Behavioral science research shows that human behavior is greatly impacted by the built environment. Human flourishing can be enhanced by organizing our surroundings in a way that connects us to nature, limits noise pollution, provides plenty of natural light, and gives privacy while also connecting us to the wider community. Our homes and offices are not merely passive backdrops, but active agents in shaping how we live our lives.
To this extent, there is no neutral design. From the banal to the profound, architecture both reflects and shapes our behavior, values, and identities. A kitchen open to the living room is suggestive of an informal and egalitarian social order. In addition, kitchens are now much larger yet used less frequently than they were in previous decades. This highlights the symbolic nature of the kitchen. Our expansive kitchens are totems of success, while also indicating an over-compensation for the anxiety felt over an increasingly fractured family life.
The decline of the front porch over the past 100 years also provides a good example of how one small architectural feature both indicates changing cultural norms and has also changes our relationship with the world around us. In his essay entitled, “From Porch to Patio,” Richard H. Thomas describes the social significance of the front porch in American life and the subsequent abandonment of the front porch in favor of the more private back patio. In the past, the front porch offered a space that was open to public life yet discreet and connected to the private domain of the home. It offered an essential middle ground from which the public could be integrated with the private. In its place the back patio became the primary space for relaxation and entertaining, but unlike the front porch, which synthesized the public with the private, the patio is an entirely private environment only open to family and intimate acquaintances.
There are many external factors which contributed to the eventual extinction of the front porch from American society. Inexpensive motorized travel led to a decline in small pedestrian towns and neighborhoods. Passersby no longer moved at a pace conducive to front porch conversation. Also, television provided easy entertainment which could be enjoyed without leaving the comfort of the air-conditioned living room.
Although the disappearance of the front porch likely did not cause the decline of community engagement, it is possible that the absence of the porch has perpetuated our loss of community and shaped our behavior to be more private and less civically oriented.
Designer and philosopher, Alain de Botton, articulates this idea well: “In essence, what works of design and architecture talk to us about is the kind of life that would most appropriately unfold within and around them. They tell us of certain moods that they seek to encourage and sustain in their inhabitants. While keeping us warm and helping us in mechanical ways, they simultaneously hold out an invitation for us to be specific sorts of people. They speak of visions of happiness.”
“The failure of architects to create congenial environments mirrors our inability to find happiness in other areas of our lives. Bad architecture is in the end as much a failure of psychology as of design. It is an example expressed through materials of the same tendency which in other domains will lead us to marry the wrong people, choose inappropriate jobs and book unsuccessful holidays: the tendency not to understand who and what will satisfy us. … The places we call beautiful are, by contrast, the work of those rare architects with the humility to interrogate themselves adequately about their desires and the tenacity to translate their fleeting apprehensions of joy into logical plans – a combination that enables them to create environments that satisfy needs we never consciously knew we even had.”
Considering this, it is important that builders and designers clearly articulate the message of their architecture. What do we value? What do are buildings say?
