly, we think about aesthetic experiences in the context of people, places and things.   

Let me start our discussion with this: Most people spend more than 90% of their time indoors, which has a huge impact on us due to human psychology and how our brains work.  Yet what this means for people has been largely ignored.  

Murray:  Yes, and to change that we want to have conversations with developers, decision-makers and community advocates, as well as designers.  And we’re starting with people like you to help build a fundamental base of knowledge around why this is true and why it is so important.  

Chatterjee:  I think the COVID lockdown made people think explicitly about built spaces in a way that had not happened before. For many, our lives are about running around from one indoor space to another, and most had not paused to explicitly think about the spaces we're in. Suddenly we became aware of the inequities in the spaces we inhabit. For example, how a child’s schooling depended on the kind of home they had, the level of privacy or quiet they had. This was also true for people working from home.  

Aesthetics is not simply a ‘nice to have’, a kind of bougie sentiment. It is fundamental to our sense of well-being. .  

“Aesthetics is not simply a ‘nice to have’, a kind of bougie sentiment. It is fundamental to our sense of well-being.”  

Schuur:  Can you explain more about how aesthetics affects human beings? How we react to different spaces, maybe without even knowing it? And how does this impact health?  

Chatterjee:  We have found that there are three fundamental psychological constructs that people respond to in their relationship to the built environment. The first refers to how organized and visually readable a space is - we call that coherence. The second we call fascination. That's how much informational complexity is there, and does the person feel a desire to explore? Does it engage them? And third is hominess - that feeling that you belong in that space. You're comfortable, you're in your skin there.  

Right at the center of all three is the question of valence, which broadly is: how good or bad do you feel?  

There is much more to be done to explore how these constructs play out for different buildings, different populations, in commercial spaces and in neighborhoods. We have one study showing that people on the autism spectrum don't react in the same way as neurotypical people to the feature of fascination. Our guess is that they find it overwhelming, and it produces a response of withdrawal rather than exploration.

We are currently cataloging different types of buildings and how people rate them along these three dimensions. Then we can explore, how do these dimensions play out in the way in which we construct these experiences? For example, does someone who identifies as religious or spiritual have a different response to a space? We use brain imaging to understand their experience.  

We found that parts of our visual system respond to coherence, fascination and hominess, even when people are not aware of having those experiences. We also found similar responses with the beauty of faces. This broadly suggests that we are always responding to aesthetic parameters in our environment, whether that's other people or the built environment.  

Another finding is that art depicting nature has a calming effect, especially in settings in which people are likely to be highly stressed, like hospitals.  In another part of our work, we induce some stress and then look at how the environment has an effect on people. In another, we've started to recreate spaces in a VR environment, which gives us a lot more control and efficiency in what we are doing, like quickly changing variables like wall color. It's still slow incremental work.  

Murray:  I’d like to ask about ideas in your book, The Aesthetic Brain. You say that aesthetic experience emerges in multiple parts of the brain, not one place. So can I make a leap and say that in some ways all experiences have an aesthetic ingredient?  

And you say that we mostly experience physical places peripherally, not in our focused experience. However, by putting people in situations to gather data you are making them realize places impact them. Am I correctly interpreting that aesthetic experience seems to be sprinkled within everything? 

Chatterjee:  I think that's totally fair. One of the things we talk about is the aesthetic triad, which is a model explaining how the brain processes beauty through three interconnected systems: One is an emotional reaction. For example, people used to talk about the sublime, or awe. Awe seems to have three components, which are: a sense of vastness; feeling small in the presence of vastness; and a sense of belonging - that smallness is associated with connecting to something much larger, so it’s not alienating. And when those three things happen – vastness, smallness, belonging – people tend to experience awe.  I am simplifying a bit as things are much more nuanced.  

The second quality is emotion valuation – which is the feeling and judging part of aesthetic experience. It translates what you see and know into how you feel, and whether you find something more aesthetically pleasurable or aversive.  The third is the knowledge and context that we each bring - our memory and experiences, education, the environment in which we've grown up, even the point in history that we are living.  

We're finding that within those sensory systems there's increased activity when people are having aesthetic experiences. They’re experiencing sensations more intensely. Even when people are not explicitly asked about their aesthetic experiences or judgments of beauty, you still get responses in the brain to these parameters. We think it's happening, if not all the time, much of the time. And that in turn will influence their behavior.       

“We're finding that within those sensory systems there's increased activity when people are having aesthetic experiences. They’re experiencing sensations more intensely. Even when people are not explicitly asked about their aesthetic experiences or judgments of beauty, you still get responses in the brain to these parameters…and that in turn will influence their behavior.”  

Murray:  Do aesthetic experiences separate us then? Does it change our taste; how we experience places? As an architect, if we're designing for the public, yet we have developed a totally different level of appreciation for design based on our studies – are we really designing for the public? Or are we imposing what we like when we design? That's a hard question for us.   

Chatterjee:  We find that people who are trained in architecture and design value coherence more than other people do. This is not a value judgment, just an observation. We don't know if this is because coherence is emphasized in architects’ training, or are the people attracted to the field more likely to have an organized mind and think about coherence?  But I agree there is a tension between the public and architects. What to do with that tension is an open question.  

Murray:  I think there is a natural tendency of architects to be interested in order, whether it's complex or not. By using your triad framework, maybe we can emphasize the hominess aspect in our work more than we currently do. Maybe that's a way for architects to express that we have a different way of looking at buildings because of our training. I see these three elements as a set of principles that we can use to think about how we design.  

Chatterjee:  It makes a lot of sense and I think it really encourages, if not demands, that architects be in conversation with their clients because hominess is going to be different for different people, for different communities.  

For example, I was talking with one of the people involved in the design of the High Line in Manhattan. They struggled with a lot of developers who felt they'd rather build expensive condominiums than a park. Now, The High Line gets more visitors than the Metropolitan Museum. However, one of the things that was unanticipated is in some neighborhoods people would not use it. They felt it was not for them; it was for the fancy people. They would not even enter the space because they felt they did not belong there.  

One of my intuitions is that sustainability without aesthetics is not sustainable. You can use the best materials and be in conversation with the environment, but if people don't love the building they won't want to preserve it.  The idea of wanting to preserve a place is an aesthetic response, not an intellectual one. 

“… sustainability without aesthetics is not sustainable. You can use the best materials and be in conversation with the environment, but if people don't love the building, they won't want to preserve it. The idea of wanting to preserve a place is an aesthetic response, not an intellectual one.” 

Murray:  This idea of belonging and hominess seem to be tightly wound. We need to find design features, affordances in the environment, things like that, that align with these three categories.   

Chatterjee:  The challenge is how do you concretize them? My sense is that people, non-architects, intuit these ideas right away. When I talk about this, people aren't confused about what I'm getting at. It's making explicit something that they kind of know.  

We're just at the beginning of learning how we develop aesthetic sensitivity. We know very little about developmental aesthetics and the preferences among children. We’re just starting to think about design literacy, for example. If you took a bunch of kids and helped them be more sensitive to their spatial environment as they grew, would it have an impact on society? Would it make them better consumers? Better advocates for their communities? Would it provide more tools and knowledge in the public sphere to have these conversations? The Viñoly Foundation is providing us with seed money to begin this inquiry. The late Rafael Viñoly was on the board of my center; his son Román now advises us. 

Murray:  Anecdotally, my children grew up in Washington, DC during 9/11. And then there was the anthrax scare, and then a sniper, shooting people randomly. A bus rider was shot less than a mile from our house. Then we moved to Pittsburgh, to this 150-year-old village called Sewickley with a lot of beautiful houses. The kids could be free range there. They could run around with their friends. We felt safe letting them out of our sight. We never did in DC. Now they both live in cities and are thriving. I feel like our move to Sewickley was really important for their development.  

That’s a total gut feeling, but exactly to your point that environment shapes us. Dangerous environments, slums with broken windows and poor street lighting - how does that impact kids’ development, their intellectual development?  

Part of our project is to advocate that if we make places more beautiful, there will be positive impacts for a community that you're not even aware of. Especially positive impacts for children.  

Schuur:  Back to the question of how to help people be more aware of the impact of their environment. We don't want to tell people what to think. We do want to raise awareness and give people ways to engage in the process. Any thoughts on how we do that?  
   
Chatterjee:  People typically are unaware, even if they are experiencing the physical or emotional effect of a place. They might feel uncomfortable or that something is not right, but they can't tell that it's because of the way the room, street or building is set up. A key step is to help people develop a sensitivity and awareness. This is where I think the triad of coherence, fascination and hominess is a pathway into people’s thinking. When they hear the science behind it - that our brains are always responding to the physical environment - then it gives people a reason to engage.   

I feel like a little bit of education is OK in the sense of trying to inform people about what they're experiencing. We do this with art as well, as art is a vehicle for self-discovery. We're not saying what you should discover, but we're giving people ways in which to query themselves, to understand themselves better.  

I view this process similarly. If you give people constructs they can grasp, they start to learn the kind of spaces in which they feel most comfortable. What do they want from their spaces? And it can be the small things in their own home that they can change around. It doesn't have to be big epic design issues. 

Murray:  Yes, it can happen at all those scales.  

“Part of our project is to advocate that if we make places more beautiful, there will be positive impacts for a community that you're not even aware of. Especially positive impacts for children.” 

Schuur: How can we put the health and well-being of people front and center, and how can the Pittsburgh Platform make a difference? 

Chatterjee:  Raise awareness among different audiences: your fellow architects and designers who maybe aren't thinking about this; city planners, engineers, and city and municipal officials, at least to have them aware of this as it can help make better decisions. And the public, as it makes for a more informed community that is going to ask for better designed places.  

Murray:  I feel like this conversation and others we are having are building on each other, like a big movement. Add in the research at the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, the Humanize Campaign, the work of Tye Farrow. Like you said, this discussion started blossoming maybe 10-12 years ago. I just want to say I appreciate all the work you're doing.  

Chatterjee:  Absolutely, thank you.  

Murray:  Thinking about that Alvar Alto article I read years ago, where he designed a hospital room so the water didn't drip and there was no light in patients’ eyes when laying on their back…those little things make such a huge difference. This conversation feels like continuity over a 45-year career.  I feel like we're at a tipping point here for some important next steps in how we design and why we design.  

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.